Elon Predicts Tesla Will Be Worth More Than the Top 5 Companies Combined!

Below is a transcript of his remarks from the 4Q2024 earnings call. Tesla's results presentation, followed by Elon's remarks, begin at the 2 hour mark of the video below. 

So, in summary, in Q4, we set a record and delivered vehicles at an annualized rate of nearly 2 million a year. So, congratulations to the Tesla team on excellent work, achieving record production and deliveries. Model Y was the best-selling vehicle of any kind for 2024 -- that's worth noting. Not just the best electric vehicle, the best vehicle of any kind on earth, number one was Model Y.

"There is no company in the world that is as good at real-world AI as Tesla. I don't even know who’s in second place. You say who's in second place for real-world AI? I would need a very big telescope to see them. That's how far behind they are." -- Elon Musk

We're staying focused on maximizing volumes and obviously doubling down for, I don't know what, it really doesn't, I was going to say doubling down on autonomy, but really it's like autonomy is like 10x-ing. Frankly, doubling is not even enough.

Tesla's path to become the most valuable company

We made many critical investments in 2024 in manufacturing, AI and robotics that will bear immense fruit in the future, immense. Like it's, in fact, to such a scale that it is difficult to comprehend. And I've said this before, and I'll stand by it: I see a path, I'm not saying it's an easy path, but I see a path for Tesla being the most valuable company in the world by far, not even close. Maybe several times more than, I mean, there is a path where Tesla is worth more than the next top five companies combined. There's a path to that. I think it's like an incredibly, just like a difficult path, but it is an achievable path. So -- and that is overwhelmingly due to autonomous vehicles and autonomous humanoid robots.

So, our focus is actually building towards that. And that's where we're laying the ground. We laid the ground work for that in 2024. We'll continue to lay the ground work for that in 2025. In fact, more than laid the groundwork actually, so it would be building the structure, we're building the manufacturing lines and -- setting up for what I think will be an epic 2026 and a ridiculous ‘27 and ‘28. Ridiculously good. That is my prediction.

Full Self-Driving Is Growing Up—Have You Tried It Lately?

As yet, very few people understand the value of Full Self Driving and our ability to monetize the fleet. Some of these things I've said for quite a long time and I know people said, well, Elon is the boy who cried wolf like several times but I'm telling you there's a damn wolf this time and you can drive it. In fact, it can drive you. It's a self-driving wolf.

For a lot of people, their experience of Tesla autonomy is like, if it's even a year old, if it's even two years old, it's like meeting someone when they're like a toddler and thinking that they're going to be a toddler forever. But obviously they're not going to be a toddler forever. They grow up. But if their last experience was like, FSD was a toddler, it's like, well, it's grown up now. Have you seen it? It walks and talks. And that's really what we've got.

And it's difficult for people to understand this because human intuition is linear as opposed to what we're seeing is exponential progress. So, that's why my number one recommendation for anyone who doubts is simply try it. Have you tried it? When's the last time you tried it? And the only people who are skeptical, the only people who are skeptical are those who have not tried it.

From 10 to 50 Hours a Week: How Autonomy Boosts Car Utility -- and Asset Value 

So, a passenger car typically has only about 10 hours of utility per week out of 168. A very small percentage. Once that car is autonomous, my rough estimate is that it is in use for at least a third of the hours of the week. So, call it 50, maybe 55 hours of the week. And it can be useful both for cargo delivery and people delivery.

So, even let's say people are asleep, but you can deliver packages in the middle of the night or resupply restaurants or whatever the case may be, whatever people need at all hours of the day or night. That same asset, the thing that these things that already exist with no incremental cost change, just a software update, now have five times or more the utility than they currently have. I think this will be the largest asset value increase in human history. Maybe there's something bigger, but I just don't know what it is. And so people who look in the rearview mirror are looking for past precedent, except I don't think there is one. So -- the reality of autonomy is upon us. And I repeat my advice, try driving the car or let it drive you. Now it works very well in the US, but of course it will over time work just as well everywhere else.

We're working hard to grow our annual volumes. Our current constraint is battery packs this year, but we're working on addressing that constraint. And I think we will make progress on addressing that constraint. And then things are really going to go ballistic next year, and really ballistic in ‘27 and ‘28. 

So, a bit more on Full Self Driving. Our Q4 Vehicle Safety Report shows continued year-over-year improvement in safety for vehicles so that the safety numbers, if somebody has supervised Full Self Driving turned on or not, the safety differences are gigantic. So, and people have seen the immense improvement with Version 13 and with incremental versions in Version 13, and then Version 14 is going to be yet another step beyond that that is very significant.

Long-term revenue potential exceeding $10 trillion

We launched the Cortex training cluster at Gigafactory Austin, which was a significant contributor to FSD advancement, and we continue to invest in training infrastructure out of Texas headquarters. So, the training needs for Optimus humanoid robot are probably at least ultimately 10x of what's needed for the car, at least to get to the full range of useful roles. You can say, how many different roles are there for a humanoid robot versus a car? Humanoid robot has probably, well, 1,000 times more uses and more complex things than in a car. That doesn't mean the training scales by a 1000, but it's probably 10x.

Now you can do this progressively. So it doesn't mean like, or Tesla is going to spend like $500 billion in training compute. Because we obviously train Optimus to do enough tasks to match the output of Optimus robots. And obviously, the cost of training is dropping dramatically with time. So, it is one of those things where I think long-term, Optimus will be -- Optimus has the potential to be north of $10 trillion in revenue. Like, it's really bananas. So that you can obviously afford a lot of training compute in that situation. In fact, even $500 billion training compute in that situation would be quite a good deal. Yeah. The future's going to be incredibly different from the past, that's for sure.

We live at this unbelievable inflection point in human history. So, yeah. So, the proof is in the pudding. So, we're going to be launching unsupervised Full Self Driving as a paid service in Austin in June. So -- and I've talked with the team. We feel confident in being able to do an initial launch of unsupervised, no one in the car, Full Self Driving in Austin in June.

We already have Teslas operating autonomously unsupervised Full Self Driving at our factory in Fremont and we’ll soon be doing that at our factory in Texas. So, thousands of cars every day are driving with no one in them at our Fremont factory in California. They will soon be doing that in Austin and then elsewhere in the world for the rest of our factories -- which is pretty cool and the cars aren't just driving to exactly the same spot because obviously they will collide at the same spot. The cars are actually programmed with what lane they need to park in to be picked up for delivery. So, they drive from the factory end of line to their destination parking spot and then to be picked up for delivery to customers and then doing this reliably every day, thousands of times a day. It's pretty cool.

Like I said, the Teslas will be in the wild with no one in them, in June in Austin. So, what I'm saying is this is not some far-off mythical situation. It's literally, five, six months away, five months away kind of thing. And while we're stepping into -- putting our toe in the water gently at first, just to make sure everything's cool. Our solution is a generalized AI solution. It does not require high precision maps of a locality. So we just want to be cautious. It's not that it doesn't work beyond Austin. In fact, it does. We just want to be, put a toe in the water, make sure everything is okay, then put a few more toes in the water, then put a foot in the water with safety of the general public and those in the car as our top priority.

Optimus with precision capabilities like threading needles and playing the piano

With regard to Optimus, obviously I'm making these revenue predictions that sound absolutely insane. I realize that. But I think, they will prove to be accurate. Yeah. Now, with Optimus, there's a lot of uncertainty on the exact timing, because it's not like a train arriving at the station for Optimus. We are designing the train and the station and in real time while also building the tracks. And so people shouldn’t say, why didn't the train arrive exactly at 12.05?

We're literally designing the train and the traction station in real time while you're saying, how can we predict this thing with absolute precision? It's impossible.

The internal plan calls for roughly 10,000 Optimus robots to be built this year. Will we succeed in building 10,000 exactly by the end of December this year? Probably not, but will we succeed in making several thousand? Yes, I think we will. Will those several thousand Optimus robots be doing useful things by the end of year?

Yes, I'm confident they will do useful things. The Optimus in use at the Tesla factories for production design one will inform how would we change for production design two, which we expect to launch next year.

And our goal is to ramp Optimus production faster than maybe anything's ever been ramped. Meaning, like aspirationally an order of magnitude ramp per year. Now, if we aspire to an order of magnitude ramp per year, perhaps we only end up with a half order of magnitude per year.

But that's the kind of growth that we're talking about. It doesn't take very many years before we're making 100 million of these things a year if you go up by, let's say, a factor, by 5x per year, insane. Not 50%, 500%. So, these are big growth numbers. Yeah.

This is an entirely new supply chain, is entirely new technology. There's nothing off the shelf to use. We try desperately with Optimus to use any existing motors, any actuators, sensors, nothing worked for our humanoid robot, at any price. We had to design everything from physics first principles to work for a humanoid robot and with the most sophisticated hand that has ever been made before by far. And Optimus will be able to play the piano and thread a needle. I mean this is the level of precision no one has been able to achieve. And so it's really something special. So, yeah, so -- and my prediction long term is that Optimus will be overwhelmingly the value of the company.

Energy Storage as a Key Growth Area

Energy storage is a big deal and will become, it's already super important, will become incredibly important in the future. And it is something that enables far greater energy output to the grid than is currently possible. Because the grids are -- the vast majority of the grid has no energy storage capability. So, they have to design the power plants for very high peaks and assuming that there's no energy storage. Once you have grid energy storage and home-based energy storage, the actual total energy output per year of the grid is dramatically greater than people think. Maybe it's at least double.

This will drive the demand of stationary battery packs, and especially the grid scale ones, to insane basically as much demand as we could possibly make. So, we have our second factory, which is in Shanghai, that's starting operation and we're building a third factory. So we're trying to ramp output of the stationary battery storage as quickly as possible.

Now, there is a challenge here where we have to be careful that we're not robbing from one pocket to take to another pocket because for a given gigawatt hours per year of the cell output, we have to say, does it go into stationary applications or mobile applications? It can't go into both. So, we have to make that trade-off. Yeah. But overall, the demand for total gigawatt hours of batteries, whether mobile or stationary, that will grow in a very, very big way over time.