Position: I am short on Tesla.
Apparently, Elon is going to talk today: [Elon Musk breaks his own Tesla (TSLA) earnings rule in desperate move](https://electrek.co/2025/04/21/elon-musk-breaks-tesla-tsla-earnings-rule-desperate-move/)
We all know what this is about: Building hype to distract from the endless onslaught of bad news for Tesla. Elon is going to deploy his ERDF (Elon Reality Distortion Field) to pump up his meme stock. This comes as no surprise to anyone here.
Prediction #1: Taking the likely prediction from the Tesla bulls, Elon will tell investors the same old story of Tesla becoming "not-a-car-company" anymore and to completely ignore all of 2025. (Source: [https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2025-largely-doesnt-matter-tesla-113124531.html](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2025-largely-doesnt-matter-tesla-113124531.html) ). Also, not really a big stretch of the imagination here.
Prediction #2: Just for fun, I will make a very specific prediction of how Elon will use his ERDF to dazzle the mouth breathers into dumping more money into his meme stock. I expect that he will roll out the Optimus. It will do the following tasks, in order:
1. Perform some silly preprogrammed maneuver that makes it look like it is self-aware. It will look at it's hands or something similar to make it look like it has "intelligence" and "awareness". Just watch the dumb video they have already put out there.
2. Elon will throw a bunch of small, non-fragile, objects out on a flat surface and say: "*Now watch this!*".
3. The robot will quickly grab each small object, maybe something like a domino, and arrange them quickly in an ordered fashion. It might even flick the first one to knock down the chain.
4. Controlled remotely by a human off stage, the robot will wave goodbye to a choreographed verbal prompt from Elon and then walk off the stage. Maybe it will even do a little dance for us.
5. The bleating sheep will go nuts and the stock will pop.
6. End sham demo.
7. Begin hand-waving and tech-jargon spewing to explain away endless mounting problems for Tesla.
I predict this because of Elon's long history of stage-hyped vaporware demos. This will be really easy for him to pull off because they can just rip a few sensors and software out of the common pick-and-place robots already used in their production lines and quickly cobble them into the Optimus. It is going to look just like the pre-canned routines production robots run at manufacturing trade shows but for dimwits that have never been to one and think this is all "new" technology.
Most importantly: This will gloss over the inconvenient fact that any "brand damage" Elon has caused Tesla, will also surely impact the sales of any other consumer product they will launch in the future. For example, an obscenely expensive robot that will likely be unable to scramble an egg for you.
The whole "Tesla is not-a-car-company anymore" earnings (so ignore the lack of earnings) show will also gloss over the fact that, like everything else "new" at Tesla, it is an old idea and they are way behind the competition (e.g., Waymo/Google in the Robotaxi space). The idea of a car company making humanoid robots was first put out there by Honda with ASIMO over a quarter century ago. They developed it. There was no consumer market for it. So, they repurposed it. There still isn't a consumer market here (longer discussion). And there is already a second generation of advanced humanoid robots for manufacturing from a company called [Figure building BMW's in Spartanburg, SC](https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/news/general/2024/humanoid-robots.html). Let's also just ignore all the more advanced humanoid robots coming out of China just like we are told to ignore BYD that just surpassed Tesla without even having access to the US market. If Elon says it's the future, it "Musk" be true, and Tesla will somehow be the ***only*** company in the world doing it.
Will Tesla's stock pop today? Probably. But who really knows with any meme stock. Performance and numbers haven't mattered at all in the past for Tesla. Retail investors are just a herd of bleating sheep that will easily get caught up in the ERDF. What I am going to be looking for is 45 days from the end of Q1 when the data from the 13F Forms comes out. Watching what the big institutional investors are doing will really be telling. I strongly suspect, given previous reports of retail investors buying up [Tesla like never before](https://www.investopedia.com/why-teslas-stock-soars-despite-car-sales-numbers-11705040), that the institutional investors are going to slowly reduce their positions in Tesla and orchastate themselves a nice soft landing on the backs of gullible retail investors. Given that institutional investors hold about half the company, I predict that this news is what will really drive the stock price for the foreseeable future.
