Here’s the scale of the claim: Tesla at $8.5T would require roughly $28.6T in lifetime profit at its current P/E of 296.97.

That is not “bullish.” That is a spiritual journey. That is walking into the Sahara with a dream and a granola bar.

Just for grounding: Apple sits at $3.5T and makes around $100B a year. Tesla in 2024 is tracking around $10–12B. If Tesla wanted to justify $8.5T at a normal P/E of 30, it would need about $283B in annual profit. That’s twenty-five times higher than today. That’s not a moonshot. That’s a multi-decade reconstruction of four entire industries simultaneously.

And yes, I know the hypothetical bull scenario. The one where Tesla becomes a robotaxi monopoly with 90 percent margins, powers half the global grid, licenses autonomy to every sedan in Malaysia, and deploys an army of humanoid robots that everyone somehow leases for $20K a year like they’re renting a Roomba.

Sure. Let’s go there. Let’s say Tesla captures a 5th of global ride-hailing. A third of grid storage. Tens of millions of autonomy licenses. A million working robots. Maybe, in a best-case scenario, and with Jupiter in retrograde, you can sketch out $200–300B in annual profit by 2040.

But even the heroic fantasy has structural cracks. Waymo already operates robotaxis in multiple cities. BYD outsold Tesla in EVs and trades at a 10th of the valuation. CATL owns battery storage. Boston Dynamics and Figure AI have a head start in robotics.

Tesla isn’t planting flags on empty continents. It’s showing up to crowded markets with competitors already eating lunch.

Then there’s regulation. Try getting Level 4 autonomy approved globally in the 2020s. Try building enough grid infrastructure to deploy virtual power plants at scale when US interconnection queues stretch half a decade. Try convincing factories to adopt humanoid robots when none of them are proven at scale.

And even if all that magically resolves, even if Tesla executes with flawless precision, even if capital rains from the heavens, you still collide head-first with the compensation trap. If Tesla hits $8.5T, Elon gets roughly $1T. That’s before any shareholder sees a dollar. The “tens of thousands of new millionaires” fantasy forgets that most of the upside gets vaporized into one paycheck.

And yes, I know market cap isn’t cash. But an $8.5T Tesla means absorbing about 13 percent of global investable capital. Not US capital. Global. That’s bigger than Apple and Nvidia combined. That’s rewriting the entire structure of world finance.

If Tesla nails its execution, nails its product lines, nails energy, nails autonomy, nails robotics, nails everything from Fremont to Shanghai, then maybe you get a $1.5–2T company by 2035. That’s still enormous. That still makes early investors wealthy. That still rewards real performance rather than celestial prophecy.

But $8.5T?

That requires authoritarian global autonomy approval, total conquest of multiple industries, zero meaningful competition for 15 straight years, trillions in capex without blowing up the balance sheet, and an unbroken chain of perfect execution from now until 2040.

No company in history has ever done anything that extreme. Not Standard Oil. Not AT&T. Not Microsoft. Not Apple. Not Nvidia. But apparently Tesla will do all five at once while also building an army of robots in its spare time.

This isn’t about being bearish. This is about being literate.

So the question back to Tesla investors—and every other person convinced of Tesla’s divine $8.5T destiny—is simple:

What specific profit margins, in what industries, at what scale, generate the $283B in annual profit needed to justify it?

Because hype doesn’t do that math. Narrative doesn’t do that math. Enthusiasm doesn’t do that math.

Arithmetic does.

And arithmetic right now is laughing its head off.
RE: atomicpoet.org/objects/e243bfd…

Chris Trottier

2025-11-13 03:52:33

Got an energetic reply on LinkedIn from an Elon supporter who objected when I said Tesla is overvalued.

Enthusiasm is fine. Aspirational thinking is fine. But Tesla fantasy economics deserves a gentle reality check.

The global supply of M1 money—every dollar of cash and checking deposits on Earth—is about $65T USD. Claiming Tesla can surge to an $8.5T market cap means one company would soak up more than 13 percent of all liquid money on the planet. That’s not optimism. That’s astrophysics.

And the idea that this would “create tens of thousands of millionaires” omits a crucial detail. Tesla’s entire current market cap is functionally spoken for under the compensation structure. That uplift doesn’t go to shareholders. It goes to Elon. Investors get dilution, shifting narratives, and the mathematical responsibility to justify a valuation that requires superhuman profitability.

Because an $8.5T valuation doesn’t run on vibes. It runs on earnings. At a P/E of 296.97, Tesla would need to produce around 300 times more profit than it does today. Not 300%. 300x.

That means trillions in annual profit—after costs, after expansion, after competition. There is no credible roadmap in EVs, autonomy, robots, or AI infrastructure that even gestures toward that scale.

So this isn’t about whether people can dream big. It’s about arithmetic, monetary limits, and a payout model that extracts enormous value before the average shareholder ever sees a dollar.

Given those constraints, what is the concrete, operational path that delivers Tesla to $8.5T?

Hope is not a model.