October 23, 2025 — 3.58pm October 23, 2025 — 3.58pm Save Getty The road to ending world poverty runs parallel with a plan hatched by Musk and his board to award him $US1 trillion in remuneration and lift his stake in the company from 13 per cent to almost 29 per cent. To be fair, he hasn’t argued that pay equality would be part of his utopian vision. Nor does the Musk manifesto mention secession to a new land called X, but you would have to think that the title of king would appeal to him, remembering he did flirt with the idea of creating a new US political party. One thing is certain: Musk clearly wants to be the general of his army of robots. Loading “My fundamental concern with regard to how much voting control I have at Tesla is, if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future?” he said on Wednesday. “If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over this robot army? Not control, but a strong influence … I don’t feel comfortable building that robot army unless I have a strong influence.” Lofty ambitions and delusions aside, there isn’t a lot of magic in Tesla’s latest numbers – if anything, it was pretty ordinary, with profits falling close to 40 per cent. Much worse than what the analysts had forecast. Advertisement The explosion in sales of new Teslas during the period was bittersweet. It was the result of customers front-loading their purchases of electric vehicles before government subsidies were removed at the end of September – an unwelcome part of Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The bitter part is that bringing forward these EV purchases will now result in significantly softer sales for Tesla over the next few quarters. Elon Musk introduces a prototype humanoid robot during a Tesla livestream. It explains why Musk doesn’t want investors to call Tesla a carmaker anymore. There are plenty of EVs on the market, and some of those made in China boast sales growth and market share that would make Tesla envious. Those now investing in Tesla are far less focused on the Model Y or the Model S and are instead punting on whether Musk’s revolutionary AI dream will become a reality. Among the aspirations Musk has mentioned is Tesla’s Optimus robot becoming the “biggest product of all time”. That’s the kind of hyperbole that gets the Tesla true believers and Musk’s acolytes excited. For the rest of us, Tesla’s progress to date on automation and AI would suggest that populating the world with robots and self-driving taxis seems more a pipe dream than a concrete evolution of the business. So investors in Tesla today have to take a leap of faith that Musk’s vision for the company will come good at some point to justify its current share price. Tesla’s price-to-earnings ratio sits at 254 times (the median among US stocks is 27 times). Without boring you with the mechanics of this metric, it signals there is an expectation of a supercharged profit down the track. Elon Musk at the robotaxi event “We, Robot”, last October. Former Tesla executives say the company’s self-driving system is not good enough to be trusted. Credit: