The Tech Sales Newsletter #78: Tesla and the bet on real-world AI

Let's preface this article with the obvious—Tesla and the rest of the companies associated with Musk do not represent any tech sales opportunities (besides selling to those organizations). Maybe xAI will have a small sales team at some point, but for the most part, these are not the places to look for your next tech sales opportunities.

This doesn't change the fact that what Tesla, xAI, X, and even SpaceX are doing has a significant real-life impact, which will lead to significant downstream consequences. The activities of these organizations are disruptive to the dynamics of their target markets, but cumulatively, they are a bet on a fundamental transformation of how the world works.

This was blatantly obvious in the last earnings call for Tesla, which was "widely panned" by journalists as "ridiculous" because it barely mentioned anything about the actual cars being produced. For those who pay attention (particularly as outlined in my recent articles on NVIDIA and the AI strategy of the new U.S. administration), this was a wake-up call for how quickly we are accelerating toward real-world AI. The implications of this are... significant.

The key takeaway

For tech sales: Tesla is becoming the real-world AI company. If NVIDIA is building the computing hardware to power AI, Tesla is the company that is going to fundamentally change how our day-to-day lives look through autonomous driving and humanoid robots. It's important for you to assess where you would fit in, if they are successful in their vision.

For investors: At this stage, the potential of "legacy" automotive as we know it is mostly exhausted. The long-term outlook for the industry is not particularly exciting, as we've seen by the slow decline of the German brands. As such, the future ahead for Tesla is not in making slightly better iterations of the same car but in picking up the tremendous amount of data and ML that they've built and creating the most important technology of our time, real-world AI. With autonomous driving mostly a foregone conclusion, the next big frontier is humanoid robotics. If they are able to execute on that vision, Tesla has a path to becoming the most valuable company in the world.

Cars, robots and energy

Elon Musk: 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.

 Like, 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 mean, 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.

Source: companiesmarketcap.com

The top 11 most valuable companies in the world are significantly ahead of everybody else. For Tesla to make a play for the #1 spot, even at current valuations we are talking about a 2.7x jump in valuation. For reference, the closest other automotive company in terms of valuation is Toyota ($242B market cap, 42nd spot in the chart).

So as far as automotive companies go, Tesla has been exceptionally successful, significantly outpacing any other player. For the company, however, to take the next leap forward, producing good cars alone is not going to make the difference.

Elon Musk: So, a car goes -- 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.

In the current state of how the world works, cars are often a vanity item rather than a productive asset. As great bets often go, you have to inverse the value proposition. What if cars become one of the most productive assets that we have? In my coverage of NVIDIA, we discussed how critical AI is in generating a significant amount of synthetic data for training the self-driving algorithms. The logical step for somebody of Musk's ambition is to scale that effort with their own large data centers.

Source: Tesla Q4 and FY24 Update

Elon Musk: 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 or 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, 1000 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.

It's important to understand how dramatic of a play this is. While other automotive companies have either completely failed at progressing on advanced software such as autonomous driving or heavily outsourced it, Tesla is the only company in the world besides Alphabet with Waymo that went ahead and ran everything in-house. The pivot towards their own dedicated ML training facility is the literal definition of making high-conviction bets.

The real play behind it is, of course, robotics. If you can get a car to navigate real-world space, you can continue iterating on doing the same with robotics.

Elon Musk: 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.

The thing is that the timeline on these is not hypothetical - it's aggressively accelerating right now:

Elon Musk: 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 it all, [went and collide] (ph) 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 specific - to their destination parking spot and then could 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.

Autonomous driving at this stage is a foregone conclusion, not a “next milestone”.

Elon Musk: Yeah. So it's really from an -- the only thing holding us back is an excess of caution. But people can certainly get a feel for how well the car would perform as unsupervised FSD by simply having a car, allowing the car to drive you around your city and see how many times did you have to intervene.

Not where you wanted to intervene or were a little concerned. But how any times did you have to intervene for, for definite safety reasons.

And you will find that that is currently very rare, and over time, almost never.

Tesla is mostly busy dealing with the regulatory frameworks rather than waiting on a technical breakthrough. All eyes are moving towards robotics:

Elon Musk: With regard to Optimus, obviously I'm making these revenue predictions that sound absolutely insane. I realize that. But they are, 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 they're like, people shouldn’t say like, why didn't the train arrive exactly at 12: 05? We're literally designing the train and the track and the station in real time while you're saying, how can we predict this thing with absolute precision? It's impossible. The normal 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, production design one, will inform how - what we change for production design two, which we expect to launch next year. And our goal is to ramp prompt Optimus production faster than maybe anything's ever been ramped.

One of the most repeated critiques of Musk and his approach to business is that he would "hype" a technology or a project he is working on and then repeatedly miss the promised milestones.

What most tend to ignore is that, well, he still delivers. And delivering on transformational technology is a lot more important than whether you slipped a quarter or two.

Elon Musk: So, these are big growth numbers. Yeah. But we do need to be -- 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 madebefore, by far.

And Optimus will be able to like play the piano and be able to 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

One of the other critical challenges to scaling AI is the electrical capacity. There is a lot of discussion around scaling new power plants but one of the most obvious ways to maximize the energy we produce is to get the most out of the existing grid:

Elon Musk: 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 grid, the grids are -- the vast majority of the grid has no energy storage capability. So, they have to design the power plants to, 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 to 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?

As computing power becomes the most important resource, every possible angle of maximizing its value needs to be pursued. That means producing more, using energy more efficiently and storing more energy. The math previously was frowned upon because the imagination of what's possible with electricity was limited to keeping the lights running, which didn't justify either efficiency or storage.

Elon Musk: So, in conclusion, 2025 really is a pivotal year for Tesla. And when we look back on 2025 and the launch of unsupervised Full Self Driving, true real-world AI that actually works, I think they may regard it as the biggest year in Tesla history, maybe even bigger than our first car, the Roadster or the Model S, so the Model 3 or Model Y.

In fact, I think it probably will be viewed ‘25 as maybe the most important year in Tesla's history. 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.

Like, you say like 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.

The Tesla rally to the most valuable company in the world will be the most hated rally. There is no other way to put it, precisely because it's built on fundamentals rather than hypothetical opportunities.

Elon Musk: Yes. What we're seeing is, at this point, significant interest from a number of major car companies about licensing for Tesla Full Soft Driving technology. What we've generally said is the best way to know what to do is take one of our cars apart, and then you can see where the placement of the cameras are, what the thermal needs are of the Tesla AI inference computer.

That's better than us sending some CAD drawings. And then we're only going to entertain situations where the volume would be very high, otherwise it's not worth the complexity.

And we will not burden our engineering team with laborious discussions with other engineering teams until we obviously have unsupervised Full Self Driving working throughout the United States. I think the interest level from other manufacturers to license an FSD will be extremely high once it is obvious that unless you have FSD, you're dead.

If you don't have LLMs and ML at scale, your applications will be left behind.

If you don't have autonomous driving, your cars will not be relevant.

If you don't expand your workforce with robotics, you will (redacted).

Elon Musk: And of course, you need real-world AI. And then the ability to scale that production to huge levels. So you have to design for manufacturing. The things that, really what other companies are missing is they're missing the real-world AI and they're missing the ability to scale manufacturing to millions of units a year.

Yeah, prototypes are trivial basically. Prototypes are easy, production is hard. I've said that for many years. The problem is that there's like, those who have never been involved in production or manufacturing somehow think that once you come up with some eureka design that you magically can make a million units a year. And this is totally false. There needs to be some Hollywood story where they show actually the problem is manufacturing.

I've never even heard of one. It just doesn't fit the narrative. The Hollywood thing is like it's like some lone inventor in a garage goes Eureka and suddenly it files a patent and suddenly there's millions of units.

I, like, I'm listening to guys who were missing most really 99% of the story. 1% is another old saying of one person -- like a product is 1% inspiration 99% perspiration. The Hollywood shows you 1% inspiration and minus, but forgets about the 99% perspiration of actually figuring out how to make that initial prototype manufacturable and then manufactured at high volume such that the product is reliable, low cost, consistent, doesn't break down all the time, and that is 100 times harder, at least, than the prototype.

There is an old saying, we call it hardware because it's really hard. This is something most individuals in tech sales are not too familiar with because the vast majority of companies in the space built their software on existing frameworks rather than doing anything actually new and innovative. Very rarely have you had employees going through "this next release NEEDS to be good or we are done".

Travis Axelrod: Great, thank you. The next question is also Optimus related. When will Tesla start selling Optimus, and what will the price be?

Elon Musk: Well, the -- it may -- for this year we expect to just close the loop with Optimus being used internally at Tesla, because we obviously can easily use several thousand humanoid robots at Tesla for the most boring, annoying tasks in the factory, like the tasks nobody wants to do, where we have to like beg people to do this task. And then they -- then it's like the robot's totally happy to do the boring, dangerous, repetitive task that no humans want to do. And that's also actually some of the easiest use cases for us to have Optimus do things like load the hopper, like, say you're loading the body line if you're transporting pieces of sheet metal to the robot, which is already robot, the robot welding line for the body, and you just have to nonstop take things out of a, from one fixture to another fixture. And it's a very boring job. That's the kind of thing what the Optimus could do.

If the real-world AI of robotics works, the first big beneficiary will be the company that accelerated its development in a very literal sense. Those initial algorithms would literally be trained on getting good at Tesla-related workflows.

Elon Musk: And then we have to -- with a production line that is designed for -- on the order of 10,000 units a month versus 1,000 units a month. So, when you're designing a production line for 1,000 units a month, it takes you a while to actually reach anywhere close to 1,000 units a month. For any given production output, it takes a while to actually reach its potential. The current line that we're designing is for roughly 1,000 units a month of Optimus robots.

Elon Musk: The next line would be for 10,000 units a month. The line after that would be for 100,000 units a month. And I think probably with Version 2, it is a very rough guess because there's so much uncertainty here, very rough guess that we start delivering Optimus robots to companies that are outside of Tesla in maybe the second half of next year, something like that.

But like I said, this is such an exponential ramp that it will go from no one's receiving humanoid robots to these things like coming out like crazy.

Once the initial quirks are ironed out, the robots will start building more robots that will be shipped across the world.

All cars will run on Tesla software.

All robots will run on Tesla software.

All spaceships will (redacted).

Tesla Semi production factory currently under development
Source: Tesla Q3 Update

Elon Musk: No. I mean, I do think that Tesla Semi, again with autonomy, is going to be incredibly valuable. That we actually have a shortage of truck drivers in America, that's one of the limiting factors on transport. And people are human so they get tired and sometimes there's -- it's -- I have a lot of respect for truck drivers because it's a tough job. But because it's a tough job, there's not that many people that want to do it.

And there's actually fewer -- I believe, if my saying is correct, there are a few people entering truck driving as a profession than are not leaving it.

So when you think, yeah, exactly. So when you consider, okay, there's more people leaving truck driving as a profession than entering it, well, we're going to have a real logistics problem as time goes by. So autonomy will be very important to meet that need. So like, yeah, it will -- I don't know. It's a several billion a year opportunity, which I don't know in this context. Is that -- these days, does several billion a year matter?

I think it does. It's not nothing. It's probably -- it might -- it’s probably like a $10 billion a year thing. That's $1 billion a month at some point probably. But it's -- all this is going to pale in comparison to Optimus. So yeah, $1 billion a month is a lot but it's not -- it's going to be like 1% of Optimus.

The same factory, 3 months later.

Source: Tesla Q4 and FY 2024 Update

The thing about innovating at scale is that you can start solving many problems that are downstream from this innovation. The whole math and dynamics of supply chain management shifts if you change the role of human labor in it. We all got used to delivery vans flying around with packages following the big shift towards remote work. Every logistics company continues to deal with rapid increases in both road incidents and staff burnout, following the pressure of delivering packages the next day across every part of the country.

Autonomous delivery vans that have significantly lower incident rates, supported by humanoid robots in the back that take out the specific package and bring it to the door, then climb back in the van, solve both of these essentially overnight.

The logical next step is to make all trucks automated and instead shift the humans to "pit stations" across the road to ensure prompt servicing if there are issues. The actual highway rules might shift to accommodate for this, making the furthest right lane "always" be reserved for autonomous vehicles for example, operating at a perfect pace and slowing down to open spaces dynamically for cars exiting the highways.

Elon Musk: There's this joke like America innovates, Europe regulates. It's like, guys, there's too many refs on the field. I mean, for example, for us to just to release supervised Full Self Driving in Europe, even though it works really well, we have to go through a mountain of paperwork with the Netherlands, which is our primary regulatory authority. Then the Netherlands presents this to the EU and I think May. And there's like this big EU country committee.

We expect it to be approved at that time, but there's nothing we can do to make that may happen sooner. In fact, nobody seems to do it. But I guess all the countries would have to somehow vote in some way to have it happen sooner than May. Otherwise, it won't happen sooner than May. So then when is unsupervised FSD allowed in Europe? I’m like, May next year maybe? I don't know. I have to find out when the EU is meeting again.

Sometimes it's a 12-month cadence, sometimes a six-month cadence. Then in China, which is a gigantic market, we do have some challenges because they weren't, currently allow us to transfer training video outside of China. And then the US government wouldn't let us do training in China. So we're in a bit of a bind there. So like, bit of a quandary. So we are already solving then is by literally looking at videos of streets in China that are available on the Internet to understand and then feeding that into our video training so that publicly available video of street signs and traffic rules in China can be used for training and then also putting it in a very accurate simulator.

And so it will train using SIM for bus lanes in China. Like bus lanes in China, by the way, were about the biggest challenges in making FSD work in China is the bus lanes are very complicated. And there's like literally like hours of the day that you're allowed to be there and not be there. And then if you accidentally go in that bus lane at the wrong time, you get an automatic ticket instantly. So, it's kind of a big deal, bus lanes in China.

So we're going to put that into our simulator, train on that. The car has to know what time of day it is, read the sign. Anyway, we'll get this solved. But I think we'll have unsupervised FSD in almost every market this year limited simply by regulatory issues, not technical capability. And then unsupervised FSD in the US this year, in many cities, butnationwide next year. And hopefully we have unsupervised FSD in most countries by the end of next year.

That's my prediction with the best data that I have right now.

Probably the biggest blocker in front of Tesla is of a political nature, rather than technological. The fact that significant computing power is being spent on simulation training for the algorithms because of the Chinese government is a good indication of the type of obstacles they face and how creative they are willing to get to solve them.

"Can't work on this here"

"Ok, I'll fire up my 50k GPUs and if necessary use some of that xAI 100k cluster if necessary. I'm launching anyway."

Source: The Information

The above statement comes from an article in "The Information," arguably the most influential tech media outlet today that covers cloud infrastructure software and its business ecosystem.

As usual, politics start to overshadow reasonable judgment, as the author proudly claims that Musk and other executives get away unchallenged on these calls and analysts don't care to ask ANY MEANINGFUL QUESTIONS.

Adam Jonas: I got it. All right. So you're still -- people think you're crazy for not looking to LiDAR.

Elon Musk: Obviously humans drive without shooting lasers out of their eyes. Unless you're Superman. But like humans drive just with passive visual, humans drive with eyes and a neural net and a brain neural net. So the digital equivalent of eyes and a brain are cameras and digital neural nets or AI. So that's the entire road system was designed for passive optical neural nets.

That's how the whole road system was not designed and what everyone's expecting, that's how we expect other cars to behave.

Elon Musk: So therefore that is very obviously the solution for Full Self Driving in it as a generalized, but the generalized solution for Full Self Driving as opposed to the very specific, neighborhood by neighborhood solution, which is very difficult to maintain, which is what our competitors are doing.

Adam Jonas: I got it.

Elon Musk: Yeah. I mean, LiDAR doesn't work in the fall, guys. LiDAR has a lot of issues. I don't have to like, the SpaceX Dragon docks with the space station using LiDAR that a program that I've personally spearheaded. I don't have some fundamental bizarre dislike of LiDAR. It's simply the wrong solution for driving cars on roads.

Adam Jonas: Right. You understand how light are works. I get it.

Elon Musk: Literally designed and built our own red LiDAR. I oversaw the project, the engineering thing. It was my decision to use LiDAR on Dragon and I oversaw the engineering project directly. So I'm like we literally designed and made a radar, a LiDAR to dock with the space station. But if I thought it was the right solution for cars, I would do that, but it isn't.

Andy is the Head of Global Auto & Shared Mobility Research at Morgan Stanley by the way, so not exactly a junior analyst. If you have opinions about the technology and you want to debate them on these calls, the best strategy is to back them up with more concrete statements based on technical facts.

The same applies for your sales cycles as well - you need to calibrate depending on your audience and have either a) strong preparation when talking about topics you are not deeply familiar with or b) be very clear that this is a curiosity topic and what you are saying might not make sense.

Who is John Galt?

While I trust that my audience enjoys reading, I'll let our friend Claude explain it:

John Galt is a central figure in Ayn Rand's 1957 novel "Atlas Shrugged." He represents both a character and a philosophical concept that drives the novel's narrative and themes.

In the novel's opening, "Who is John Galt?" appears as a casual phrase that people use rhetorically, similar to saying "Who knows?" But as the story unfolds, this question transforms into something far more meaningful.

John Galt emerges as a brilliant inventor who created a revolutionary motor that could draw electricity from atmospheric static electricity. However, when his employer adopted a Marxist policy of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," Galt abandoned his invention and orchestrated what he called "the strike of the mind." He systematically convinces other productive members of society—inventors, industrialists, artists, and entrepreneurs—to withdraw their talents from a world that, in his view, exploits them while demonizing their success.

The philosophical significance of Galt's character lies in his embodiment of Rand's Objectivist philosophy. He represents the mind's supremacy, the morality of rational self-interest, and the virtue of productive achievement. His famous radio speech, spanning over 60 pages in the novel, serves as a comprehensive exposition of Rand's philosophical ideas about individualism, reason, and capitalism.

The question "Who is John Galt?" evolves throughout the novel from a expression of resignation to a declaration of human potential and individual achievement. Galt becomes a symbol of resistance against collectivism and a champion of individual rights and rational self-interest.

There is an argument to be made that since "Atlas Shrugged" was published back in 1957, outside of computing, there has been little real-world innovation. The majority of innovation has occurred on screens rather than outside of them, and it's debatable how much of it has been beneficial in achieving better outcomes for humans.

For different reasons, the intellectual titans and inventors of this period often withdrew from having an outsized impact on society. The recent meme of you can just do stuff is a reflection of the realization across many talented individuals that we've reached a certain plateau (or a peak, depending on the viewpoint) of what our lives and society look like with human capital in the center of it and its products being valued above all else. So instead of being constrained to iterating on how things have been done in the last 60 years, there is a desire to build and innovate.

The best way to start and progress is, well, just do stuff.

Elon Musk: Well, I mean, we're, I think, working on perfecting real-world AI and making rapid progress week over week, if not month, certainly month over month, but often week over week.

I spent a lot of time with the Tesla AI team and the Tesla Optimus team. I mean, I go where the problem is essentially. Like, not -- if something's, this is, unfortunately sometimes, like, don't talk to Tesla executives, and like, hey, we don't see you very often.

I'm like, that's because your stuff is working awesome. If you start working really great, unfortunately, I didn't see them very often because I go where the problem is. What's the greatest challenge that lies ahead? So obviously there are many challenges with Optimus. It's a hard problem to solve. Many challenges with vehicle autonomy.

But we're making rapid progress in both.

What makes Musk so effective is not exceptional IQ or magical schematics coming into his dreams at night. It's showing up every day in pursuit of your deep interests and being willing to put everything on the line for them, rather than withdrawing from society or "sticking to your lane" once you've achieved success.

You can just build the fastest and most profitable cars in the industry.

You can just fire rockets into space and fly them back.

You can just develop the algorithms of real-world AI.

You can just buy the most influential social network among those that build and sell the technology of the future.

You can just get involved in politics and start cutting into decades-old bureaucratic cartels.

If your end goal is expanding civilization beyond Earth, these are logical and necessary steps. They just require a lot of work and it all starts with the willingness to keep going after the hardest problem you need to solve today and work with the best talent you can hire to do so.

Elon Musk: Well, at Tesla, obviously, we think manufacturing is cool. SpaceX, we think manufacturing is cool. But in general, for talented Americans, they need to be beyond, beyond my companies, beyond me and my teams here, in general, we need to make manufacturing cool again in America. And, like, I honestly think people should move from like law and finance into manufacturing. That's my honest opinion. We have too much, this is both a compliment and a criticism.

We have too much talent in law and finance in America. And there should be more of that talent in manufacturing. The potential for the future. I mean, it tells that we're making sure that we can continue to manufacture our stuff. Even in the event of geopolitical tensions rising to very high levels.

I've mentioned before that the current crop of tech sales talent will be the leaders of tomorrow. If you are in cloud infrastructure software, you have a front seat to one of the most fundamental shifts we've seen in society - the moment when incentives shift because work will no longer be necessary for survival in the same context as we've understood it previously.

Similar to the world described in "Atlas Shrugged," there will be a division between those that do and those that don't. The difference is that the doers will win, dominating and reshaping society.

Success in the future will require behaviors much closer to a "renaissance" man than the previous focus of singular specializations. For those that want it, there will be an opportunity to build and sell, learn and teach, grow and contribute.

The Tesla rally to the most valuable company in the world will be the most hated rally. It will reshape the world as we know it and set up the stage for what's next.

Are you coming along, sales anon?