I hate to reschedule "The Cylon (TOS) Design Fallacy" yet again, but we had a big news day on the Tesla front

I've got some real posts coming up on Elon's Optimus and the humanoid robot bubble, with any luck starting tomorrow, but the last three days of April were just too eventful to ignore.

Remember, as I'm writing this, Tesla's P/E ratio is 155.30. Toyota's is 7.10. Alphabet's (Google) is 18.23.

Tesla (TSLA) chair sells most of her stocks – her time is done?
Fred Lambert | Apr 29 2025

Tesla’s Chairwoman, Robyn Denholm, has filed to sell another $30 million in Tesla stock. She appears to be completely liquidating her stake in the company she chairs.

This morning, we noted that a Tesla insider made their first stock purchase in five years.

Other than the small purchase from Joe Gebbia disclosed last night, Tesla executives and board members have exclusively exercised stock options and sold them right away.

Robyn Denholm, Tesla’s Chairwoman, has been the top seller. She sold over $150 million worth of Tesla stocks over the last 6 months.

She has received over $600 million in stock compensation since joining the board just 10 years ago, and she has sold over $500 million worth.

While that looks bad, there was a potentially far bigger announcement, but first a bit of background. More from former Elon fan Lambert.

When explicitly asked about Waymo, which is already seen as the market leader by most experts, Musk again claimed that it won’t be competitive because of cost:

Well, okay. The issue with Waymo’s cars is it costs way more money, but that is the issue. The car is very expensive, made in low volume. Teslas are probably cost 25% or 20% of what a Waymo costs and made in very high volume. So, ironically, like, we’re the ones to make the bet that a pure AI solution with cameras and what do you have? The car actually will listen for sirens and that kind of thing. It’s the right move. And Waymo decided that an expensive sensor suite is the way to go, even though Google is very good at AI. So I’m wondering. And it is worth noting that Tesla has both an incredible AI software team and AI hardware chip design team.

While it’s true that Waymo’s vehicles are more expensive, this has little to do with an “expensive sensor suite”, as Musk claimed.

Tesla’s sensor suite, which consists only of cameras, is certainly less expensive than Waymo’s, which includes cameras, radar, and lidar sensors. Still, most of the cost difference is due to Tesla building vehicles in high volumes for consumers while Waymo buys existing vehicles and retrofits them with its sensor suite in much lower volumes.

Talking to Business Insider this week, John Krafcik, who helped launch Google’s self-driving vehicle program and was Waymo’s first CEO until 2021, doesn’t see it as a problem:

In the long run, the cost of sensors has a “trivial cost-per-mile impact over the useful life of a robotaxi,” he told BI,” while also providing massive quantifiable safety benefits.”

Krafcik has been skeptical of Tesla’s efforts for a while and even suggested that what Tesla plans to launch in Austin in June could amount to “faking” self-driving.

If Waymo were in a position to build in high volumes, the math might be very different.

On a completely unrelated note.

Waymo, Toyota strike partnership to bring self-driving tech to personal vehicles
Jennifer Elias, Lora Kolodny

Alphabet-owned Waymo and Toyota on Tuesday announced a preliminary partnership to explore bringing robotaxi tech to personally-owned vehicles.

“The companies will explore how to leverage Waymo’s autonomous technology and Toyota’s vehicle expertise to enhance next-generation personally owned vehicles,” the two companies announced.

The companies said they aim to use the partnership to more quickly develop driver assistance and autonomous vehicle technologies for personal vehicles. Toyota is the world’s largest automaker by sales. 

Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said the strategic partnership could also result in the Google-owned company incorporating Toyota’s “vehicles into our ride-hailing fleet.”

And there's this.

To be blunt, I don't see any way out for the company. Elon is—and will remain—the public face of Doge, regardless of how much time he spends in the White House. As long as he is with Tesla, the brand will remain toxic.

But that 155 P/E is wholly dependent on the false belief that he is an engineering genius who will make trillions of dollars through robotaxis and humanoid robots. If he leaves, investors will have to face the fact that this is a small car company with a horrible brand trading at something like 20 times any reasonable value.

Tesla may be the platonic ideal of "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent," but when sanity does hit, it's likely to hit hard.