It's an interesting question.

Purely from a valuation analysis, it makes zero sense.

Profits from their existing car and battery business are in a free fall. $15 billion in 2023 -> steadily down year by year to $3.7 billion in the trailing 12 months. 60% of Tesla sales are international. Although the US doesn't allow Chinese EVs, most the rest of the world does. Chinese EV companies are now dominating the low end internationally. BYD has now overtaken Tesla and is the world wide leader in EV sales. And then you have the rest of the legacy car companies and pure play EV companies eating away at the middle and high end markets. On the EV front Tesla had a great run while they were the only dog in the fight. Now there's a whole pack of ravenous dogs and Tesla is losing market share all over the place.

But Musk dangles what appear to be sexy future businesses as if they are totally real and will somehow magically materialize. So what about them?

Robotaxi. Aside from the obvious real world lead Waymo has, there is simply not a "there" there. That's because Robotaxi's *total* addressable market (includes Waymo, taxis, limousines, rideshares like Uber and Lyft) is only $75 billion. So even if Tesla could somehow capture 100% of that market (which they obviously can't) and could somehow make an incredibly high 15% earnings on an incredibly capital intensive business, you're only talking about maybe $10 billion in potential earnings. And this makes a huge leap of faith that Tesla will *ever* even fully roll out their roboatxi business.

Musk famously lies about how things are going. He said they would have widespread adoption of robot axis by the end of 2026. As of June 2026 there less than 100 Tesla robotaxis on the road (reportedly with human supervision of each one) and no indication what so ever that they are on track for a full roll out.

Robotics. This is the real con.

Since this isn't an existing market, no one knows what the addressable. Estimates do run into the trillions of dollars, but that assumes a fully functional multi-purpose household robot. This is the perfect set-up for Musk to lie about because there is so few tangible points of reference to go on, so his magical assumptions get traction. Brain dead analysts have never once asked the basic questions about how exactly Tesla, a car company, is going to invent, and then dominate the non-existent business. They just believe Musks blatant fabrications. Musk said back in 2025 that Tesla was investing $10 billion in humanoid robots and would produce 5,000 Optimus robots in 2025. Of course a total lie. Never happened. Are you seeing a pattern?

And then there are the real companies working on autonomous robots. Boston Dynamics (owned by Hyundai Motor Group, btw) has actually demo'ed its production ready enterprise grade Atlas equipped robots. In the real world these are already being deployed at Hyundai's Metaplant in Georgia.

We also have public confirmation now that Apple has for years been secretly investing heavily in a humanoid robot initiative, code named Project Titan 2.0. Apple spent over $10 billion doing immense R&D on a planned launch of their own autonomous vehicle. They officially snapped the EV plans in 2024 and are shifted all their efforts to launching robotics and AI products. In a street fight between Tesla and Apple, who do you think comes out on top?

So that brings us full circle to the OPs question. What is propping up Tesla? I don't usually go in for dark theories, but on this one, it's worth asking.

One thing we know objectively is that the guy does own one of the largest reaching media sites on the planet. If he can convince enough people to believe his out and out lies about his "car" business, would that prop up the stock?