đ⥠Using iPhone shipments to value Apple failed in 2007 â the same mistake is now being made with Tesla
If youâre still valuing $TSLA by how many cars it delivered this quarter, youâre replaying one of the most expensive analytical errors in modern markets.
Back then, investors obsessed over iPhone unit sales.
They missed the real inflection: Apple wasnât a hardware company anymore â it was becoming a platform.
Tesla is at the same junction today.
And once again, the market is staring at the wrong dashboard.
This isnât a story about EV deliveries, ASPs, or quarterly margins.
Those are accounting variables, not value drivers.
The only question that matters for Teslaâs long-term valuation is simple and binary: does autonomy work at scale?
When Apple crossed its inflection point, the winning investors werenât modeling phone shipments.
They were watching supply chains mature, ecosystems lock in, and usage patterns compound.
Teslaâs equivalent isnât âcars soldâ â itâs autonomous miles driven, interventions per mile, city-level replication, and utilization per vehicle.
Thatâs why todayâs debate is so distorted.
Most critics argue autonomy in theory, not in practice.
Many have never experienced FSD or a real robotaxi service.
But technology adoption doesnât wait for consensus â it moves once reality outpaces skepticism.
Waymo has already proven one thing clearly: autonomy can work.
The real bottleneck isnât software â itâs scale.
Without manufacturing capacity, fleet density, and operational infrastructure, autonomy stays a pilot, not a platform.
This is where legacy OEMs quietly hit a wall.
If autonomy reduces the number of vehicles society needs, it compresses their total addressable market.
That structural conflict explains why partnerships stall and timelines stretch.
Teslaâs advantage isnât just better models or better code.
If autonomy succeeds, Tesla already controls the hard parts most competitors donât:
manufacturing, charging, servicing, and a direct consumer interface.
Thatâs a full-stack system â not a feature.
Uberâs strategy makes this contrast even clearer.
By fragmenting autonomy partnerships, Uber positions itself as the marketplace layer.
But if one system becomes meaningfully safer and more consistent, the strongest autonomous network may not need an intermediary at all.
The real valuation unlock isnât âselling more cars.â
Itâs recurring, subscription-based mobility.
Access over ownership.
Platform revenue over product margin.
Thatâs why markets assign premium multiples â and why hardware-only models break down.
Regulation wonât stop this shift.
Once autonomous transport is measurably safer, cheaper, and cleaner, resistance becomes a delay â not a reversal.
Cities that block it will feel the cost faster than those that adopt it.
So the debate over â8% vs 50% market shareâ misses the point entirely.
The real variable is how large autonomous miles become as a share of total miles.
Cross that threshold, and adoption stops being linear.
The question investors should be asking isnât whether Tesla is overvalued today.
Itâs whether theyâre prepared for what happens if autonomy becomes the default mode of transportation.
đ I share long-term, thesis-driven insights on autonomy, AI, and platform-level shifts reshaping markets.
If you care about where value compounds before consensus forms, follow along.
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