There is something about a retired man on a Portuguese vineyard predicting the downfall of the most-watched company on Earth. Carlos Tavares no longer has a podcast, no short position to talk up, nothing left to sell. He spends his days near Tomar restoring old cars and tending to wine. And yet, when he told the French paper Les Echos last October that he wasn’t sure Tesla would still exist in ten years, the line traveled fast. Tesla is being hammered by Chinese rival BYD, which surpassed it in global EV sales earlier in the year — that part wasn’t really in dispute. It was the rest that stung.
“Tesla’s stock market value loss will be colossal because this valuation is simply stratospheric,” he said. The phrasing matters. He didn’t say bankruptcy. He didn’t predict a crash in the apocalyptic sense people assumed from the headlines. What he described was stranger, and maybe harder to argue with: a slow drift, in which Musk eventually decides to leave the automotive industry to refocus on humanoid robots, SpaceX, or artificial intelligence. One morning, Tavares suggested, the announcement comes, and the car company quietly becomes someone else’s problem.
It’s worth pausing on who’s saying this. Tavares ran the world’s fourth-largest automaker for four years. He studied, as it were, at the feet of Carlos Ghosn. He knows what it costs to build a car, down to the bolt. So when a man like that calls a valuation “stratospheric,” it lands differently than the usual analyst chatter. There’s a sense he’s not guessing. He’s comparing Tesla to the factories he used to walk through, where margins were thin, and every percentage point was fought over.
Musk’s response was characteristically brief. He saw the story on X and said Tavares “has no clue.” Maybe. Musk is no stranger to being underestimated, and the idea that he’d simply walk away from Full Self-Driving — billions sunk, years of data gathered — doesn’t quite fit. Tesla’s whole bet right now is autonomy and the Optimus robot. That’s not the posture of a company about to abandon cars. It’s the posture of a company that betting cars were only ever the beginning.
Still. The numbers don’t make Tavares look foolish. Tesla’s deliveries fell for a second straight year. Its China market share has slid to roughly 5% from 16% in 2020. And the financials carry an uncomfortable detail: a large slice of recent profit came from regulatory emissions credits, a revenue stream that’s drying up as rivals build their own EVs and stop buying. Strip that away and the picture gets thinner.
Here’s the tension, though. As of late May 2026, Tesla still trades around $426 a share, valued near $1.6 trillion — more than most automakers combined, with a price-to-earnings ratio closer to a software firm than a carmaker. Investors clearly aren’t buying Tesla as a car company. They’re buying robots, robotaxis, and a future that hasn’t arrived. Whether that future justifies the price is the whole question, and nobody knows the answer yet.
Watching this unfold, it’s hard not to notice the symmetry. Tavares was, in a way, the last of the empire-builders in Western autos. Tesla faced these same doubts a decade ago and survived them. Maybe Tavares is wrong, as he’s admitted he sometimes is. Or maybe he’s describing something real that the market hasn’t priced in. The next ten years will tell.
