Last night, it became more clear to me than ever, why there are so many varying opinions about Tesla, the stock valuation, and its future impact on society. As a result of this mini epiphany, well, well, maybe more of a strong reminder, today's video will be a bit different than a typical quarterly recap. Watching the world react to Tesla's earnings has me in a place where I feel the need to say some things and share some perspectives and I think in the end that will be more helpful than nerding out about market gains for Bitcoin and how that's benefited Tesla in quarter four.
Although sure, in time we can certainly explain the mechanics of stuff like that, and listen, let me be clear, it's not that these things don't matter, because for the next 6-12 months, they most certainly do when it comes to the stock. The problem I'm seeing is the volume of people that can't seem to detach from certain things and as a result, many people are disillusioned with Tesla and it really doesn't need to be this way. Everyone just needs to understand the great Tesla buy for cash and once you can really grasp this and the incentives behind each group, the commentary about Tesla and narratives you see will make a lot more sense. And hopefully, each side can understand the other a bit better with the most important result being a better understanding of Tesla and its future.
Now more than ever, Tesla observers are being split into two groups, we'll call one group now and one group future. The now group does have all of these factual points on their side, Tesla stock price was higher back on November 1st, 2021 than it is today. So over the past 3 years, the stock has been negative. Tesla's auto gross margin X credit number in quarter four was the lowest it's been in about 7 years. In quarter four, Tesla's operating income was down 24% year over year.
Not only that, but Tesla's operating income was higher in quarter three of 2021 than it was in Q4 last year. Tesla's average selling price has been steadily coming down thanks to the need for sales incentives around the world to keep moving metal and yet all of those efforts still resulted in negative year over year sales growth for 2024. There are still big question marks for Tesla's delivery growth in 2025, especially if the tax credits are removed and Tesla did not reiterate that 20-30% delivery growth for this year, which some can interpret as a backing off of that figure. We do have to consider Tesla is doing something unprecedented, changing over four factories globally at the same time to the new Model Y and the last year to change over to the new Model 3 at fewer factories was slower than expected at Fremont.
Vibov said on the call the change over will result in several last weeks of production in quarter one and as a result margins will be impacted. There's plenty of uncertainty about tariffs and those would hurt Tesla's cost structure even though Tesla's done a great job of localizing production over the years. Despite that, there's still very reliant on parts around the world for all of its businesses. And yes, we all know Elon's been wrong about the Robotaxi timeline for many years, so this now group doesn't really care what Elon says about Robotaxi timelines and listen, to some degree, I get it.
So I think you get the picture, there are certainly metrics and financials and data points that this now group is correct about Tesla has been underperforming on these key metrics for a few years. One more example, Tesla's gap net income was higher in quarter four of 2021 than it was in quarter four of 2024. So for a growth company with over a trillion dollar valuation, if you want or need Tesla stock to perform now, you're going to be upset and it's easy to point fingers at Elon and politics and all of that. We live in a what have you done for me lately world and by these metrics Tesla really hasn't done much for a few years, so the number of people in this now camp when it comes to Tesla is continuing to grow. And I'll come back to this now group in a moment, but I just think it's important for everyone, no matter what group you fall in, to understand these points and understand why certain narratives exist.
Because it is indeed these very metrics, margins, profitability, growth, etc. paired with a six to 12 month outlook on those metrics, that really does drive the stock price in the short term second to only macro economics. And we'll call the second group future. This is where Elon lives. Hence the thumbnail of this video, which was referring to when Elon was bringing himself back to earth, which I thought was hilarious. But it also gave us an excellent insight into where his head is at when he thinks about Tesla. And my prediction long term is the optimist will be overwhelmingly the value of the company. We're counting energy back to us. The vision that Elon sees so clearly now more than ever is quite special, but there will be even more waiting ahead to get to this future. Now this group will call future understands that all of the financials and metrics right now really don't matter for the long term vision, not that they don't matter. But for 2026 and beyond, they just become so trivial.
As I was filling out my quarterly numbers spreadsheet with Tesla's data, I could just not get away from the thought that this is all just noise for those in the future group. When you envision unsupervised FSD in many cities by later this year and optimists doing useful work in the thousands by later this year or early next year, dwelling on auto gross margins, ex credits really does feel foolish. Everybody here knows the arguments for the future camp. The upside of Tesla over the next decade is so big that to put it into words or figures doesn't make sense and just leaves you sounding like a fanboy. Elon does see a path to Tesla being the most valuable company in the world by far with a greater valuation than the next top 5 companies combined, which by today's numbers is nearly $15 trillion. The driver of this number though is autonomous vehicles and autonomous robots. It is absolutely not Tesla achieving 20% auto gross margins, ex credits or even growing auto sales at 20, 30, 40% a year. That's just never going to move the needle to those type of numbers.
But as I lay out some of my biggest takeaways from yesterday, you should be able to see why so many people are agreeing to look past the current financials into the future that is now closer than ever. A few of the new things we learned, Tesla claims to be battery constrained specifically for battery packs and battery production. They're in talks now about how to increase the total gigawatt hours of battery production. Apparently that's the constraint on output for auto and energy. But Tesla said the 4680 lines hit a rate exceeding 2,500 Cybertruck packs per week, which is about 125,000 packs per year well ahead of the current production rate for the Cybertruck, so 4680s are not the limiting factor but batteries from suppliers is. Which I'll be honest to me is a bit odd because other automakers have been pulling back on EV battery packs and the narrative was about excess cell supply from China nearly all of last year.
Of course Tesla needs specific cells but there were times when battery factories were running at 40% of capacity last year and electrode manufacturing capacity was nearly an order of magnitude greater than the global EV cell demand at the time. So I would have loved to hear more about how and why Tesla is battery constrained but of course no analyst thought to get more information about this. Nothing about the severity of the constraint but Elon did say they'll get it sorted out and for now that's really all we have. The big news was of course for the first time we got a specific month for Unsupervised FSD which is June for paid rides in Austin but it'll only be for Tesla's fleet no customer deployments yet. Next year should be the year for the Airbnb situation for customer cars joining the network according to Elon. But it's not just Austin. The plan is to launch Unsupervised in California later this year and likely in many regions of the US by the end of this year. Further probably everywhere in North America next year the constraint next year is likely to be regulatory and hopefully by then the Trump friendship pays some dividends and there's federal regulation for robot axes alleviating that constraint.
To start Tesla will go slow to make sure everything is safe and works well and there is significant interest from a number of major car companies to license FSD but Tesla's only entertaining it where the volume is very high. Clearly Tesla's focus is to get Unsupervised working across the US first before worrying too much about licensing. Elon did go on a mini rant about regulations in the EU and challenges in China with FSD so I'm even more confident now in what I said last week that we should all temper our expectations for FSD around the world. The EU committee meets in May but there's nothing Tesla can do to expedite that. Elon at one point guess that maybe May next year is when supervised FSD would be allowed in the EU. So then when is Unsupervised FSD allowed in Europe I'm like May next year maybe? I don't know well better to find out when the EU is meeting again. Clearly that was just a guess but what I'm getting at here is I think quarter one of this year is looking very doubtful.
On the China challenges China won't allow Tesla to transfer training video outside of China again exactly what we talked about last week but we learned that the US government won't let Tesla train in China. So in the event China says you need to do all of your training here which is what they're saying now something may need to change with US restrictions to allow that to happen and Tesla would then need to build out separate infrastructure in China. It is pretty cool that Tesla can make progress now with video of streets on the internet fed into Tesla's training and simulations for bus lanes in China which is their biggest challenge for that market and Elon concluded saying hopefully Unsupervised is in most countries by the end of next year. Here's the thing some people are now concerned that other companies could just pull online videos and buy some compute and then really narrow Tesla's data gap after the comments about what Tesla's doing in simulation. But a few weeks back we talked about the limitations of this simulation data so this is not some sort of shortcut to eliminating the need for real world data it's just like a bandaid temporary measure to keep the progress moving until the regulatory situation becomes more clear. We should be expecting Tesla's capex to increase the next few years as they called out in the 10k. The training needs for optimists will be 10x what's needed for the vehicles to get to the full range of useful roles for optimists. So far cumulatively Tesla has spent about $5 billion on AI capex so over the next five to ten years Tesla may see that figure increase to $50 billion and beyond. And of course it's fun to think about optimist revenue being north of $10 trillion at some point like Elon said but there's a long way to go to get there. Elon did say 10,000 optimist robots built this year is the internal plan but they're likely only going to hit several thousand realistically. The production design one which is what they'll make later this year will inform what they change for production design two which should go into production toward the middle of next year. Optimists is not yet design locked and the pilot production starting this year will be for internal use at Tesla. They can use several thousand for boring jobs at the factories. It sounds like the optimist ramp could get pretty nutty as they're aiming to see an order of magnitude ramp every year aspirationally which would mean this pilot line that should launch later this year of version one of optimists would start off with one line making about 1000 optimists per month and then version two which hopefully comes toward the middle of next year would be around 10,000 units per month. And then after that the next line would be for 100,000 units per month and so on. Elon said this version two of optimists that should start toward the middle of next year those deliveries to external customers may begin in the second half of 2026.
Elon thinks that 1 million optimist units per year the production cost should be less than about 20,000 dollars but the price for optimists will be set by market demand. Just keep in mind this optimist ramp is going to involve an entirely new supply chain and entirely new tech so the risks abound for the ramp and the timing. Elon did say that optimist has the most sophisticated hand that's ever been made and that should allow it to thread a needle. And I have a feeling in the next six months we'll get a new video of optimists showing off these new hands and what they can do. Tesla is building a third megapack factory we don't know where or when but that was encouraging to hear.
A quick note on the FSD upgrade if you have not already bought the FSD package with hardware 3 I would not just assume that if you buy it now you'll be included in that upgrade group. I'm just saying if it was me I would want to confirm with Tesla and somehow get it in writing that if you buy FSD now only to get that upgrade that they'll actually honor that for you buying it now. When Elon and the team were talking about the semi which is still on track with the same timeline he said it should be a $10 billion per year type project when it comes to revenue but he made the joke like is that even relevant anymore when you think about the opportunities for FSD and optimists. Once again that just gives you a little window into Elon and the team's mind of where they see Tesla going in the next few years.
So with these updates if you take a second to imagine a realistic scenario where at the end of 2026 so less than two years away we have unsupervised in a majority of North America both for Tesla's internal fleet and customer vehicles. Maybe not all of North America like Elon is predicting but let's just say again the majority over 50% and don't forget these vehicles could be transporting both people and goods. Then we have Optimus production at maybe a few thousand every month some being sold externally to customers. The Tesla Semi should be through the challenging early stages of the ramp and nearing profitability for that business line.
The third megapack factory may be nearing completion if not starting low volume production. Tesla energy should be over 100% bigger than it is right now. More affordable models will have been on sale for Tesla for over a year. The CyberCab will have likely started at least low volume production. So even just these few things alone it really shouldn't be hard to see why this future group is so excited and willing to stay patient for another few months or a year. However long it takes for all of these endeavors to finally start increasing Tesla's profits once again and for the market to start giving credit to Tesla for the foundation they've been building for all of this the past few years.
This is the inflection point that Elon was talking about on the call. It's partially finally exiting the in between growth waves thing we've been talking about for over a year. And not to oversimplify but it boils down to you either believe all of this is going to happen even if it's a bit late and a bit slower than what's promised or you don't. And as Elon has made explicitly clear if you don't you should just not own Tesla stock. And I do really understand why so many are disillusioned with Tesla. If you've held for a few years and expected big returns you're likely frustrated and fed up. But this is why I always say actual investing is a 7 plus year game. Growth is not linear more often than not and exponential growth requires building a strong foundation which is exactly what Tesla's been doing.
So the truth is the conversation around Tesla should always be defined. Are we talking about the now you know the next few months kinda like Wall Street does or are we talking about S curves and exponential growth waves that are likely right around the corner over the next 5 years. Your perspective on Tesla really just boils down to which camp now or future you relate more with. I of course am personally in the future camp as I have no need for Tesla stock to perform right now. But I was also a financial advisor and my background is finance and I used to love nerding out on Tesla financials because at the time it was a much more critical piece of the Tesla story back then.
For a time the stock price was absolutely driven by how many cars were being sold and the profits on those vehicles because that's really all we had for a time. And eventually the day will come back around when Tesla's financials start to accelerate rapidly and there are things we'll need to pay attention to closely to understand this next chapter of the Tesla story. And by the sound of things that may start sometime toward the end of 2025. So until then while it's good to be aware of Tesla's margin compression and the numbers lagging. I don't think it's wise to let it distract from what's about to happen starting later this year.
I'm not naive enough to think that the now group and the future group are going to start holding hands but I do hope that as we all watch this Tesla story unfold we can do so with some patience and understanding which will make keeping up with the company a bit more enjoyable. Hopefully enabling people to not be so frustrated with why some people just quote don't get it. But on that front perhaps the highlight of the call for me was listening to Adam Jonas get dunked on by Elon and the team for the LiDAR question. Some things apparently will never change. So just remember for the next year or so there's going to be a great divide between the now and the future and both camps have good arguments to make depending on what you want from Tesla.
Some are here for a short time and others for the long haul. Some focus on the tech some on the financials some are long Tesla some are short Tesla some need Tesla stock to go up now some want it to go down as they're still accumulating. So I know certain narratives can frustrate certain groups just know that in the end all that will matter is the product from Tesla and there's a reason they say patience is a virtue. There are valid reasons for people to complain about Tesla right now some other arguments are not so valid.
Tesla was founded as a mission is to advance sustainable transportation and energy and that they were doing a wonderful job before they pivoted into a bunch of businesses that were not sure how they're going to be which is robotics and cybercabs so you know and that's not coming anytime soon either. But having followed Tesla for the past decade I am quite confident that most of what Elon is saying about Tesla right now will turn out to be true. Every great shooter misses now and again but statistically they're then much likelier to hit the next time around.