Emily Flippen

I think about Axon when they set market cap goals for compensation for their founder CEO and achieved them.

It can be one of those win-wins for shareholders.

But I will say the milestones that you laid out, John, in my opinion, are

are somewhat contradictory to the expansion in market cap for Tesla, because we're talking about expanding the number of vehicle deliveries, robots, robo taxis.

These could be initiatives that are actually margin reducing for Tesla.

Trying to deliver more vehicles means cutting the cost.

We've already seen Tesla's margins start to erode in previous quarters.

There's still not an optimist robot that's available for purchase.

So if we're aggressively going after these milestones, if I'm Elon Musk and I want to get my pay package,

and I have to achieve these milestones, you're going through all of these steps to aggressively achieve them, even if it is at the expense of something like free cash flow.

And free cash flow has been the silver lining for Tesla shareholders for so long now.

So I worry a little bit that these operational metrics are in direct contrast to what has made Tesla such an incredible business to this point.

And there's also this element of, can these goals be fudged?

For instance, the 5 million active full self-driving subscriptions, it's not clear whether or not those are paid or if they can be given out for free, for instance.

So there's also, I think, a lack of clarity about how these goals could be delivered upon.

And in my opinion, I think the operational goals are actually worse for Tesla than just doing pure market cap-based goals.

We saw that work for companies in the past.

I wish that's what it was, but...

I actually, I'm so excited to see how this plays out for Musk and Tesla.

Oh, there's no doubt in my mind that we're going to be sending robots to space any day now.