“He sells cars.”

Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade advisor, dismissed Elon Musk on Fox News.

The message? Stay in your lane, Space Cowboy.

In case you missed it: Musk wants “zero tariff zones” and global flow. Navarro wants a tariff wall and a trade sword.

Yes, Navarro’s right—Musk is protecting his own interests.

But here’s where he’s wrong: Elon Musk isn’t a car salesman.

Everyone thinks Tesla sells cars. (I used to, too.)

No, Ford sells cars.

Tesla is an AI energy empire in disguise. And if you don’t get that yet, you’re already five years behind.

Let me explain.

No Tariffs on Mars

Elon Musk is in the business of building the future—specifically, a multi-planetary future. Earth is the MVP. Mars is the Series A. Every product is just a stepping stone to that goal.

So what looks like a car company is actually the early stages of a planetary infrastructure company.

Here’s what everyone misses:

By 2027, Tesla will make more money from AI energy than from cars.

You read that right. The real money is in AI energy infrastructure. And they’re already way ahead.

Let me break this down like a startup pitch from the future:

DOJO – Tesla’s supercomputer. This isn’t ChatGPT for Teslas. It’s the brain. It trains itself. It powers autonomy in cars, robots, energy systems. It’s building its own intelligence, every day.

OPTICASTER – Sounds like a Pokémon, but it’s smarter. It’s Tesla’s AI that manages energy distribution in real time. It knows when to store energy, when to use it, and when to trade it. It’s like having a hedge fund manager for your electricity bill.

AUTOBIDDER – This one’s nuts. Imagine AI trading electricity the way Wall Street trades stocks—except with 100% uptime and no emotion. It’s already being used by energy companies and even Supercharger networks to buy and sell stored energy in real-time markets. (Translation: free money.)

POWERHUB – Think of it as the command center. It’s an AI dashboard that tells you where your power is going, where it should go, and how to make your grid smarter.

But wait, here comes the robot army…

OPTIMUS – This is the twist ending. The AI-trained humanoid robot that will literally install the future.

Picture this: Optimus building solar farms in the desert. Optimus repairing wind turbines in a storm. Optimus cleaning and maintaining your entire energy infrastructure without sleep or pay raises.

And Optimus isn’t even on the books yet. They’re not including it in the financials. It’s the hidden ace.

So What’s the Bottom Line?

In 2023, Tesla’s energy profits were 6.5% of gross.

In 2024? 25%.

Energy revenue up 67%. Auto revenue down 7%.

And at this growth rate? By 2027, Tesla will become the Amazon Web Services of energy.

Except instead of selling server time, they’re selling electricity… AI… autonomy… robots… and maybe even the keys to Mars.

None of this includes the upside from:

Selling AI chips (the A15 chip)

Offering AI-as-a-service from Dojo

Scaling Optimus

If you’re still thinking about Teslas as cars, you’re using a flip phone in the iPhone era.

My guess? At today’s price, $TSLA is trading at 5–10x what 2029 earnings will be. That’s without even pricing in the robot army.

I’ll say it again: Tesla is not a car company.

It’s the foundation of the next civilization.

Mars is optional.

But profits aren’t.

Best,

James Altucher
Contributing Editor, Investor’s Daily

The Last Man Standing

Bill Bonner, writing from Youghal, Ireland

The era of rules-based order and globalized free trade is over.

–Lawrence Wong, Singapore Prime Minister

When the stock market was in free fall, a subscriber wrote to ask if we were satisfied. After all, here was the sell-off we were waiting for.

Alas, no. We hold gold. And we can’t complain. Gold has been the top performer for a quarter of a century…and now, it is the only sure refuge from 2025 chaos. Seeking Alpha:

Gold futures added to gains in electronic trading late Wednesday, with the June contract rising to as high as $3,111/oz, after prices had already gained 3% during regular trading for its largest one-day percentage gain in a year and a half.

We keep score in gold; we hold gold as as store of value; we don’t expect to make any money in it. Businesses increase the world’s real wealth; Buffett is right about that. They make profits. We want a part of those profits. And we hope for a bit of capital growth too.

But our macro trading system is designed primarily to avoid the Big Loss (Tom and Dan discussed this last night in the video below). The recent sell-off might be the beginning of it…or it might not. Whatever…the risk is still there…and increasing.

Stocks crash. Bonds collapse. The dollar goes up…and down. Interest rates too. Recessions. Bubbles. We’ve seen them all.

But Donald J. Trump is introducing something we’ve never seen before. In addition to unsettling the financial world with a $37 trillion debt… and $2 trillion deficits — sure to lead to another crash and recession — he’s unsettling the political world too, with capricious policies, reckless tariffs and crackpot theories.

His Liberation Day never came.

His ‘reciprocal’ tariffs were fake.

It was as if Abraham Lincoln waved the Emancipation Proclamation, and then the next day said he was ‘only kidding.’

What are trading partners supposed to think? They are surely looking for new suppliers and new markets.

And what is China supposed to do? Singled out for special beatings, can the Chinese save face by buckling under to Trump’s whims? Or will they be forced to take more aggressive action?

We don’t buy gold as an investment. We buy it as a way not to lose money on our investments. We sell stocks and hold gold for long periods of time…and we only buy back into the broad stock market after we are pretty sure that the risk has been squeezed out of it. That’s when you can trade 5 or fewer ounces of gold for the entire group of 30 Dow stocks.

You see immediately the weakness of our investment strategy. We could wait a lifetime and never buy a stock. The Dow passed our ‘sell’ point back in 1996. Since then, grandchildren have been born and reached voting age, new cars have been consigned to the junk yard, fruitcakes and hams have been entirely consumed… grunge, mom jeans, beanie babies…the internet, Iraq, Apple, Google, Musk, Trump — a lot has happened. And we’ve been substantially (but never entirely) out of stocks the whole time.

And during that time, our holdings of gold rose from a dollar value of around $300/oz. to today’s $3,100. Without getting out a calculator, we see our gold is worth more than ten times what it was in 1996.

And the Dow? Trading around 6,500 in 1996, it’s up a little more than six times.

Holding gold — and staying out of stocks — paid off. But in terms of real wealth, we gained nothing. We still have exactly the same number of ounces of gold that we had 29 years ago.

So, yes, now we’re getting restless. We’re eager for the Dow to sell off to a point where we can jump back in with confidence. How will that happen? We don’t know. But we know when it will happen.

Our target is still the Dow at 5 ounces of gold. That could be with a gold price of $4,000… and the Dow at 20,000. Or maybe gold at $5,000 and the Dow at 25,000. Either way, we have a long way to go.

So the answer to the question: Are we satisfied?

Not yet!

In the meantime, how will today’s market and political madness shake out? We don’t know. But we recall Richard Russell’s famous last words. “I don’t know what will happen, but when the dust finally settles, gold will be the last man standing.”

Regards,

Bill Bonner
Contributing Editor, Investor’s Daily

For more from Bill Bonner, visit www.bonnerprivateresearch.com