Tesla Bull Predicts Democrats Will “Block Autonomy,” a Bigger Risk Than Data Centers David Hanson Tue, November 10, 2026 at 12:06 PM EST 5 min read TSLA -0.23% GOOGM -0.48% Trade Tesla on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
Jason Calacanis, a Tesla shareholder, said on This Week in Startups that after the midterms Democrats will "block autonomy," a bigger risk for tech than data centers.
The risk is bigger for Tesla than for Alphabet's Waymo, since Elon Musk says Cybercab will dominate only where the law allows it, and Tesla is moving Cybertruck out of Giga Texas to build more of them.
Tesla trades at 177x forward earnings against a five-year average of 108x, and analysts' 2028 EPS estimate of $3.24 is still below what it earned in 2022.
A presidential veto makes a ban unlikely. But a Democratic Congress can stall federal rules that would override the states, which leaves robotaxis winning approval one city at a time.
Since Democrats swept Congress last week, much of the talk in tech has been about data centers.
Angel investor Jason Calacanis sees a bigger target. "The biggest outcome of this midterm election is not data centers," he said on Monday's episode of This Week in Startups. "I think they're going to block autonomy."
That's a striking call from someone who disclosed buying 3,000 shares of Tesla (TSLA:NASDAQ) late last month. And Alphabet (GOOG) is exposed too, through Waymo, the service Calacanis pointed to as already cutting into human drivers' work.
Calacanis's case starts with jobs. In the big Waymo markets, he said, the number of rides human drivers get "is going down a bit," though he called the data early and noisy. And Democrats' instinct, in his words, is "protect, protect, protect."
Anduril founder Palmer Luckey spelled out the stakes on X: take ride-hailing's "$150B+" of revenue "and subtract the cost of paying 16,000,000 drivers. That is the bet." Musk replied on Tuesday that "Cybercab will do a majority of all passenger miles in any jurisdiction where it is not prohibited by law."
Read that last part again. Musk's bull case comes with a legal condition, and the drivers Luckey wants to subtract are the people Calacanis expects Democrats to protect.
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Musk posted on Oct. 17 that "Optimus and Cybercab will be the vast majority of Tesla's value." Later in the episode, Calacanis was asked how a law blocking autonomy would hit robot makers like Figure. His answer: "If that legislation comes out, the valuation of those companies gets cut in half." By Musk's own account, Tesla is one of those companies.
Analysts' estimates show how little of that payoff is in the numbers so far:
The consensus has normalized EPS climbing from $1.66 in 2025 to $3.24 in 2028, still below the $4.07 Tesla earned in 2022. If Washington slowed the Cybercab rollout, most of the hit would come after 2028.
Yet investors pay a steep price for those earnings:
Tesla trades at 177x forward earnings, against a five-year average of 108x. Cut that in half, as Calacanis expects if that legislation passes, and you get about 88x, still more than four times its 20x low of December 2022. So a law blocking autonomy would hit the multiple long before it showed up in the estimates.
Musk said on Nov. 6 that Tesla will wind down Cybertruck production at Giga Texas around the middle of next year "to make room for increased Cybercab production." Spending was already climbing:
Capital spending rose from $6.51 billion in 2021 to $11.3 billion in 2024 before dipping to $8.53 billion in 2025, and management guides to about $20 billion this year. AI computing and Optimus take a share, but that's a lot of money behind a car that, in Musk's own words, needs the law on its side.
A federal ban is the least likely outcome. States set most robotaxi rules, and President Trump can veto anything a Democratic Congress sends him.
The bigger risk is a bill that never passes. In February, House Energy and Commerce lawmakers voted 12-11 to advance the SELF DRIVE Act. It would set federal rules for self-driving cars and stop states and cities from regulating any car with a safety case on file at NHTSA. Democrats objected to those limits on states, and with them running Congress from January, that override gets much harder to pass. That leaves Cybercab winning approval one "jurisdiction" at a time, the way Tesla's robotaxi service just reached its seventh city, San Antonio.
For Tesla holders, Calacanis has the ranking right. His own base case is the slower path: as a 10-year holder, he expects the rollout to take longer and the outcomes to be smaller. A stock priced like Tesla doesn't need a ban to fall, since a few more years of city-by-city approvals would push the payoff further out than investors are paying for. Alphabet faces the same patchwork with Waymo, but Waymo is one bet inside a much bigger company.
Frankly, at this multiple, I'd want a much clearer read on Washington before paying up for Tesla. Of course, the new Congress won't be seated until January. The first markers are Cybercab's planned Dallas launch this month and Tesla's 2027 spending plan, due with its fourth-quarter report in late January.
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