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The strongest case against this piece: Musk's own track record on FSD pricing, laid out plainly in this same piece, is a reason to be skeptical of crediting him with a deliberate, years-in-advance strategy rather than a series of reactive corrections. The 'appreciating asset' pitch was wrong. The price went to $15,000 and then had to be walked back three times. Read uncharitably, the subscription-only model isn't a masterstroke, it's what a company does after an expensive pricing strategy visibly failed to find buyers, dressed up afterward as intentional. This piece can't fully distinguish foresight from a smart recovery from a mistake, and it leans toward the more flattering read without being able to prove Tesla's internal reasoning was strategic rather than reactive.

Second, the 12% FSD-adoption figure this piece treats as an argument for a lower, more accessible price could just as easily be the argument against the entire thesis. If four out of five Tesla owners haven't paid for FSD even as a discretionary purchase at any price point tried so far, from $3,000 to $15,000 to $99 a month, it may be because the product itself doesn't yet do enough to justify a recurring bill, in which case cutting the price doesn't unlock durable revenue, it just delays the moment low satisfaction shows up as cancellations once the subscription actually renews at a higher rate for the first time.

Third, the comparisons to Adobe, Take-Two and Amazon Prime carry an important disanalogy this piece doesn't fully resolve: those are either professional tools people need for income (Adobe), an addictively designed game people choose to keep playing (GTA Online), or a shipping-and-streaming bundle with daily utility (Prime). FSD is a discretionary convenience feature in a car, competing for a much smaller share of a household's patience for recurring bills, and consumer subscription fatigue is real and well documented in exactly this price range. The self-storage ECRI comparison is arguably the most apt one here, precisely because it also describes a captive customer (moving a storage unit is a hassle, canceling a car subscription isn't) tolerating small increases, which may actually undercut, rather than support, how much pricing power Tesla really has once an owner can simply stop paying $99 a month with no further cost at all.

Finally, the '$10 trillion market cap in 10 years' prediction, even correctly labeled as a prediction, assumes Tesla's execution risk (Optimus actually shipping at scale, robotaxi regulatory approval, FSD eventually working well enough to retain subscribers past the honeymoon period, competitors' software catching up) is low enough not to matter next to the pricing-strategy insight. Every one of those is a live, unresolved risk as of this writing, and a piece built around 'the market doesn't understand this yet' should weigh more heavily on the possibility that the market has already priced in both the opportunity and the very real chance several of those bets don't pay off.

A fifth point, sharpened by this round of research: the piece's own capability evidence is more mixed than a clean 'FSD finally works' framing suggests, and a skeptical reader should weigh the Austin numbers, not just the Forbes anecdote. Electrek's own count found the driverless service running at only 19% availability eight months after monitors started coming out, with a crash rate the outlet measured at nine times worse than human drivers, in a city picked partly because it doesn't get snow. If the flagship deployment of the technology this piece cites as justifying $99 a month still can't run reliably or safely, by the numbers, in one mid-size Texas metro, extrapolating from it to a trillion-dollar market-cap thesis is exactly the kind of gap between a technology's claimed trajectory and its measured, current performance this outlet says elsewhere it exists to catch. The valuation figures cut both ways harder than the piece's framing implies, too: for every analyst assigning Tesla's self-driving business $330 a share or a $750 billion standalone value, there is a price target more than 90% below the stock's current level, and a Wall Street consensus that is a Hold, not a Buy. A stock already trading at roughly 330 times trailing earnings does not have much room for the market to be wrong about the pace of that ramp in Tesla's favor; it has considerably more room to be wrong against it. This piece cites the bull case at length because it's the more interesting and more falsifiable story, not because it's the more likely one.