Buena Vista Pictures Distribution/Warner Bros. Pictures
One analyst has come up with a unique way of explaining Elon Musk’s vision of a future dominated by robots — comparing it to Christopher Nolan’s 2006 science-fiction classic “The Prestige.”
“I was watching ‘The Prestige’ with my sons last Saturday night. Set in the late Victorian Era, I found many quotes by the character of Nikola Tesla (played by David Bowie) elegantly capture the zeitgeist of today’s era of scientific discovery,” Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas wrote in an analyst note on Monday.
The note was released shortly after Tesla announced a proposed pay package for Musk that could be worth as much as $1 trillion.
For those who haven’t seen it, “The Prestige” follows a feud between warring magicians Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) and Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman), two friends-turned-enemies in 19th-century London.
The scene Jonas is referencing sees Bowie’s Nikola Tesla warn Angier, who has become consumed by obsession and jealousy, about the consequences of using a dangerous new technology to perform a fresh magic trick and upstage his rival.
Jonas, Morgan Stanley’s managing director of global autos research, continued his foray into film criticism by linking several quotes from “The Prestige” to 10 predictions “for a world soon to be populated with autonomous robots.”
According to Jonas, Nikola Tesla’s warning to Angier that “the world only tolerates one change at a time” links to the growing overlap between Tesla and Elon Musk’s other companies, Tesla’s robotaxi fleet hitting 2,000 cars by 2026, aerial drones, and “Optimus limbs for Neuralink cyborgs.”
The analyst went on to connect Nikola Tesla’s quote that “man’s grasp exceeds his nerve” to Musk’s $1 trillion compensation package, China beating the US back to the moon, and the advent of “AI-enabled robots.”
It’s not the first time Jonas has shown his creative streak when analyzing Tesla’s prospects.
In a June note titled “Tesla Inc: American Autonomy,” the Morgan Stanley analyst examined the potential impact of AI robots on the US economy through the medium of poetry.
Jonas illustrated analysis on the effect of humanoid robots on the labor force and the importance of rare earth magnets with rhyming couplets like “hope you’ll not be too annoyed, with burgers flipped by humanoid,” and “resiliency is ours to gain, re-architect the supply chain.”
The note ultimately concluded that Tesla was the company best positioned to capitalize on the robotics boom, or as Jonas put it; “robots not a want but need, if not TSLA who will lead?”
It’s an unorthodox approach to analyst coverage, but Tesla is an unorthodox company, and Jonas is by no means the most colorful of Tesla’s Wall Street watchers.
That prize goes to Tesla bull Dan Ives, who launched a clothing line based on his eye-scorchingly bright outfits earlier this year.
The post A 20-year-old movie about warring magicians explains Elon Musk and the world of robots, a Morgan Stanley analyst says appeared first on Business Insider.
