From an outside perspective, it feels wrong that the goal isn't higher earnings but a higher stock price. They don't care about actually creating value, just keep inflating the bubble and you're golden.

If a trillion dollars is on the line, could the stock be manipulated to be higher than that for less than a trillion?

Other private Musk companies (SpaceX and xAI) just bought fleets of Cybertrucks. One may wonder what exactly they would do with so many vehicles other than boost Tesla's share price.

They need them for the Mars colony, duh. You can't drive a gas car on the moon.

Musk's companies buying hundreds or thousands of Cybertrucks is of course good for Tesla, but the impact on finances (and the stock price) should be minimal. Tesla has the capacity to make ~30k Cybertrucks/quarter, and it seems they sold only ~5k of them in Q3. So unless these companies would buy thousands of them per month, it's nothing.

Could TSLA be manipulated? With a priced earnings ratio of 300, the question is: how much more manipulated? How about all of the other fashy tech bros with ridiculous valuations in public and private companies?

There are multiple milestones. Earnings is one of them. So it's actually even harder than just an earnings target.

Welcome to the West? It's been like this for a while now here.

8.5 trillion in 10 years, is 20% growth per year. For comparison S&P 500 grew 25% last year.

I don't believe we will have such growth at all in the next 10 years unless we get hyperinflation

growing 25% when a company is say 50-100b is a lot different than going towards 10 trillion

and valuations are already so stretched across the board

I don't think so either because if we did, Elon Musk could just shut down Tesla, invest all the money in S&P 500 and collect is $1 Trillion at the end of 10 years!