The pitch for “Elon Musk’s NEW AI Masterplan” from Brownstone Research’s Near Future Report opens with a big number: buy three “secret” stocks and “unleash enough wealth to make every household in America $2.38 million.” The three picks map to a three-step story, where Musk would “take control of the entire AI industry.” Step one is the chips, step two is the energy, and step three is the applications, the physical-AI layer. That third pick is onsemi (ON).

onsemi is not a secret by any ordinary measure. It is the second-largest power chipmaker in the world and one of the biggest suppliers of image sensors to the automotive market. It already supplies Tesla with sensor technology. What the pitch gets right is that the underlying mechanism is real. What it oversells is how quickly that mechanism turns into robot revenue.

What onsemi actually sells

Power semiconductors are the quiet workhorses of electronics. They switch current on and off very fast and very precisely, and they manage how much electricity flows through a system while wasting as little of it as heat as possible. Every electric-vehicle drivetrain, every industrial motor, and every robot joint depends on these chips. onsemi’s silicon goes into electric-vehicle powertrains, automotive safety systems, and industrial energy infrastructure.

The company’s other strength is sensing. onsemi is a leading supplier of image sensors to the automotive market, the chips that let cameras in cars and robots see what is around them. That combination, power plus sensing, is exactly what a humanoid robot would need in volume. It is also why the pitch calls onsemi the “backdoor” into the robotics wave.

The Tesla and Optimus angle

The ad’s specific claim is that onsemi is “already supplying Tesla with a key piece of sensor technology.” That relationship is real, not invented. Tesla buys onsemi’s image-sensor technology for its cars, and the argument that the relationship could extend to the Optimus humanoid robot is plausible. Morgan Stanley has flagged onsemi as a way to play the robotics trend.

The pitch frames onsemi’s power-management chips as the thing that will let Optimus “move efficiently, stay cool, and run longer without needing to stop and recharge as often.” That is an accurate description of what power semiconductors do. A humanoid robot with dozens of joints and motors needs a lot of precisely controlled power, plus the sensing to know where its body is and what is in front of it.

What the pitch glosses over

The gap is timing and scale. Today onsemi’s revenue is overwhelmingly automotive and industrial, not robots. The Optimus program is years away from shipping in volume. Our teardown notes that the “manifested AI” story has been the presenter’s pitch for more than a year, and onsemi’s own numbers have not yet shown a robot-driven inflection.

There is also a marquee number that belongs to a different pick. The ad says the chip-equipment supplier could be “on the receiving end of up to $500 billion in 2027 alone.” That figure is aimed at ASML, a company whose annual revenue is around $30 billion. It reads as a rhetorical flourish, the kind that should make a reader slow down and check the rest of the claims.

The valuation question

onsemi trades at about 18 times forward earnings with a roughly $28 billion market cap. The tease price in the ad equals the current close of $71.67, which tells you this is a re-pitch at the current price, not a name that has already run away.

That multiple is defensible if growth lands, but it is not obviously cheap. onsemi has been here before. In 2021 and 2022 it was the hot electric-vehicle story, the stock ran ahead of itself, and then gave most of it back. Semiconductor demand is cyclical, and this exact stock has been burned by a “next big thing” narrative before.

The honest read

onsemi is a quality franchise. If you want exposure to the long-run electrification and robotics theme, it is a legitimate way to get it, bought at a fair price on its own merits. Just do not buy it because of a “$2.38 million per household” headline. The robotics catalyst is real but distant, and the stock’s history is a useful reminder that hype runs ahead of fundamentals and eventually corrects.

For the wider three-step pitch, see our explainer on the “manifested AGI” phrase and our physical AI explainer. If you want to understand the newsletter behind it, our review of the Near Future Report subscription walks through what you actually get.

The offer is worth stating plainly. The Near Future Report costs $179 for the first year and renews at $199, with a 30-day refund window, so you can read the full reports and ask for your money back if they do not hold up. Subscribing unlocks the special report the pitch is built around, the “Manifested AGI Revolution,” which names the stocks the ad teases. The fine print worth remembering is that these are large, well-covered companies trading near their current prices, not the “secret” the headline suggests.

Ready to see the research? Click here to view the Elon Musk’s AI Masterplan presentation.

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