One Wall Street investor I spoke with was flabbergasted at the number of short positions on Tesla, which now total around $11 billion. While people have been shorting Tesla since the company went public years ago, the current abundance of shorts is staggering, even by fickle Wall Street naysayer standards. “This is the largest short bet ever made,” this investor said. Another Tesla investor I spoke with went on a long rant about Musk’s behavior. “I’ve never seen a share price more tethered to a C.E.O., and I’ve never seen a C.E.O. who is more untethered from reality,” this Tesla investor said. “Elon Musk is clearly more of a genius than Steve Jobs ever was, but Steve was more of a pro than Elon Musk has ever been.”

Should he continue to behave erratically, some are wondering if Musk risks being pushed out of Tesla, as Jobs was from Apple, in 1985, when the board fired him. During the first quarter of this year, Tesla lost nearly $710 million, burning $745 million in cash, and free cash flow was at negative $1 billion. (Before hanging up, Musk said on his earnings call that he expects a net profit by the third quarter of this year, and he’s aptly pointed out that there are enough Model 3 pre-orders to keep Tesla busy for the next two years.) But as the investor who compared Musk to Jobs said: “If Tesla were the greatest car company in the history of the world and valued at such, its stock would be around $70 a share. But it’s not valued as a car company; it’s valued as a tech company. So if you take Musk out of the equation, that means you’re taking about $230 of the share price out, too.”

For most investors, this is obviously terrifying. And it may explain why, over the past year, the confidence, or confusion, in Tesla has been echoed by its stock price, which has taken investors on a roller-coaster ride to rival any company in its class, either tech, or automotive. While automakers like Fiat are up over 103 percent from this time last year, Tesla is down over 6 percent. This, in itself, is not what you’d imagine from a 15-year-old company that has promised to disrupt the auto industry.

Part of the problem with Musk is not really Musk’s fault. It’s the failing of the media, and social media, too. The comparisons to Iron Man are hyperbolic and unsophisticated. Musk is often talked about in Dionysian ways. And people take everything he says he’s going to do at face value, because Musk has done a lot of it before. When Musk tweeted that “The Boring Company will be using dirt from tunnel digging to create bricks for low-cost housing,” it was as if he had just, in that one tweet, discovered the solution to housing the over half-a-million men, women, and children in America who sleep on the street every night. Yet the reality is, bricks are not what make construction expensive; it’s labor costs. The same thing happened when Musk unveiled plans for the Hyperloop in 2013. Musk said the price tag of the 800-miles-per-hour train that can get you from Los Angeles to San Francisco in under 30 minutes would cost $6 billion in its entirety. But let’s be realistic: it cost around $6.3 billion to build a replacement of the Eastern span of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, and that was only 10,176 feet long. A 380-mile tube that spans aqueducts, hills, farms, towns, motorways, coastline and two massive inner cities, is not going to be built for $300,000,000 less.

The more fitting comparison between Jobs and Musk really comes down to their singular identifications with the companies that they created. Of all the people I’ve spoken to about Musk, no one questions his generational brilliance, and his ability to do the things he says he’s going to do. But you have to wonder if maybe it’s time for Musk to place all the amazing ideas for candy companies and flamethrowers in his Twitter drafts folder, and fix what is arguably the most important automotive company to emerge in decades. Experts are worrying that Tesla, for all its innovation, is repeating mistakes by its Detroit forebears—like General Motors, which was almost flattened by its quest for automation—and that it’s going to take some real ingenuity to fix the company’s problems as quickly as they need to be fixed. Musk, as ever, is the man for this moment, too. Everyone I’ve talked to conceded the same point: the only person they think can get Tesla through these issues is Musk. Let’s just hope he realizes that, too.

This article has been updated to reflect Tesla’s current stock price.