I'm probably the only idiot still mowing his lawn with a corded electric lawnmower. It's a pain to swing the extension cord over the thing every pass but it was < $100 floor model at Sears and it still works.

EVs are really cool. I’ve never had a problem with EVs. It’s always been Elon Musk I’ve had the problem with. The guy was pushed out of PayPal as CEO because he was unstable. Then he carpetbags all over Martin Eberhart and pushes him out of Tesla. Then he bails out his cousins at solar city with Tesla money. He’s a loose cannon, and just because he’s rich doesn’t mean he’s some sort of genius.

This popped up on twitter today; great thread, I guess a software engineer whose NDA has expired is sounding alarms about the car's firmware
https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376

Yes, I understand what he’s saying, I’m a software engineer. That sounds like tech debt city and like many things I’ve seen my own companies from inside. I’ve yet to see anyone die from a bad ad placement or busted satellite internet access terminal though.

The things they talk about re: culture, and a giant fizz buzz test, do not strike me as the kind of thing that will cause a massive money losing company like Tesla to suddenly turn the corner to profitability. Not if the assembly line can be held up for firmware imaging processing.

Ugh who cares about all your ad-hominem beef, both @brijam and @o-din

Plenty of people love their teslas and thats fine. What's not fine IMHO is the state of the business. I believe Tesla has too much debt coming due, and a lot of it is convertible bonds that require cash if Telsa stock isn't above a certain number. That's why Elon is so worried about shorts, that's why a lot of the top executive team has left.

I think the failure of the business, after forensics is done (and yes, I believe the business will have to be restructured and investors will lose a lot of money), will be Musk's fault. A lot of the debt was taken on to build a fully automated manufacturing facility, which was supposed to reduce labor costs. Now they've backtracked a ton on automation, which means not only is the money they used for their fancy conveyor belt system written off, but also the cost per unit for assembly is just gonna be a lot higher since they still need all those people at the factory. That's why Tesla is still burning a lot of cash, and needs more. For all the 'disrupting' Tesla was/is supposed to be doing, there's no way to shortcut physical manufacturing knowledge and performance. The fact that Elon's running manufacturing despite not having ever been a factory foreman or run a manufacturing operation even close to this scale, is very troubling. IMHO Elon has a typical software engineer's mindset (as a software engineer I can say this) that they think they can solve every problem by iterating quickly on it, not accounting for how much it costs to make mistakes in the physical world.

Teslas are probably cheaper to operate than gas cars. They're probably more fun to drive, too. Having said all this, even if I were in the market for a $50K car, I wouldn't buy a Tesla because I believe they have a very high likelihood of going out of business.

I don’t see how that works; if they are losing money at 5K cars a week, how will 6K cars a week help them? Their revenue and losses have increased together which says to me they lose money on every car they make.

No, I do not short stocks or invest in single stocks. I just ran the math.

The amazon comparison is not apt. Amazon lost very little money relative to revenue. They broke even which is VERY different than going billions of dollars into debt.

https://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes.com/files/styles/embed/public/2013/12/18/amzn-chart_0.jpg

They spent most of their money on R&D. Also Amazon eventually undercut price wise their competitors so they had a value proposition that allowed them to attain near monopoly status in e-commerce.

Finally, amazon diversified. They invented cloud computing, they built a delivery network, etc. Tesla isn’t losing money to corner markets, they are losing money at their core competency against well established competitors who are way better at manufacturing than they are.

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They already did via tax breaks and ev tax credits right? If you can’t make your business work with massive tax subsidies in Nevada on top of $7500 EV tax credit, well, then it ain’t worth bailing out because it’s never gonna make money.

Really? A company that has raised billions in the capital market, produces 10% of the volume of car makers like Chevy but is valued way more in market cap, oh and has made what two quarters of tiny profit over 10+ years of business? Financial markets have been outrageously kind to Tesla.

Tesla stock is still trading above $300 a share despite outrageous CEO behavior; despite highly questionable financial moves (solarcity was a terrible terrible decision); despite lots of key personnel leaving (3 years they’ve had two CFOs leave, on top of HR/legal/engineering/manufacturing people leave). That Tesla still has access to money and is trading so high is contrary to financial markets not liking Tesla.

Please don’t equate a stock price with an actual company’s success. Demand for the Y is not great. The solar roofs are barely being installed and are overpriced compared to conventional solar. If you check earnings, the paper profits for Tesla are mostly down to pollution tax credits other auto companies have to buy from Tesla.

Congrats on being Tesla rich. But if you haven’t noticed, lots of stocks are on a tear. The fed is pumping billions in liquidity so assets are being bid up. Also Tesla’s short interest is high, and there’s lots of squeezing going on (on top Musks blatant fraud where he straight up lies about going private etc)

But I’m sure the neuro company and boring company and all these other straight up frauds are “the future” and you were just so smart to see it.

Whether the stock is in the S&P 500 doesn’t matter. Enron was in the S&P 500 right up until it wasn’t.