Tesla has also delivered the Roadster,Model S, and Model X already. Worst case they will probably be scooped up by a competitor, though based on Musk's record that likely won't happen.
From the armchair.
From the armchair.
What record is that? Musk has shown he's willing to sell his companies in the past. Between starting PayPal and selling to Ebay was only 3 years.
He owns less than 30% of tesla. So if another company wants to take it over, he may not have a choice.
I could see Ford merging with Tesla in a few years after Elon isn't running the day to day and is just on the board of Tesla (and running space x) vs ceo of both
In terms of Elon's long term goals, I think a merger and revitalization of Ford would win him huge political points which he can then use for cutting through red tape for SpaceX.
You must be thinking that Ford would help with "scaling expertise" and whatnot, but Tesla doesn't need to be acquired to do that. It just needs to hire a few good people to set that up. Also, I think Elon Musk even said in a recent interview that Tesla's cars use like 5% of the components of other cars. Musk prefers to "rethink" everything from scratch, and he has done the same with SpaceX.
In that context, Ford would be more of a hindrance, and not in any way helpful. What Tesla needs most is resources, so it can build its new models faster, hire workers faster, pay them more, install 10x more superchargers, start building 2 more gigafactories (which it will probably need by the time they are finished) and so on. It can't do all of that right now because it requires tens of billions of dollars, which it doesn't have.
I'd much rather see Apple acquire Tesla in 10 years. Then Tesla would have all the resources it needs to accelerate the growth of its car sales, infrastructure, and the Tesla Energy business.
If Elon stays as CEO of Apple after Tim Cook, even better, because he'd probably actually use Apple's cash reserves instead of keeping them in the bank.