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>They've _always_ fought against the odds and always looked like a bad bet if you only looked at numbers.

To quote Peter Thiel, "Never bet against Elon Musk."

I’d buy that index fund.

>"Never bet against Elon Musk."

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. - Abraham Lincoln

Elon musk is on phase 2...and it can go on for a while..it seems..

He's not particularly fooling anyone - he's achieving what he says he will, just a bit off schedule for the most part.

Schedule is a big part of what he's forced to talk about these days...

Smells like a cult. I would love Tesla to succeed, but schedule is everything. I can claim I will cure the cancer, but if the deliver is 2000 years later. It means nothing.

I think people are just ready for a company likes musk's. People want an strong enigmatic company thats focused on technologically improving things. And for whatever sliver of time we're living in the stars aligned and for once what the people want was made a lucrative thing. I hope things change in his favor.

Seriously. Their battery manufacturies are amazing.

Because it is Panasonic's manufacturing, probably?

Quite possibly.

Musk's companies are putting better rockets in space than NASA. Optimism does get a premium sometimes, because sometimes it actually pulls through. Frankly I'll root for them to succeed over a company based around showing me the last product I reviewed on amazon again. It shows we're capable of so much more.

SpaceX has to make a profit, NASA does not. How good your rockets are dosent matter if you are not profitable.

SpaceX appears to make a profit, other than losses caused by their 2 big failures.

I don't believe NASA actually builds rockets... It contracts them out to for example, United Space Alliance... And even SpaceX.

There's no need to compare Apple with Tesla. It's like comparing apples and monkeys. They're two completely different beasts.

Everyone knows building cars is a capital intensive business. You need to build expensive factories for every new line you want to roll out. It takes time. I think Elon has been whipping his employees a bit harder in the last few days - and I'm confident they'll be able to turn the situation around. All their jobs depend on it...

> I think Elon has been whipping his employees a bit harder in the last few days - and I'm confident they'll be able to turn the situation around. All their jobs depend on it...

Whipping your employees a bit harder is no cure for bad management decisions and promises. It also doesn't make problems simpler or quicker to solve.

Tesla is fundamentally trying to change a 100 year old industry and get cars off fossil fuels. If Apple never existed we'd have uglier mobile phones. If Tesla never existed the switch to electric cars might well be delayed by a decade.

Perhaps people forget the scale of the Gigafactory and how important batteries will be over the next 100 years.

Let's see when Apple starts giving all their patents away for free.

ehm, the real issue has been for the last three decades that electric cars rely on government incentive to be profitable and on top of that nobody knows really what to do with batteries if ev become _really_ widespread

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_Panda_(1980)#Panda_Elettr...

the only thing that's credit to Musk is to have made EV "premium" and "novelty" enough so that people will to pay a higher total cost of ownership to be part of the brand vision.

Until the recent declines they were already worth ~20% more than Ford or GM. The market cap had already baked in massive success, but the financing necessary to get them there was dependent on an every rising share value. A virtuous cycle until it becomes vicious.

There’s a floor for the stock value: the value of the mark to a Chinese upstart EV company (of which there are already a dozen producing a higher volume than Tesla).

There are in fact not a dozen Chinese companies producing strictly EV vehicles at a higher volume than Tesla.

Fortunately China is no longer allowed to purchase consequential US companies. If Tesla were ever sold, it would go to a US, European, Japanese, or South Korean company.

You reminded me ... christ, can you imagine what a disaster an Apple car would have been had they continued pursuing it? Two companies competing in the same already-challenging space....

Renault already has a compelling electric car. A happy owner of a Zoe. Absolutely no regrets with this car. Which I can have today.

The Nissan Leaf was compelling to me. Only like $10k after tax incentives, though I think that's no longer the case. If I didn't already have three cars I might have bought one as my DD.

> the so called production ramp up has been postponed for a year now

In what sense?

Elon originally said they were going to try to start production in July 2017. He also said they’d probably miss that date due to supply chain failures, but that he needed to set a date so suppliers could set plans.

To say they delayed the ramp by a year, that would mean they were delivering the first units in Summer 2018. They’re obviously ahead of that so it would seem to me the delay is much less than a year.

The problem is not delivering the first units, but ramping up production to what they need to sell half a million cars. Tesla built 2000-odd cars in Q4; for comparison, Toyota pumps out around 14,000 cars every day.

That 2,000 number isn't meaningful to where they're at now, which is closer to 1,000 per week, or 12,000 per quarter. That should continue to gradually climb as the year goes. 24,000 in the last quarter of the year would be a solid goal.

At 50,000 units in the first year, it would be one of the most successful first year model vehicles in recent automotive history. At 100,000 units the second year, it would be one of the most successful luxury sedans on the planet.

And at 7 billion Elon becomes the god king.

At 15 billion people are wondering where all the cars are coming from.

At 70 trillions it’s pretty much just cookie clicker.

But, in its first year it wasn't 50000, it was less than 3000. Even if you count full year since release, it looks like it's going to be closer to 20000 than 50000.

Tesla claimed they'd produce as many as 200000 Model 3s in 2017 and 400000 in 2018.

Restricting to "first year model vehicles" is silly and seemingly completely ignores how automobile companies work.