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Comment by bksenior | Hacker News Reader

You think thats bad. Tesla is about to have to head to head with all the majors who are now starting to finally harvest about a decade of their own research in the space (prompted by Teslas early success).

Musks ambitions and outbursts strike me as a man who suffers from the top killer of successful entrepreneurs, The skill/talent portability fallacy. It's this idea because you did something similar well, that your ability should port to "things like it." Seems like Tesla is going to extend itself to death.

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>It's this idea because you did something similar well, that your ability should port to "things like it."

Except that Elon Musk has:

Completely disrupted online payments

Completely disrupted space travel

Completely disrupted automobiles.

It wouldn't matter if SpaceX and Tesla disappeared at this moment. The history books would still be written about how Tesla and SpaceX were the things that instigated the change.

Musk was one of many founders of PayPal. SpaceX is actually run by Gwynne Shotwell.

I’m pretty sure that Tesla investors with lots of money on the line invested in a car company, not Elon Musk’s hagiography.

He also did zip2 (to fund x.com which he sold and became paypal), which was essentially one of the first online phone books / business directories.

He is good.

I agree that zip2 was not a great accomplishment aside from making money, but it certainly wasn’t copyright infringement.

I don't disagree, but this reminds me SO much of when I bought my first Mac in 2002 (mind you, I was switching from Linux, not from Windows) and all the nay-sayers were claiming stupid stuff like "MAC doesn't have virus problems because who writes viruses for 2% of the market?" My basic attitude was "I'll enjoy what I've got while I have it."

I've only OWNED a Tesla for 6 months, but man it feels like the other manufacturers have been about to release a Tesla killer Real Soon Like Now for a whooole lot of years. I certainly don't think Tesla's lead is insurmountable, but it sure seems like the competition is doing its best to drop the ball.

> but man it feels like the other manufacturers have been about to release a Tesla killer Real Soon Like Now for a whooole lot of years.

Yes, decades and counting of nothing but vaporware and concept cars. Like this article from 2009:

https://www.wired.com/2009/12/audis-electric-e-tron-is-real-...

I don’t know if anyone could release a real “Tesla killer” except for Porsche. It has to be sexy after all.

droooool

It's probably going to turn out that the guys who've been building cars for a century can figure out battery technology faster than the battery guys figuring out how to scale auto manufacturing

I'd be skeptical about this. The extreme/rare event is Tesla got hundreds of thousands of people to put a down payment on a car with zero marketing costs. Unfortunately, Solar-city and taking on convertible debt vs. equity have shrunk down their runway. Had they not done the related party transaction and issued equity, I think they could ramp production at a slower rate without the quality issues you hear about. I don't think Elon's episodes have helped his case either the last year. An interesting question though is whether there was anyone else in the world who could have created a car company in the 21st century, and gotten it to as far as he has?

> The extreme/rare event is Tesla got hundreds of thousands of people to put a down payment on a car with zero marketing costs.

According to their SEC filings Tesla spends tens of millions of dollars per quarter on marketing costs. Where does the idea that they spend zero on advertising come from?

Marketing != Advertising. You might want to look up the definitions.

Zero is an under statement, but relative to the $4B Ford spends for example, Tesla's $70M advertising costs are tiny. You could also say that about the number of cars Tesla has sold too, but auto companies typically have an incredibly large ad spend.

> Zero is an under statement, but relative to the $4B Ford spends for example, Tesla's $70M advertising costs are tiny. You could also say that about the number of cars Tesla has sold too.

Yeah, from the numbers I can find, Tesla sold around 255,000 cars in 2018, Ford sold around 6 million. While I'm not sure what time period those advertising figures are, per car sold in 2018 they aren't wildly in different leagues; Tesla's are lower, but presumably marketing has diminishing marginal returns.

Isn’t that sorta like what Steve Ballmer said about the iPhone, and then laughed?

Cars don't have network effects like smartphones do

People talk to each other about their cars and whether they like them. That's a network effect.

All the German car manufacturers have in terms of engineerig talent and cultural is mostly mechanical, and brilliantly so.

But, the electronics suck.

Some of the most talented chemical, physical materials and electrical engineers work for Musk’s companies.

You can just tell that Tesla’s were not designed with teams in silos. I don’t think car makers are currently capable of that.

Germany has a lot of electric and chemical engineering talent - you might have heard of Bosch and BASF. These companies are already involved in the car manufacturing supply chain. "Working in silos" allows engineers to specialize and get in-depth knowledge.

> You can just tell that Tesla’s were not designed with teams in silos. I don’t think car makers are currently capable of that.

Toyota was, at one point. I don't know if they are anymore.

uhh, Germany has been the center of the chemicals industry since the late 19th century

You mean like GM and Bolt ?

One word... patents

TSLA has a market cap of something like $40B. Seems like the window closed on a determination of "successful" a few years back. Your argument seems to be that it's going to have to compete once the market matures and won't take over the entire industry. And that's... a flaw?

What has Elon done or think he has done that is similar?

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