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Comment by itsoktocry | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure any of those things you mention are "successful businesses". Interesting technologies, sure. But they have yet to prove they can make a dime off any of them. So far they are nothing but capital burning enterprises.

(No,Tesla is not profitable)

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Tesla has reported profit the last four quarters: https://fortune.com/2020/07/22/tesla-earnings-q2-2020-profit.... Are you saying their quarterly earnings reports are fraudulent?

I would say they could be fraudulent, certainly in the gray zone. Their profit in 1H 2020 was just $120M despite receiving $780M from regulatory credits, which is not sustainable and scalable. If governments stop giving Tesla money, they're deep in the red again.

The government gives Tesla money because Tesla is proven to actually pay that money back with interest.

They're not paying the money back with interest.

You're moving the goal posts. They're profitable, and the fact that a large part of their revenue is regulatory credits doesn't change that. There's a risk that they may not receive regulatory credits in the future, but we're not there yet.

If I moved the goal posts, what was their original position?

I didn't imply they were not profitable. You're not disputing anything I said.

Profitability aside, SpaceX has indeed produced reusable orbital rockets, and Tesla has indeed produced salable, useful electric passenger vehicles. My comment (and this thread) is about the feasibility of the core technology itself, which is in question.

The idea is that if all of the things you have tried have worked out and done what it says on the tin, perhaps you aren’t trying to do a sufficient quantity of impossible things. :)

There’s a difference between trying impossible things and pretending you’ve already solved them. Lying about your capabilities takes resources away from more honest entrepreneurs.

Elon's work with tesla + spacex has greater value than any other entrepreneur this decade. He is honest, just pushes timelines back

Not just decade, This century

How is Tesla not profitable?

Are you Tim Cook or something where anything under $10B is pretty much the same as 0?

Tesla showed that electric cars can work (even if sustainable energy generation is still a huge issue), despite the oil lobby trying to monopolize cars to use only petrol engines [1]

[1] https://archive.org/details/vimeo-210171457 / https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0489037/

More specifically they proved that electric cars can be "cool" and people would want to buy them regardless if they're electric. Before Tesla most electric cars were klunky, low performing, and generally meh.

You might be surprised to learn almost half of cars sold after the turn of the 20th century were electric. We knew electric cars could work for a long time.

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