What is your solution? Should we just keep doing nothing?
Amazon is (and even in the past, was basically at a rounding error to zero on margin, since they were plowing so much money into R&D), and Tesla has had the past couple quarters be profitable (though amusingly more on bets on Bitcoin than actual car sales), both essentially creating a new market, and while not actually undercutting the competition. But I thought Uber was 'expecting' to be profitable by the end of the year? While basically making it so cab companies have a hard time competing, since they, you know, obey the rules (albeit ones they created to, themselves, maintain a monopoly), and have to turn a profit.
They have been profitable for almost 1.5 years.
> (though amusingly more on bets on Bitcoin than actual car sales)
That is simply false.
https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a36266393/tesla-mad...
https://www.motorbiscuit.com/tesla-loses-money-on-every-sing...
Bitcoin was relevant for 1 Quarter. And trading in fuel credits has been a thing in the automotive industry for decades and are simply a normal part of the business.
You might as well point to specific spending and say 'they are only not more profitable because of XY'.
They have a ~20% unit margin excluding credits so clearly they are making a massive amount of money selling cars. If they weren't selling credits they would likely spend differently and still show moderate profitability. Their goal is not maximum profitability but maximum growth while showing consistent profitability.
Because people (for the most part) aren't fools, especially on here.
People see a 600B dollar company and expect it to feel its presence in their lives each and every day.
They expect to use the thing, or their employer to use the thing or their supplier to use the thing on a daily basis like it happens with Exxon, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Salesforce, Oracle, IBM...
They all earned their significance by touching so many lives and making people lives a tad better and less complicated for their users, and the rise to riches of their founders has happened in lockstep or almost lockstep with the changes and the improvement they were making in people's lives.
With Tesla you have a 600B company and Porsches (which are a rarity on their own) are still more common then them on our roads.
People are suspicious about unjustifed enrichment, always been, always will be.
"What have you done for me to deserve that amount of money? What have you done for society to deserve that amount of money?"
Such question will always come up. Musk has been able to answer to such question up to now with:
1) "Give me time!" and
2) "Wait, neat things are a-comin" as well as
3) "Population wide morale boost given by the prospect of amazing future is the real product"
People are more and more asking questions though, and he keeps answering with postponements and future deadlines, while Teslas are still less common than Porsches
https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-q4-2020-vehicle-pro...
https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/company/annual-sustainabilit...
And Porsche is stagnant compared to Tesla:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-v...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/263854/sales-development...
>With Tesla you have a 600B company and Porsches (which are a rarity on their own) are still more common then them on our roads.
I have seen far more Teslas than Porsches up and down the west coast.
They are private but the approximation can be extracted from Ferrari: 45.5B
Now, where does the remaining 555B come from?
I do not know what Ferrari has to do with Porsche.
If your question is why is the outstanding number of shares of Tesla multiplied by the most recent share price of Tesla equal to $x, then there are multiple answers.
The simplest is because someone decided they wanted to buy the most recent share of Tesla at $y. The slightly more complicated one is that that person decided that buying that share was a better use of their money than whatever other alternative they had. The most complicated answer is going to be that many actors in the market are betting Tesla is going to “grow” by market share or new technologies over some nebulous amount of time, and that given all the investment options, people are allocating that amount to Tesla compared to others.
"Hey chap, what are you doing for the consumer? Meaning those who buy products, not those who buy stocks. What's the concrete quality of life value your company is producing in exchange for all that wealth? How does it compare against Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Daimler, Ford, Porsche?"
And if enough people ask the question and the response is unsatisfactory and there are not enough people to defend him , then he'd be expropriated. You can see pockets of the population which are more and more asking the question. Especially here on HN, one of them was the one which started the discussion. Game recognizes game after all.
And again, just like Tesla market cap is fair game, and Musk wealth is fair game... so is people asking questions and the expropriation if the answer is unsatisfactory.
The only rule to the game is that there are no rules and that everything is fair game... never explain, never complain, for this sort of things have always happened and it goes with the territory really. It already happened with J.D Rockefeller, and nearly happened again with William Henry Gates III.
At least those chaps produced lots quality of life, people went after them due to the hedonistic treadmill effect and the inability of Standard Oil and Microsoft to keep the pace of quality of life improvement after the initial burst which happens when a new tech such as Petroleum oil or the Chip emerges for the first time.
Musk Reeve Lyndon Elon has yet to produce some tangible quality of life which is not to the benefit of Musk Reeve Lyndon Elon, or one of his cousins.
Tesla most successful product is the common stock of the company, it's also the most pitched and promoted by the CEO. Not even close.
But even if it were true and those revenues wouldn't exists and Tesla would have 0 profit, it wouldn't actually change that much about the overall position.
If you want to make the argument that Tesla is not worth 600B then just make that argument. Rather then endlessly trying to make an incredibly marginal argument about Quarter to Quarter possibility.
Literally nobody that owns Tesla stock believes this Quarter profits are what gives the shares the value.
> They all earned their significance by touching so many lives
No they don't. In fact most people don't have a clue about what Salesforce is or how IBM touches their lives.
They are valued because of their financial data, predictions about and predictions about future potential data.
> Musk has been able to answer to such question up to now with:
At this point you are just making things up. Musk has not said any of these things and seemingly isn't very interested in answer that question.
> People are more and more asking questions though, and he keeps answering with postponements and future deadlines, while Teslas are still less common than Porsches
No in fact people are asking less and less questions. The FUD about Tesla was 100x larger a few years ago.
Also, even a 14 old should figure out that a product that has 20-30 year utility will be more common then a competitors product of a company that started less then 20 years ago and didn't even growth to any relevant size until less then 5 years ago.
False, regular people were so confident in IBM that it became a catchphrase in IT departments around the world:
"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM!"
Meaning the products not the stock.
A scenario where you make 150B based on future hypothetical execution which you can always postpone because your cult followers will always give you more time....that is bound to cause an opposite reaction of equal strenght among those who are not part of the cult and see this very suspicious allocation of wealth playing out.
It's just what it is, people are suspicious about unjustified enrichment, always have and always will be. The owners and founders of the other companies that I mentioned saw their fortune rise in lockstep with the real life relevance of their company. I mean concrete and tangible relevance, quality of life being produced in a way which is proportional to the rise in wealth, not future projections of infinite growth based on up & to the right charts.
Gates first made Windows 3.1 and then became a billionaire, he then made Windows 95 and then became a multibillionaire.
Same goes for Rockefeller, Ellison , Buffett and so forth
> No in fact people are asking less and less questions. The FUD about Tesla was 100x larger a few years ago.
It's not FUD, it's FACTS. As of today Tesla doesn't produce any tangible quality of life, whereas the guy who sued for the title of owner of the company is pocketing quality of life with a shovel, matter of fact he needs thousands of bulldozers to pick up all that quality of life.
People look around, see suspicious stuff and sound the alarm, it's just what people do. That's the reason why people report suspicious activity and denounce cults such as Scientology, NXVIM etc and I am sorry but this is one of those cases. You should not be upset about it, you should ask yourself why so many people are sounding the alarm.
And, as you mention, emission credits are something all competitors can take advantage of. Bitcoin kind of is too, though speculative investments outside of the business the company is in strikes me as just as problematic as debt/equity funding an unprofitable company. But not the point I was trying to make. I actually was putting them in the "reliable profit" category, unlike Uber. Though if being profitable requires governmental incentives and speculation on crypto, maybe not so much.
Uber is maybe the canonical example of what's being discussed.
Their free cash flow didn't really take off until AWS came along. A couple billion a year vs 100 billion in profit for Walmart. They were definitely trading cash for market share. The only reason to do that is if they can later use that market share to make even more cash.
investors will get burned and be more hesitant to pour more gasoline on the fire
What company has had long term success with this model
The problem with anti-competitive practices is that they're immune to market forces.
No, they aren't, in general.
They are self-limiting, though, where the actor isn't insulated from idealized market forces by market position. In that case, they are incentivized by the same real market forces which protect them.