Notable laughs:
* Nikola rolled their semi truck down a hill to show that it worked
* Trevor appointed his brother Travis "Director of Hydrogen Production/Infrastructure" when his only experience was pouring concrete driveways
* The infamous "HTML5 supercomputer" comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPL-PbDUKrM
> "The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer," Milton said. "That's the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it let's us build our own chips. And HTML 5 is very secure. Every component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same language. It's not a bunch of separate systems that somehow still manage to communicate."
The founder of an apparently very technically challenging company speaking like that should have been an instant red flag, that’s absolute nonsense.
What speaks volumes is that he clearly has no idea what he’s talking about but speaks as if he’s a domain authority. Of course, this is a classic trait of a megalomaniac fraudster.
Its like when you choose Intelligence 0 in Fallout, everyone that is smart sounds dumb and everyone dumb sounds normal
Predicting how to relate to people to make an investment is something some of these sales guys get that I don’t
I can persuade people to do a lot of things, but selling equity to a bunch of technophobic old money and English as a Second Language people? Learning
In NL we call this 'has affinity with the core business'.
I think paved ways is canonical ( not a native speaker though ).
The investment world is drowning in deliberate misinformation. There's no path for reasoned criticism to break through. Pick any stock and there's someone willing to tell you it's a scam. Or a gem.
Edit: and this subthread is a perfect, shining example. Just look at all the people jumping in to perpetuate and argument that somehow Tesla is, I guess, comparably fraudulent to Nikola, a company that got caught faking a vehicle that didn't exist. No one trusts you people, because you sound the same for everything.
Who cares about unit margin or operational margin, as long as you can pick a bunch of revenue items and by removing them they didn't make any profit.
And even if your argument was true and they didn't make #realprofit, who would even care as long as they keep having their current growth trend at the unit margin they have.
And the regulatory credit thing is so fucking played out that people who still bring it up can only be described as haters.
Are you seriously unable to look at a long term trend? Can you seriously not see how Bitcoin is totally irrelevant in their long term story?
Many TSLAQ people were far more extreme then saying 'they could go bankrupt, car industry is risky.
> Not that I think Tesla is particularly well run so, but Elon's ability to entertain the market and keep money flowing is impressive.
The haven't really need to raise that much money in a long time. They did some raises in the last couple years but that money is mostly in the cash balance now.
Its not like they are just raising more cash all the time.
It’s still wildly overvalued, people don’t talk about it as much though since the price is flat, not up. Be careful of confirmation bias.
My point is that the fact a company is producing a product does not necessarily disqualify them from being a 'scam'.
Somehow people always forget that.
The valuation is still steep by earnings and compared to likely competitors, but it's not based on speculation devoid of observations.
Now, sure, "overvalued" is a very reasonable argument. I'd even agree.
That's not the kind of rhetoric that was deployed against the company and you know it. Which is why people didn't believe folks screaming that Nikola was a scam.
Look, nitpick about FSD if you like (I bought it, FWIW -- 100% happy customer). But don't claim it's the same as faking a motor in a truck that didn't have one.
So yes there is a difference in scale, but not in principle I would say. Musk is also lying (I don't believe that by now he still believes we will have unassisted autopilot next year) to keep the stock price high.
Staying on the road, obeying traffic laws, not hitting other cars, this is just the beginning. There are so many oddball situations you see when driving that an autonomous system also has to handle.
One of the big ones is construction, and that alone brings a whole host of issues including wacky lane changes, following the direction of human workers, missing or misleading lane markings, debris, and more.
Telsa has always separated AutoPilot and Full Self Driving as separate features. "But people confuse AutoPilot and think is does everything and is a virtual chauffeur", Well those people are stupid, stupid like the people who try to trick the car into driving and fake out the driver attention safety features.
Tesla almost went bankrupt. They started shutting stores that were tied into commercial leases that hadn't expired and all kinds of stuff. At one point they said they would never need to capital raise again and then did one 3 days later or something. They made wild statements of autonomous taxis by the end of 2020 in a desperate bid to build hype before the capital raise.
They survived and raised a lot of capital from shareholders and now seem in no danger of bankruptcy, but it was either a real threat or the CEO is lying about it to be theatrical.
>And it was all wrong, much of it deliberately so.
then act like people calling you out for that are calling Tesla a scam. It's a real company, they make cars, but the short sellers weren't and aren't crackpots from a 'Tesla is overvalued' perspective.
Now the next great scam we all want answers for and we need to talk about is that misleading contraption called FSD.