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Comment by ninth_ant | Hacker News Reader

Musk used massive government subsidies to produce a small number of luxury electric cars for wealthy people, while massively enriching himself.

He openly manipulates markets without facing consequences, busts union activities, pushes to production over worker safety, uses extremely misleading marketing contrary to public safety, avoided paying taxes for years while becoming the worlds richest person... and you find it odd that the political left doesn't deify him to the same degree as the tech bros?

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> a small number of luxury electric cars

They have produced 2 million cars thus far. They're so demand slammed that orders are for 9 months out. They just finished building Giga Berlin and Giga Austin which is going to 2x their production to more than 1 million cars / year within a couple years. They already have plans for a $25k/yr car in a couple years. And every single car manufacturer considered EV's a no-go until Tesla started shipping Model S's en masse. There is no modern EV push, no "all cars sold must be EV by 2040" in many developed countries, without Tesla.

They are already at an annualised run rate of over 1.2M without giga Berlin and giga Texas. I agree with the rest of your comment.

Woops, you're right, I had old dated numbers and just winged it conservatively not wanting to overshoot.

The question isn't about why he's not deified by the left. It's why is he treated as a boogeyman, which granted, isn't surprising given his behavior. But I suppose there is a point as to why he's disliked more than Bezos, Zuckerberg, or the Waltons.

I don't think he's more disliked than Bezos, or Zuckerberg. Unlike with Bezos and Zuckerberg, Elon at least seems to have a personal mission beyond earning a lot of money, whether it is a lie or not. Out of curiosity, who are the Waltons? I couldn't figure it out even through search.

I think his legacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Walton

How can you still write nonsense like this: "Musk used massive government subsidies to produce a small number of luxury electric cars for wealthy people"?

> How can you still write nonsense like this: "Musk used massive government subsidies to produce a small number of luxury electric cars for wealthy people"?

Technically still correct even if the intent was to use the wider margins to enable growth. But more to the parent comment's point, Musk used tax credits intended to incentivize EV purchases by everyday users to inflate the prices for his cars in order to extract more value from buyers/governments.

Proven true by the fact that he had to cut pre-rebate prices after Tesla cleared the sales thresholds for the tax rebates.

Tesla sells 5% as many cars as Toyota (valued at $0.25B vs $1.25T). They would need to increase deliveries 50% year over year for the next 8 years just to match Toyota's deliveries this year. They make a small number of cars. The cars they make are luxury cars based on their selling price. Primarily wealthy people buy these cars.

Ergo, it is a factual statement to say that (1) Tesla sells a small number of (2) luxury electric cars to (3) wealthy people.

[edit] As for the government subsidies... [1]

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-su...

Stop lying please. Toyota delivered 2148k vehicles in Q1: https://global.toyota/pages/global_toyota/ir/financial-resul...

Tesla delivered 310k vehicles in Q1: https://tesla-cdn.thron.com/static/IOSHZZ_TSLA_Q1_2022_Updat...

310 is 14.4% of 2148, and it implies an annualised rate of 1240k per year. Tesla production and deliveries are growing exponentially, Toyota deliveries are shrinking. Last year in Q1 toyota delivered much less compared to 2020 and while this year it’s recovering it’s still delivering 170k less cars in Q1 2022 compared to Q1 2020. Tesla just opened two new factories and this can feasibly double its capacity by next year.

It's not lying, it's just based on the prior year's data. Allow me to update it for EOY2021.

In an average year, Toyota ships between 8 and 10 million cars, and has for a long time.

Tesla's year over year percentage increase in cars shipped has been trending down, of course, as they grow with the exception of last year.

However, last year, Tesla shipped 935K cars. Since it's just Q1 of 2022 I don't think it makes sense to make any extrapolations as to how many they will actually deliver this year, so let's use that number. I think that's generous given, you know, everything.

So, Tesla ships 9%-ish as many cars as Toyota.

To get from 900K to 10M per year, an 11X increase, would take:

- 27% year over year growth for 10 years.

- 30% year over year growth for 9 years.

- 35% year over year growth for 8 years.

- 40% year over year growth for 7 years.

- 50% year over year growth for 6 years.

As deliveries increase and the market is saturated growth rates will drop.

And that's to get to the same deliveries as just Toyota today (a company valued at 250B), when Tesla is valued at the sum total of the market cap of every other automaker on the planet, plus a utility company, plus the battery arm of Panasonic, plus a solar panel manufacturer.

The global auto market delivered 67M cars last year, of which Tesla accounted for 0.9M, or 1.3%. For comparison Porsche delivered 0.3M last year. Same ball park.

Even if Tesla doubled their deliveries this year and next year, they'd still sell a fairly small number of expensive electric cars to rich people. And that's a big if since right now is just about the single hottest auto market in history, and their deliveries remained flat quarter over quarter.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-v...

Why are you not shorting Tesla then if you are convinced of your ludicrous narrative?

It's surprising that you decided to nitpick on hyperbole than any of his other frankly valid claims.

A "small number of electric cars" isn't nonsense. Ford sold as many F-150s in 2021, than Tesla has sold in it's lifetime.

That's not quite true. From googling really quick, Ford sold 726k F-150s. In that same year, Tesla sold 936k cars. If you're comparing the number of cars Ford sold last year, you'd be closer but still incorrect by a few thousand cars. Ford sold about 1.91 million cars in 2019 while Tesla has sold 2.3 million cars by the end of 2021. I wouldn't consider 2 million cars a small number.

Absolutely false. Accordingly to this article Ford sold 663k F-150 in 2021: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/12/02/ford-pickup-remains-amer... Tesla is selling pretty much that amount of vehicles every two quarters.

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