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Comment by icapulet2 | Hacker News Reader

he's talking about profits, not revenue

He says:

>Here's the thing about @tesla It's not a car company. Tesla is a company that has to make cars in order to sell its real product: Emissions Credits.

So the so called real product makes 2.7% of the revenue, but actually selling the cars to customers makes them 97% of the revenue, but somehow it's not a car company but an emissions credits company? What?

If the credits disappeared tomorrow, only 10% of the profit would be lost. If it were an emissions credit company it'd take heavy losses and shutdown.

That's incoherent. Tesla made ~53.8 billion revenue in 2021, 1.8 billion of which was from regulatory credits. It doesn't make sense to say that a specific part of revenue is the "profit" part. Profit is the difference between what you make and what you spend.

Tesla had gross total profit of 13.6 billion dollars. Even if it weren't nonsense to say which parts of revenue are profit, it would still be completely wrong to say Tesla's business is selling cars.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000095017022...

Even then, it's around 10% of their Q3 profits ($300m of $3.3b) and dwindling

Exactly, the tweet is basically factually incorrect. It implies Tesla is mostly about the credits when in reality it's a nice cherry on a really big cake for them. And it's not like they are getting favorable treatment here (which is another thing implied by the tweet). A lot of those credits exist because companies like GM receive them too and the US government just decided to inject a lot of dollars in renewable infrastructure. Only fair that Tesla gets a chunk of that given that they do invest a lot in exactly that kind of thing.

Also, people keep talking about Tesla as if it is just a car company. They now have several booming businesses related to grid batteries, domestic batteries, solar panels, charging infrastructure, and a few other things. They are becoming a virtual power plant even. And they are about to become a major semi truck producer (planning to ramp up to 50K trucks per year over the next few years). The cars are still a huge chunk of their revenue and profit of course but they have healthy growth in their other businesses as well. I think grid batteries are about 1 billion $ revenue per quarter at this point for example.

and that's why it is a historical account

The linked tweet is:

>Thread time. Here's the thing about @tesla It's not a car company. Tesla is a company that has to make cars in order to sell its real product: Emissions Credits.

It uses 'is' not 'was', in three different places. In English that means they're claiming it's currently the case, not a historical account like you're mistakenly thinking.

What makes you think it's a historical account?

Because Tomlinson starts out by talking about 2012?? The company got to where they were on the basis of regulatory credit exchanges for the majority of its relatively long history. It is no longer some startup darling, mind you, it's got years on it comparatively: https://www.businessadministrationinformation.com/news/the-t... If another 10 years pass where credits do not significantly contribute to its profits, then we can make a case for a fundamental change.

Also, take a look at what happened in 2020: https://news.bloombergtax.com/financial-accounting/sec-pushe...

And their significance in 2021 as well: https://news.bloombergtax.com/financial-accounting/sec-pushe...

You are comparing the revenue from the credits to the profits (or that's what the Bloomberg links you are giving do). That's specious. The credits aren't given to Tesla for free, they earn them by building and selling the cars. The credits are now and have been a small part of revenue.

It's also wrong historically.

How do you untangle them? The credits won't exist without the cars. The credits are not an independent line of business/product.

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