Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

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It’s fundamentally just a car company and was wildly overvalued as a car company in large part due to the Musk cult of personality. He popped his own bubble by making everyone hate him with the twitter acquisition. Now Tesla is being revalued as a car company.

I mentioned a few times at peak it was valued as much as the entire auto industry combined plus a utility company plus a battery company plus a software company or two plus a solar company - and then some - all while manufacturing about 10% as many cars as Toyota and showing no success in anything other than cars.

It was always a question of when, and he forgot that JPow giveth and JPow taketh away.

Like Trump he could have just sailed off into the distance a rich and largely beloved man but he flew just a little too close to the sun.

I’ve joked before that Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person (“I bet rich people have solid gold toilets”) in the same way Elon is a 'left-curve' idea of a genius (“I bet geniuses just spend all day inventing crazy ideas and going to Mars and digging holes and stuff”). They’re both, in real life, caricatures of what they’re projecting to be. More showmen than anything. That’s not a criticism; they’re both excellent showmen. More Barnum than Rockefeller or Nikola.

I think a large part of the valuation was also the promise of full self driving. Musk repeatedly stated that it would coming "very soon" and Tesla would have been the first worldwide with that.

Now we know that Tesla will probably not be the first with level 5 autonomy and that their no-lidar approach may not even be sufficient at all.

But the belief in their FSD was priced into Tesla's valuation as well and by now it's clear that this part was overvalued.

The man did promise FSD was one year away for each of the last 9 years. At some point it becomes a 'fool me 9 times shame on... fool me can't get fooled again' kinda deal. [1] It's just too bad the video montage got struck down. It takes a genuine showman to string people along for an entire decade.

[edit1] All while getting them to pay up to $12,000 for software that didn't exist and had no path to existing within the promised timeframe.

Textbooks will be written about this bezzle.

[edit2] > Bezzle: Alone among the various forms of larceny [embezzlement] has a time parameter. Weeks, months or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in—or more precisely not in—the country’s business and banks. [2]

Not suggesting a crime occurred here, to be clear - just the broad shape of what transpired re: FSD rhymes real good.

[1] https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-promises-full-self-driving-ne...

[2] https://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/85179

In a lot of ways it feels like this finale was already written.

This bubble birthed and featured Cathie and Saylor (again) to a large degree, but the real star was Elon.

There's always too much poetry in these cycles for him not to fall apart on the way back down.

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