Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by bigbillheck | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

bigbillheck

> Tesla is a given.

It most certainly is not.

View on HN

They are shipping millions of cars, cheaper than the competition and at a profit?

And they have some outstanding liabilities...

Compared to GM and the like they have a very low level and very little debt.

Debt to equity ratios for OEMs according to Ycharts:

Tesla: 0.11

Toyota: 1.06

GM: 1.65

Ford: 3.3

VW: 1.05

Seems fine to me...

Nitpick: Tesla’s equity is more volatile than the others’. Linking debt to operating cash flow makes more sense.

..Confident and wrong, I love it

Where do you source your crystal balls? Mine never seem to work quite right. Maybe I'm holding it wrong?

Crystal balls? What is the most profitable american car company? You let me know.

The comment states Tesla performing well in the future is a given, a guarantee it'll exist in the future. We don't know what will happen in the future, I wouldn't say "x company existing in the future is a given".

It'll probably keep doing very well. It may have some sudden event happen that makes it stumble. I wouldn't even state that the future of transportation in 20-30 years is a given.

I wouldn't bet against Tesla in the next decade or so, but I wouldn't state its future performance is a given. You know, that whole "past performance does not guarantee future results" thing your broker keeps chanting. Unless you happen to have a crystal ball or some kind of time machine, in which case I'd like in on that.

I'm so tired of the "I was actually making a semantic argument" thing people do to cover their ass. It's so lame.

Well, the answer to your "What is the most profitable american car company?", the American car company with the highest gross profit in 2022 was Ford.

Maybe you need to polish that crystal ball a little bit more.

Tesla annual net income for 2022 was $12.58B, a 127.79% increase from 2021. By comparison, Ford Motor annual net income for 2022 was 1.98B, a 111.04% decline from 2021. Please just stop dude.

Weird, I was using this site to compare:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/F/ford-motor/gross...

I'm not gonna waste my time arguing company financial statements with someone who doesn't know the difference between gross and net profit. You can have the last word. Have a nice day buddy.

You got a bit confused, stating something is not given isn't sign of confidence, rather sober analytical approach... Confidence is parent stating the opposite, without anything like crystal ball to back it up, while host of others don't agree

You can quibble whether or not Tesla will continue to win at the scale it has, but it definitely doesn't seem likely to go bankrupt at the speed of a $6/share SPAC-boosted EV startup. It just doesn't really bear comparison to the other EV companies out there. It is not a startup, and has been publicly traded plenty long enough. Neither does it make sense to compare it to the old-guard ICE companies, which don't yet have their sea legs.

Any company can fail (for a fairly broad definition of "fail"), given time, but there's no practical likelihood of Tesla suddenly going bankrupt in the near future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com