Tesla's in Serious Trouble | Hacker News Reader

Tesla's in Serious Trouble

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12 pointsbertman20 comments

Tesla's quite profitable, with a big cash buffer and little debt with the most popular entry in a highly growing market. It's biggest competition is from Chinese makers like BYD who are being increasingly excluded from Western markets.

Tesla is fine.

Tesla's stock price, OTOH, probably isn't. A P/E of 75 can perhaps be justified with a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 50%, but when the company itself says that it won't hit that CAGR, a share price drop of only 12% is less than I would expect.

I believe Tesla's in serious trouble, but these blogposts where the seething hatred for Musk is palpable are hard to trust as reliable analysis.

You may be right but this is not one of them.

How so? There's not even a passing mention of the macroeconomic conditions like high interest rates that affect sales of big ticket items that almost everyone takes out a loan for. Teslas have been in the mid luxury segment.

It's definitely not reliable analysis.

Blog post read alright, the author probably has a short position.

Why is that? He has been behaving terribly, I would be concerned about the ethics of anyone who doesn't hate him at this point.

Just the anti-musk blog ecosystem is largely noise, this particular post looks pretty good though and mostly rings true to me.

That's because it's omitting inconvenient facts, like zero mention of interest rates becoming sky high as one of the reasons for the slowdown.

I want a comparison of the lithium battery supply chains that the competitors have.

Isn't this a major factor?

Not buying it. Tesla has a huge share of a growing pie. They will continue to grow as the EV market grows. While I agree that the past few months were not good, the long-term outlook for EVs is positive and therefore Tesla's outlook is positive.

Just because we have all decided we hate Elon Musk doesn't mean everything he has done is bad and destined to fail.

Being first doesn't necessarily make a good outcome. Leadership is the most important to keep it going. Many incredible companies/products have failed as soon as leadership has failed. Musk is more and more worrying investors and customers. It doesn't mean it's going to fail, but it leaves more and more space to.

It’s not destined to fail. But Elon’s jumping the shark has absolutely harmed Tesla sales.

Personal anecdote: I got into the Tesla ecosystem with a model 3. All it took was one test drive and I was sold.

I went on to buy solar and powerwalls, because their prices were literally a fraction of every one of the six local solar companies I got quotes from. Heck, solar plus 3 powerwalls cost the same as just solar from the local clowns.

To your point that not everything they do is destined to fail: I’m still considering getting a couple more powerwalls because with tax incentives and utility rebates they’re a staggeringly good deal. And no one can see the Tesla logos in my basement.

But not only have musk’s idiot antics welded my wallet shut when it comes to not buying another Tesla car, I’ve got a set of emblems from a Mazda 3 to replace the Tesla badges on the one I’ve already got so I can stop feeling embarrassed to be implicitly advertising for them everywhere I drive. The alternative to the badges was a bumper sticker I once saw which said something like “I bought this before Elon jumped the shark”.

Putting Mazda Emblems on a Tesla is sort of embarrassing. Just debadge your car.

I'm in the DC Metro MD VA area and Teslas feel as common as civics now.

I’m bringing personal experience based on having spent $100k with his company– befor le he outed himself as a racist doofus.

You’re bringing quippy contradiction and downvotes. Are you just a fanboy, or do you work for his reputation protection service?

You’re also wrong. You don’t get to tell me what is or isn’t embarrassing for me. That’s for me to decide. Swapping on different badges is, in my world, funny; having a logo associated with an overtly racist man-child on my car is, in fact, embarrassing.

> Are you just a fanboy, or do you work for his reputation protection service?

Neither, I think the Tesla is a well functioning and decently engineered product. It does hurts that Elon is such a big ego and I don't agree with his rants on X.com, He is a extra juicy target for any kind of news or tabloid outlet. I don't attach my identity too strongly with Tesla's or Elon's brand so I just drive the thing around and appreciate it as a good tool that functions for me.

> You’re also wrong. You don’t get to tell me what is or isn’t embarrassing for me.

Fair enough, It's your car, maybe not for me, but absolutely fine for you to enjoy, mod, and change it up however you like.

I find it weird when someone brands one product with the logo of a competing product. I see this when people debadge and rebadge their Honda Civics with Lexus, Audi, and Mercedes logos. I know this is an expression of appreciation for the luxury brand they like but I feel confused by the action none the less. Why not just sell your car and buy a Mazda, is my natural next line of thinking. It's just my opinion, I shouldn't be prescriptive on how others should use their cars they own. You do you and if that makes you happy and hurts no one then thats fine with me,

"The Austin, Texas, electric vehicle, solar panel and battery maker said Wednesday that its net income was $7.93 billion from October through December, compared with $3.69 billion a year earlier."

Damn they must really be hand to mouth right now...

You left out the next paragraph of that article.

"But excluding one-time items such as the $5.9 billion noncash tax benefit for deferred tax assets, the company made $2.49 billion, or 71 cents per share. That was down 39% from a year ago and short of analyst estimates of 73 cents per share according to FactSet."

https://www.kolotv.com/2024/01/25/tesla-4q-earnings-fall-sho...

Any non cash expense like stock-based compensation is pretend from a cash perspective. Stacking money in the bank with no debt is the purpose of a company and what Tesla is doing in increasingly effective fashion.

That's in a big part due to interest rates going sky high during that year, but you won't find that mentioned in the blog post. Wonder why.

I'm not sure where this serious trouble is.

- Model Y was the bestseller 2023

- they keep ramping up production and fabs

- they are sitting on a pile of money

- quality has been steadily and consistently improving

- they have the SC network that everyone is adapting to

- they managed to slash prices, reduce per-car costs, while still getting the average auto industry margin - there is no EV competitor that can do this without selling at a loss, at the moment (if they do, everything becomes an optional and you get back to 50k$)

- finally a Non-US-sized vehicle is going to be released in 2025 - definitely 2y too late due to the CyberFuckup (seriously, the only market capable of buying this is the US)

Everyone keeps comparing to BYD, but I just read today that the software quality and compat for charging are simply not there yet. The other manufacturers are even more behind.

What I see/think:

- Wall Street pseudo-science of EPS has been flawed since forever: the same analysts expect Tesla to keep growing >50% YoY, and call for doom if it misses 600mln out of 25bn, or 0.03$ out of 0.71$ (I see this all the time also with other stocks, esp. in the last ~4y)

- Tesla's valuation is heavily reflecting the expected future developments, and has been inflated for some time; this is not necessarily a bad thing, but a market correction was to be expected and long overdue

- Musk's cult and news outlets created this alternate reality where having a Tesla product expresses approval of the CEO: I don't buy it, and I don't care; I own a M3 and plan to get a Powerwall because they're the best products in the price range

- Musk's behavior is concerning, I'd rather see him out at some point, but I fear Tesla would lose its most powerful asset: the constant, enormous push to innovate and break boundaries; if Tesla were to become the regular car company, it would probably disappear in less than 5y

- I hear all the time on Reddit that Service Centers are a hit and miss (esp. in US), this will need to be addressed ASAP not to break user trust (along with repair costs); my experience has been flawless luckily

- their products are way superior to competition for the price range, other car companies cannot get even close to the efficiency and reliability of Tesla vehicles, not to mention the UX/software updates (not FSD)

- FSD 12.1 video released a couple days ago is impressive, I finally get the feeling we're getting close to something usable (I don't have it and will very likely never buy it)

- CyberFuckup should have been canceled before prototype phase, and deposits refunded; it was and still is a massive resource distraction on the way of bringing EVs to the masses

- a 25k$ vehicle should have come sooner, it's coming, and will sell like crazy when available, esp. outside the US

- I hope storage and solar won't be forgotten, all other solutions I've seen so far are not so well integrated with the house, or as easy to control via a phone app

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