If the company became unprofitable to the point of possible bankruptcy, that's a different story.
That's not really true these days and hence part of the grift. Early Tesla was only profitable because they were first to market and had huge subsidies to take advantadge of. It's no coincidence that Musk started moving right as Trump took his first office and was clearly antagonizing EV tax credits (as he does now).
Meanwhile, in the 2020's TSLA isn't profitable from cars. It's from BTC and some weird loophole I don't fully understand letting them amortize that value for multiple years.
Nothing I said was really opinion here. How about you cite how they excluded the crypto and got 20% profit margins if you're going to simply ask for sources and call me biased? I don't exactly trust Hollywood accounting knowing the above story.
But like, Tesla almost has the best car available on the market anywhere. Almost.
They could wipe the floor of any of the existing incumbents. Could.
There is some justification for that number, based on the theory that Tesla is an energy and AI company with a side hustle in automobiles. But that is pure conjecture that only receives market support because Elon is at the helm.
At some point, that facade is going to collapse. Every time I point this out, I get jumped by a bunch of Tesla fanboys, $TSLA holders and the usual associated crowd.
So, I'm going to list some major problems with Tesla, in brief summaries of no particular order
1) FSD is a half truth. I am genuinely impressed with the progress they've made and I think Tesla is one of the leaders in the field. HOWEVER: their approach to risk (laying it on the owners), their lack of robotaxi operations center, and even the hardware in the vehicles not being capable for true FSD and remote monitoring, means that all Tesla vehicles on the road today will NEVER be FSD/RoboTaxi capable without: major hardware upgrades (expensive per vehicle), substantial backend upgrades for live support (time consuming), and serious hiring of live support (they've gotten started but this will completely change the math on OpEx). [0]
2) They have huge risk around new battery technologies. This has become a global race. If someone (such as Toyota) introduces a genuine leapfrog (which they seem to be conservatively teasing in the usual Japanese way with solid state batteries), then Tesla is in some serious shit. Tesla's investing heavily in R&D, so I think they're probably not screwed on this point, but it will be a major point of contention for them in the near future.
3) Public opinion: Elon has decided to make himself the Conservative of the Year. I, personally am not a conservative, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that he's polarizing the addressable market for a mass market consumer product. This is increasingly true outside of the US.
4) Upper limits of addressable markets, pending infra: charging infra is getting better, but the simple fact is that they're reaching the point of diminishing returns. The end goal is probably something like be an L2 charger (ideally better) at every parking meter and a farm of them in every WalMart parking lot. Much progress is being made, but it will still be many years before it's where electric cars are feasible for - let's say - 80% of the US domestic market. NACS went a long way in alleviating this.
5) Competition from China: China is deeply incentivized by market forces to build electric cars (they do not have domestic oil). Their domestic market is huge and economies of scale kick in even for relatively niche products. They are already eating at the low end of the electric car market. They are also hungry and see designing beautiful and good things as a matter of national pride[1].
[0] While we're at it, Alphabet has invested heavily in companies doing 5g rollouts - which is a requirement for a RoboTaxi in my opinion. Elon seems to be short sighted in his apparent belief that 5g isn't needed, nor a vision hw update, and they can really build a 0-intervention RoboTaxi. Don't get me started on his refusal to include LIDAR. I wish him the best of luck.
[1] I have a lot of complaints about how China and Chinese industry operates, at a moral level. But one must also recognize that as they're late to the table, they are at a disadvantage and they know it. A lot of the things they do that offend and disgruntle western tech people - especially around IP - are frankly, perfectly rational (even if I personally don't like it). The DeepSeek leader Liang Wenfeng put his attitude around China's behavior in a very refreshing manor, which really humanizes a group of people that many like to denigrate:
We believe that with economic development, China must gradually transition from being a beneficiary to a contributor, rather than continuing to ride on the coattails of others. Over the past 30 years of the IT revolution, we barely participated in core tech innovation.We’ve grown accustomed to Moore’s Law “falling from the sky”—waiting 18 months for better hardware and software. Scaling Law is treated similarly. However, these advancements are the result of generations of relentless effort by Western-led technology communities. Because we haven’t been actively involved in this process, we’ve come to overlook its significance.
Anything less is adaptive cruise control + lane assist (keep & change), no matter how fancy the marketing wrapping on it. "Safety-critical interventions" WTF is that, car trying to kill you and your family and you fighting its bad decisions and for now winning over? The amount they would have to pay me for such alpha-testing to ever drive such vehicle is non-trivial even for tesla.
Yes, I’m aware it’s supposed to be monitored.
Btw I love the implication in your line of questioning that I haven’t experienced fsd by demanding I give my own personal anecdotes
So here’s three! The last time I experienced FSD was during the December 2024 free trial (12.5 I believe). On one trip, it unsafely botched a merge on Market Street in San Francsico by the Castro (ran out of room and faulted ) Actually, we tried that route because a few years ago, we’d had it completely fuck up by trying to navigate the wrong way down the road. So I supposed that’s an improvement.
Later that week, FSD kept having trouble with a freeway off-ramp around San Mateo and when we did a go around, it tried to pull us into a dedicated bus lane. Well, it did pull through and get to the destination.
And lastly, it consistently manages to navigate into my parking garage and then immediately drive out the other exit.
So there’s your anecdotes. At least we didn’t slam head on into a lamp post.
Anyway, I can only say that I've had an impressively good experience with FSD, which I have put a lot of hours into. But I have noticed the same problem that you have with bus lanes. I disable it when I enter parking garages.
And yet, I described you in my original post :)
> Every time I point this out, I get jumped by a bunch of Tesla fanboys, $TSLA holders and the usual associated crowd.
You have no basis to accuse me of any of that based on my single question to you. I disagree with you. I politely asked for your personal experience, which differs somewhat from mine. You are being rude.
You get the amount of courtesy from me that you deserve.
To give you an idea: at the European level, the group of LePen and Meloni refuses to work with them because they are to extreme. Many regional branches of AfD are under surveillance for strong suspicion of fascist activities. One of their most prominent politicians sued someone for defamation for calling him fascist. The court decided that this was not defamatory because it was in fact true.
Our conservatives are so far refusing to cooperate at all with the AfD.
So Musk is not "conservative of the year" he is a supporter of certified fascists.
While I agree, he seems to be trying for that title with these stunts. And in his mind, he might think that he is succeeding.
(In the US, and to some extent the UK, 'conservative', in political terms, is now usually used to refer to radical far-right policies.)
IMHO, it consists of exactly one proposition.
But lately people have been more blatantly making a MAGA distinction from Republicans and MAGA is pretty much your AfD party in a nutshell. Except they are running the show in America for at least 2 more years.
You say that in future tense. But we also now believe that steep tariffs on Chinese cars are necessary lest they "contribute" too much, too advanced, too cheaply and destroy domestic industries that can't keep up any more.
The EU, and current and previous US administrations believe this.
> new battery technologies. This has become a global race.
"Global" ? One country is far ahead here and again it's China e.g.:
"Can anyone challenge China’s EV battery dominance?" https://www.ft.com/content/1f95d204-ea6a-4cf3-b66a-952362e80...
"Ford Chief Says China Leads US By 10 Years In EV Batteries" https://www.carscoops.com/2025/02/fords-ceo-says-china-is-10...
And yes i have a lot of thoughts about that and it is a substantial danger to tesla
Ah right. Interesting that this is the view of a Chinese technologist working in China.
And also that seems be aimed more at DeepSeek's LLM software and the tech business, than it is at electric vehicles. The second technology is IMHO far more beneficial.