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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Tesla got the job done, which was empower Musk, not manufacture EVs at scale. The stock is the product.

Maybe I’m just naive enough, because I love cars and progress, but I think you agree that he really showed our whole small world that EV can exist and work. Everyone laughed, no one believed it will work and here he still is rich and we have Teslas everywhere. Driving, not killing more people than other brands.

I think China would’ve gotten us to here without Tesla.

Except that the Model Y accounts for more fatalities than any other car out there.

Going to need a citation on this one.

I don't even think it is correct. Teslas as a whole have twice the fatality rate [1] per billion miles as the industry overall and the model Y has a rate 4x the industry average, but that can't overwhelm the fact that there are too few Teslas on the road to make that 2x or 4x turn into more total fatalities.

[1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a62919131/tesla-has-highes...

A quote from the original study [1], in which Porsche 911 is the 4th on the list

“The models on this list likely reflect a combination of driver behavior and driving conditions, leading to increased crashes and fatalities.”

I would like to remind you that Tesla's least powered vehicle has around 300HP and needs ~7s to go from 0 to 100km/h. Musk is a moron but Teslas are still good and safe vehicles.

[1] https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study

Is it really safe to unleash 300hp daily drivers with instant torque and significantly greater weight to the general public?

That's another question, and not a dumb one at all! But still, while the product is what it is, there is still personal responsibilities in using it properly and safely. Otherwise we should ask regulators to just prohibit this kind of vehicles.

That ship has long since sailed. My college-age niece just bought her first car, which is a 2012 V6 Mustang with 305hp, naturally aspirated. I'm sure it's lighter, but that just makes it faster.

While you're correct on the one hand, Tesla made EVs feasible and mainstream, did the investments and caused a rolling effect of worldwide investments in e.g. batteries and EVs, and government subsidies that also made investing in EVs more attractive to competitors.

Besides EVs, Tesla's long term revenue could very well be in the supercharger network, too. It's not as exciting as self driving cars, but the oil companies have been the most valuable companies / stocks worldwide without being exciting like that. I mean I don't think EV charging will be anywhere near as big as oil because it doesn't involve nearly as much infrastructure or international trade, but it's still big, especially if governments refocus on replacing ICEs with EVs.

(the focus has been let go because the subsidies were too popular and expensive)

I agreed on the supercharger network, which made it pretty surprising when Musk fired the entire supercharger team.

> The stock is the product.

Musk reeks of scam. But for a stock pump and dumb scheme there sure are a lot of teslas on the road.

Tesla sold 1.7M cars in 2024. Toyota sold 11.1M cars in 2024.

Tesla’s current market cap is $1.43T. Toyota’s current market cap is $354B.

There really aren’t that many teslas on the road, and their sales are declining.

This kind of maybe made sense for a while their revenue was growing at a very fast pace but now that its stagnant/falling they are no different to any other car company.

I wonder if this coincides with Musk getting into politics? Never a good choice to alienate half your customer base. Michael Jordan famously said he never got into politics because "Republicans buy sneakers, too."

Tesla stock isn't valued as a car company

Which is exactly the problem.

The stock is priced on expectations of how many humanoid robots they might sell over the next decade.

Those expectations in turn treat humanoid robotics as if Tesla is the only game in town, when Tesla's Optimus is not yet available for purchase and other companies already ship.

Then someone brings up the value of Tesla's AI to those robots, and here's my response to that to save re-writing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46799603

"Robots"

A product no one knows if there is a real demand for promised to be made by a company that has no core competency in robotics

But hey let's just value this BS in the trillions because why not. Sam Altman's ChatGPT is not far behind

Oh, Optimus is much worse than ChatGPT.

ChatGPT, for all its flaws, does actually exist and definitely isn't just a remote-control-based illusion, and some people even pay for it.

Optimus, the only thing we can be sure is real is the hardware, which is the least interesting part. But even if they really are running just on software without remote control, the one and only thing they've shown in any public demo that would actually be impressive, was voice comprehension in a noisy environment.

Elon would save Tesla by force xAI to buy it like twitter does

because why not???? at least Grok is real and we are years away from real "Skynet"

SpaceX for weapon delivery, xAI for the brain and Tesla for robot chasing

Has it all really been just one giant grift to steal every Americans social security number.

And what would he do with them?

The same systems had labor board whistleblower info.

Why would musk love to identify (or at a minimum, but a huge chilling effect on) labor board whistleblowers? The world may never know.

Try to impair democracy through election denial groups? Absolute power and all that jazz.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734078

The Trump administration admits even more ways DOGE accessed sensitive personal data - https://www.npr.org/2026/01/23/nx-s1-5684185/doge-data-socia... - January 23rd, 2026

Case No. 1:25-cv-00596-ELH - https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.577...

> The unnamed employees secretly conferred with a political advocacy group about a request to match Social Security data with state voter rolls to "find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States," the filing said. It remains unclear whether any data actually went to this group.

“Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.” —- David Frum

So why the car company? Also I was told there is no voter fraud. Is that just because nobody’s looking?

> So why the car company?

How else was he going to become wealthy? Wealth is unelected power. Show me evidence he’s after anything but power.

> Also I was told there is no voter fraud. Is that just because nobody’s looking?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud_in_the_United_...

https://www.npr.org/2024/10/11/nx-s1-5147732/voter-fraud-exp...

https://www.brennancenter.org/topics/voting-elections/vote-s...

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/debu...

There is no material voter fraud. It is a red herring to disenfranchise voters.

Additional citation:

The Georgia voter data is clean - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46856850 - February 2026

I'm not following your logic.

What you responded to was a quote of a request that claimed that was what they were looking for. Whether it was a good-faith request or they used the data for only that, etc is the real question.

And if they did find something, it would obviously have been in court a long time ago.

>Also I was told there is no voter fraud. Is that just because nobody’s looking?

I was told you haven't raped anyone, is that because we haven't looked into it?

Unless there's evidence that something happened when decisions need to be made we assume it didn't.

It's so sad an engineer like you believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election even after all the investigations. It speaks volumes to your abilities in all aspects of life.

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