
Tesla Has Failed Massively as a Public Company - AndrewBissell
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimcollins/2019/08/21/tesla-has-failed-massively-as-a-public-company
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mikewarot
Consider this: Every day that Tesla, and the electric car/solar future is
delayed, is another $5 Billion of revenue for the oil and gas industry.

There is a strong incentive to spread every possible bad news item about Tesla
for all the people in that industry which comprises 2-3 percent of the world's
GDP.

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csb6
Or maybe - just maybe - Tesla is actually a poorly run business that
objectively has seen a dip over time in stock price and tremendously wasteful
spending (see nearly empty Buffalo gigafactory or the highly automated
assembly line for Model 3’s that was abandoned after who knows how many tens
of millions spent on it).

I agree that corporations have undue influence on media, but come on. Tesla
isn’t making their critics’ jobs very hard. Reporting the truth sounds pretty
bad already. But sure, maybe it is all a conspiracy by clandestine cells of
writers recruited by Big Oil. And they’re doing a great job, since multiple
electric vehicles are coming to market more and more each year across all
brands.

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mcv
I'd like to know how these numbers compare to Amazon's early years. Amazon
also took forever before it made a profit. As the article points out, Tesla
has been expanding enormously. As long as there is demand for their cars (and
it seems there is), I don't see why it would start making a profit once the
company focuses on profit rather than expansion.

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somerandomness
There's a difference in not having a profit due to (a) reinvestment; (b) poor
unit economics.

(a) is much less worrying for an investor, e.g. Amazon (b) suggests a bad
business model, e.g. Uber/Lyft, Tesla

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mcv
But Tesla is reinvesting a lot. And it's growing the market for electric cars,
setting up infrastructure, etc. He might be selling at a loss initially in
order to create the volume that will eventually drive down the cost so he can
generate a profit. From what I understand, the big reason he keeps losing
money on selling cars is that by the time the previous car starts making a
profit, he's already already started selling the next one at greater volume,
creating new loss that drowns the fresh profit from that previous car.

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somerandomness
That was true with model S but not with model 3. The latter is the main
product, bread and butter, whose purpose is not funding other future products.

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SmileyRedBall
Would being continously shorted by Wall Street have anything to do with this?
For example, take yet another short position in Tesla and then trash it in the
financial press, like this article is doing.

It is curious that since 2013 Tesla sales have jumped from approx 20,000 per
year to approx 30,000 per month and yet the stock price hasn't shown an
equivalent increase. If I were of a cynical nature I would suspect the rest of
the US car industry (what's left of it) of punishing Musk for being
sucessfull. Despite this, an increase of 1,889 percent on an initial
investment in the IPO in 2010 is not too bad.

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AndrewBissell
The financial press has gone _very_ easy on Tesla & Musk. They will routinely
write "Elon Musk says" articles which are little more than stenographic
regurgitation of some statement by Musk or Tesla. Longs and Tesla touts like
Ron Baron, Cathie Wood, Gene Munster, and even the utterly inexperienced
Galileo Russell are routinely given long CNBC segments to hold forth with
their bullish theses. And even if it can temporarily push the stock price one
direction or another, press coverage has little to nothing to do with their
audited financial results.

Netflix attracted a ton of short interest back when the stock was around $100.
Somehow that didn't, in and of itself, hold back the company at all.

> It is curious that since 2013 Tesla sales have jumped from approx 20,000 per
> year to approx 30,000 per month and yet the stock price hasn't shown an
> equivalent increase.

Yes, it's almost as though the company has a complete lack of operating
leverage and is losing more money the more cars it sells.

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cellular
At least it's doing better than my kickstarter:

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/poly-wants-a-
cracker/po...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/poly-wants-a-cracker/poly-
wants-a-cracker-robot-controller-for-bricks)

