I think that's very much a hindsight kind of thing. I mean, yes, Nikola was a scam. But in "the beginning" the only people willing to say that it was a scam were ones who sounded exactly like the much louder, better funded, and media-accessible people screaming that Tesla was a scam. This very site was filled with $TSLAQ nonsense. And it was all wrong, much of it deliberately so.
The investment world is drowning in deliberate misinformation. There's no path for reasoned criticism to break through. Pick any stock and there's someone willing to tell you it's a scam. Or a gem.
Edit: and this subthread is a perfect, shining example. Just look at all the people jumping in to perpetuate and argument that somehow Tesla is, I guess, comparably fraudulent to Nikola, a company that got caught faking a vehicle that didn't exist. No one trusts you people, because you sound the same for everything.
>And it was all wrong, much of it deliberately so.
then act like people calling you out for that are calling Tesla a scam. It's a real company, they make cars, but the short sellers weren't and aren't crackpots from a 'Tesla is overvalued' perspective.
In all fairness there was a non-zero chance of Tesla running out of money at one point. At the final word on Tesla being worth what it is hasn't been spoken neither. I do have to give Musk credit for being able to maintain Tesla the way he does, under everyone else the company wouldn't exist anymore. Not that I think Tesla is particularly well run so, but Elon's ability to entertain the market and keep money flowing is impressive.
While it is true that Tesla might have gone bankrupt. There is a big difference between 'this is a risk company with growth potential, be careful' and 'this company is fraud'.
Many TSLAQ people were far more extreme then saying 'they could go bankrupt, car industry is risky.
> Not that I think Tesla is particularly well run so, but Elon's ability to entertain the market and keep money flowing is impressive.
The haven't really need to raise that much money in a long time. They did some raises in the last couple years but that money is mostly in the cash balance now.
Its not like they are just raising more cash all the time.
Funny how people like you are so desperate, at this point you literally can't even use the current quarterly report anymore and must talk about the last one. And then string together a bunch of revenue that you can then somehow argue 'doesn't count' for #reasons.
Who cares about unit margin or operational margin, as long as you can pick a bunch of revenue items and by removing them they didn't make any profit.
And even if your argument was true and they didn't make #realprofit, who would even care as long as they keep having their current growth trend at the unit margin they have.
Hey, you’re not going to like hearing this, and feel free to ignore, but $TSLA is c. 20% below it’s peak valuation and still is trading at 100x earnings on pretty mediocre growth.
It’s still wildly overvalued, people don’t talk about it as much though since the price is flat, not up. Be careful of confirmation bias.
Tesla wasn't faking videos by rolling a nonfunctional truck down a hill. They're shipping almost a million cars a year now (looks to be like 850k in 2021 I think).
Mine took me to Yellowstone a few weeks back.
Now, sure, "overvalued" is a very reasonable argument. I'd even agree.
That's not the kind of rhetoric that was deployed against the company and you know it. Which is why people didn't believe folks screaming that Nikola was a scam.
They had a video on their website for years (taken down very recently, I believe) that showed a FSD "self-driving" Tesla with the narrator saying something like "the driver is only present for legal reasons".
And again, people see arguments like this attempting to liken Tesla to a clearly fraudulent scam (the truck didn't even go!), and is it any wonder they threw up their hands and figured NKLA was a good bet?
Look, nitpick about FSD if you like (I bought it, FWIW -- 100% happy customer). But don't claim it's the same as faking a motor in a truck that didn't have one.
Well but Tesla is still calling their drive assist autopilot and Musk has at multiple times in the past said full independent driving is just around the corner and all these "around the corner" dates have past and there still is not fully independent autopilot.
So yes there is a difference in scale, but not in principle I would say. Musk is also lying (I don't believe that by now he still believes we will have unassisted autopilot next year) to keep the stock price high.
What is wrong with calling it AutoPilot? What does AutoPilot do in a plane ?? it keeps speed, direction and altitude. It doesn't do anything magical, it doesn't replace an actual Pilot and fully navigate the plane from Gate to Gate and hit on the stewardesses as well.
Telsa has always separated AutoPilot and Full Self Driving as separate features. "But people confuse AutoPilot and think is does everything and is a virtual chauffeur", Well those people are stupid, stupid like the people who try to trick the car into driving and fake out the driver attention safety features.
So, full autonomous is... very hard. It is easy to get most of the way there, and then think you're nearly ready to ship a product.
Staying on the road, obeying traffic laws, not hitting other cars, this is just the beginning. There are so many oddball situations you see when driving that an autonomous system also has to handle.
One of the big ones is construction, and that alone brings a whole host of issues including wacky lane changes, following the direction of human workers, missing or misleading lane markings, debris, and more.
After reading about quality issues for years and years about Teslas, I'm not rushing to buy one any time soon. Though I know many owners really love their cars. I see more than a few every commute to work.
Not sure I'd classify 100% year-on-year growth to revenues of $12 billion as mediocre, during a year when the production lines of two of their three cars were shut down for almost an entire quarter and we also went through the worst pandemic since 1918.
The valuation is still steep by earnings and compared to likely competitors, but it's not based on speculation devoid of observations.
Tesla also reopened their Freemont plant within days against health department orders saying they were producing ventilators and then delivering expired bipap machines bought in bulk while really working on luxury cars. The pandemic didn't slow them much because they just violated the orders.
I think you just proved his point. NKLA was an outright scam, and Tesla wasn’t, but the way many people talked about Tesla was as if it was a scam selling vapor ware. It took a very keen eye indeed to tease out fact from fiction. Tesla may have “mediocre growth” as you claim (I strongly disagree) but the number of Tesla cars I see on the road are a testament that the company is no scam.
Tesla almost went bankrupt. They started shutting stores that were tied into commercial leases that hadn't expired and all kinds of stuff. At one point they said they would never need to capital raise again and then did one 3 days later or something. They made wild statements of autonomous taxis by the end of 2020 in a desperate bid to build hype before the capital raise.
They survived and raised a lot of capital from shareholders and now seem in no danger of bankruptcy, but it was either a real threat or the CEO is lying about it to be theatrical.
The investment world is drowning in deliberate misinformation. There's no path for reasoned criticism to break through. Pick any stock and there's someone willing to tell you it's a scam. Or a gem.
Edit: and this subthread is a perfect, shining example. Just look at all the people jumping in to perpetuate and argument that somehow Tesla is, I guess, comparably fraudulent to Nikola, a company that got caught faking a vehicle that didn't exist. No one trusts you people, because you sound the same for everything.