Yup. Sensible. Consider upside vs downside. But also, what kind of car company cant build and deliver cars? Silly me, a battery company!
As with any other investment, it depends on your goals and time frame and perception of the company. If you’re looking for short-term yield it’s not worth investing in. If you see it as a solar panel and battery company that also owns a lot of licensable patents for automotive applications it might make sense as a longer-term play.
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I knew there was a positive outlook for this, Elon is too smart to let Tesla crash
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Definitely but there are a lot of potential concerns when a private company borrows from a public one. Indeed you can have pretty legitimate concerns even about a public company borrowing from a private one where control of both entities is in one common hand… Considering the position of new borrowing in the capital structure is pretty important for public shareholders to avoid being ripped off.
Anyway, bless St. Elon and all who sail with him. But I wouldnt lend him money.
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I think it’s two extra motors (regular model 3 has 2, super version has 4) and a several kilowatt-hours of battery.
There are astoundingly many people in the USA, some of them very influential, who wholeheartedly believe in pollution as a social good. They’ve read Tragedy of the Commons and believe that any commons - anything shared - is destructive to the souls and rights of men (they typically aren’t much concerned with women). The free availability of clean air and water is an affront to these people, they want all clean water to be provided from bottles to someone’s profit.
Such people see Musk as their most significant opponent. They have to crush him through whatever means necessary; he only managed to get into the rich guys club because the Old Guard didn’t see the Internet and Paypal coming until too late, to the great chagrin and rage of the Texas-dominated dirty energy axis.
Whenever a Musk venture has any setback, you can assume it will be trumpeted to the very stars. Which is convenient if you are an investor who is more interested in human futures than stock market futures, I guess?
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But remember, since 2014, Tesla has open-sourced its electric-vehicle patents:
Tesla blog, June 12, 2014: All Our Patent Are Belong To You
It’s always helpful to remember that Tesla’s overarching corporate mission is and always has been to accelerate the adoption of sustainable energy.
Electric cars are a crucial first step along that path, but only the first step.
From the blog post cited above:
Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.
We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform.
Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.
Tesla stock is a long-term, high-risk, high-reward play. Anyone wanting immediate returns and/or trying to avoid volatility should probably avoid it. Elon himself has advised day-traders and quarterly-bottom-line speculators to not to buy the stock.
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I’ve heard a bunch of stories like yours.
It became obvious a while back that if you were anxious to have a Tesla right now, and if you were planning to kit out your Model 3 with all the kewl options, you could probably find a lower-range Model S a couple of years old on the used market for about the same price - and the S includes most of the kewl options of the Model 3, and is, in fact, a better car overall.
As Elon himself pointed out in some detail a while ago.
So I’d wager that more than a few of the Model 3 cancellations are exactly that.
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Interesting. I hadnt really considered this way of looking at the Tesla venture. Im sure you are right about there being a bunch of people willing him to fail. However, generally I struggle to think that those who get substantial funding from VC firms are enemies of the establishment or status quo. Perhaps it would be better to say Musk is a leader of the new establishment out West. And the old East Coast establishment would love to see him fail.
Where I do take a position on Tesla is their ability to revolutionize manufacturing. I think he is full of shit on this. I am sure there is a great need for clean transport technologies and provided the subsidies remain in place maybe Tesla will remain in the van of this change. However if Tesla doesnt learn how to actually do scale manufacturing then it will probably fail. The problem appears to be the desire to fully automate the production line - something no one else has succeeded with yet. From what I have read it appears to be central to the business plan cos there is no other way to get to scale with the limited manufacturing capacity he has available. The other guys who are making electric cars are very good at manufacturing and not as good as Tesla at software.
Im an Iain Banks fan. Mr. Musk is also clearly an Iain Banks fan. There is a lot to be applauded. However hubris is always very dangerous. Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.
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This is one of the things I hate as well. From what I’ve driven over the last decade, the gold standard IMO of “infotainment” systems is from BMW with the wheel on the center console for commands sent to the screen. The climate controls are just OK.
We rented a Hyundai Santa Fe on vacation a couple weeks ago and the system on it was stupid. Otherwise the car itself wasn’t bad.
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