For years, we've been told a lot of things that have never come to fruition.
Just 6 months ago, we were told that Robotaxi would be available to half the US population by the end of the year.
https://electrek.co/2025/07/23/elon-musk-with-straight-face-...
Now excuse me while I go check on where my 2016 full-self-driving Tesla car. It was supposed to pick me up 9 years ago, something must have happened.
Because you can cancel your reservation and get your deposited refunded. See terms at Tesla.com
Musk also bought into Tesla.
So its not like he invented some kind of alien technology.
It was always about having good enough marketing to permit 10 years of R&D to make the car actually attractive.
Nissan might like a word about that.
The question - is Musk lying on purpose, or is this more 90-90 rule where he made (obviously wrong) assumptions based on current progress?
As it stands, he can get a trillion dollar pay package if a something-trillion market cap target is hit.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/elon-musk-loses-...
https://thedriven.io/2023/06/22/tesla-to-start-building-its-...
The reality is they announced that as a pipe dream. Just like the FSD, Robotaxi, Optimus and 10 other projects that will never work - or more precisely, they will work but >10 years from now, and it won't be from Tesla but from a competitor.
I've recently been shopping for another electric SUV and to be told that to get charging stops on your long trip 'through an app on your phone' instead of built into the navigation is.... Wild
Edit: it needs to be said that I consider a car a solution to the A to B problem, and nothing more :) This was one of the premium German automakers by the way. On a ~$50k car....
Many like Polestars and Renaults are built on Android Automotive (different from Android Auto) and the built-in navigation is full Google Maps with direct access to the cars battery state and control systems.
Works perfectly on my Renault Megane E-Tech.
That's my expectation too.
> For some the quality of the data isn’t as high, but it will be there.
This is a real issue. You might be stranded with low quality suggestions. Chargers that don't work. The large number of accounts you need to have as every charger has their own etcetera
In a Tesla, you get what Tesla gives you.
I haven't bothered with any accounts in years for third-party chargers. Most just plug in and negotiate payment automatically. Others have credit card readers on them. I haven't personally encountered out of service chargers on my road trips in a few years.
I can charge at most of the major Tesla charging locations as well these days. Ironically, those require I hop on a proprietary app with another account to manage, so I often avoid them.
In an EV it's a necessity.
Makes sense.
Xiaomi? Huawei? Avatar? Or do you mean only the ones available in the US?
I've obviously not tested every car out there. But for years Tesla has been the only car that came close to the convenience of a gas powered car. Their charging infrastructure really allowed it to be a normal car when you live in populated areas.
Who knows where you live and what options you have? Who knows what you considered? Maybe that's why the question was asked?
> I've obviously not tested every car out there. But for years Tesla has been the only car that came close to the convenience of a gas powered car. Their charging infrastructure really allowed it to be a normal car when you live in populated areas.
Charging infra have nothing to do with their cars besides maybe the US. They are barely leading in anything anymore, especially in countries with heavy EV competition, like China. When I was in China this year, I saw Teslas everywhere, but most of them were a few years old. Most of the new cars were Chinese EV brands, and they seemed better on most metrics in the same segment, which included quality. They're losing market share in the EU and worldwide.
Yes looks pretty capable but they don’t go into software itself much. Looking at video you can see it’s pretty laggy at times.
Friends atto3 is somewhat capable but software quality just isn’t it. Other just got brand new sealion 7, hope I can test it soon, but some capability isn’t there either.
I don't know what to think anymore about this. He has continuously conned his way along and does it just long enough to jump to the next con.
Tesla is crashing and somehow people though giving him a huge pay package made sense. Cyber truck is flopping but now he's again living off government graft by having another company buy up the dead weight supply. Tesla is only around because of govt subsidy and now that that's dead he's turned to another govt spigot. While supposedly being opposed politically to what he's doing.
And time and time again people still make up excuses because they can't believe they were conned.
Probably the biggest sign AI is going to flop is him starting talking about it being right around the corner.
Little technical skills, no forecasting ability, we saw how much his "efficiency management" philosophy flopped when done in public via DOGE (vs behind the scenes in a private company) and yet people keep falling for it. As long as he can keep spitting out BS, people keep falling for it.
There’s only upside for shareholders.
Musk’s package is entirely performance-contingent and structured as 12 stock grants.
And the targets are very ambitious: valuation ($8.5 trillion) and operational goals (20M cars, 10M FSD, 1M robotaxis, $400B profit) over 10 years.
https://poole.ncsu.edu/thought-leadership/article/inside-the...
On the other side of the coin, they really don't have a choice; either they attempt to provide leverage (and using non-realistic goals is excellent to avoid actually having to pay it), or any major misshap with any of the other businesses that may have as collateral tesla stock (either directly or indirectly) would basically bankrupt the company. And the scenario where Elon would attempt to do a sort of firesale on purpose just to take revenge isnt far-fetched either;
IMO The only way forward for them is to keep him happy for now, while attempting to either do damage control or graceful exits.
https://americanliterature.com/author/hans-christian-anderse...
I always thought the story ended with the emperor and his entourage being embarassed after the child said he's naked... but no, it ends even more close to real human behavior. (Sorry for writing a clickbait sentence).
In fact even if every single shareholder in Tesla knows that the price is unsustainable they can still hold out for a greater fool for years. To a large extent you are betting on what the crowd will do, not what the company will do.
The really killer part is, I can't even be 100% certain that it's not me. I'm quite sure, and justify it solidly, but then, I would.
Maybe the smart people are the ones who can intuitively feel the stupidity of the masses and take advantage of that, whereas the dumb are the ones who are too cautious about houses of cards and unstable Ponzi schemes...
They mistakenly believe, like temporarily embarrassed millionaires/capitalists [1], that they are actually in the winning group.
First with autopilot, then with boring's tunnels, then a $39k cybertruck, then ...
What's that saying about "fool me so many times I can't keep count" ?
Whatever angry feeling we may have towards Elon Musk, he's not the richest man on earth for nothing.
Lesson learned, till next time !
He engineers perceptions, finance, and govt funds, not technology. Every report and available evidence shows he is barely technologically astute, nevermind genius; the accomplishments of his teams are despite him not because of him.
Which is why a better description would be: The Greediest Man On Earth.
In particular, nothing that comes out of his mouth regarding AI makes any sense.
And still, people listen to him as if he was an expert. Go figure.
His latest bullshit was about Tesla cameras and fog/rain/snow - on an investor call, no less - "Oh, we do photon counting directly from the sensor, so it's a non-issue".
No. 1, Tesla cameras are not capable of that - you need a special sensor, that's not useful for any real visual representation. And 2, even if you did, photon counting requires a closed "box" so to speak - you can't count photons in "open air".
And no-one calls it out.
If my observation is correct, I guess what we're witnessing with Musk could be a case of hero worship – and in any narrative in which Musk is a hero, he's of course right.
Both SpaceX and Tesla are accomplishments if you consider where their competitors are.
CATL, BYD, and other Chinese manufacturers are absolutely killing it at Tesla's expense, Because their markets have actual, sharp-elbowed competition requiring actual innovation.
If not for crew dragon, the US would be begging Russia for seats to the ISS still. Is that your preferred outcome?
It's available! Everyone in the US can go to Austin and get a ride in a Tesla robotaxi!
https://electrek.co/2025/12/22/tesla-robotaxi-project-austin...
Tesla isn't a robotics company it's a meme company (2027)
Remember in 2016 when people would be on Mars by 2018?
Musk just took it way further. When Jobs missed with the RDF it was on stuff like the G4 Cube being "cool" enough to make up for its issues. He wasn't promising miracles.
I'm no fan of Tesla, but this looks like the collapse of the contract with the supplier for the battery chemistry they've moved away from, aka "no [more] big deal."
2023 article confirming NMC chemistry: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/1945-7111/ad14d0
5/2025 article discussing change to LFP: https://roboticsbiz.com/teslas-4680-lfp-battery-explained-ch...
3/2025 article comparing BYD's LFP and Tesla's NMC/NCM: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266638642...
Cylindrical cells make sense for higher performance NMC and NCA chemistries, as they can be cooled more easily (coolant lines can run in the voids between cylindrical cells), and any single cell failure is less likely to cascade to other cells. Batteries with cylindrical cells were easier to repair, but nowadays cells are welded together instead of bolted, so that's no longer an advantage.
This is obviously untrue. Tons of other chemistries have used prismatic cells with good safety as well. You think Macbooks and iPhones use LFP or cylinder cells?
> Batteries with cylindrical cells were easier to repair,
It can be just as easy to repair a prismatic battery as a cylinder battery. It all comes down to the layout of the battery. And as you mentioned, how the battery is constructed, if the battery is structural, etc.
To use an analogy: If someone stores a gallon of gasoline in a single-walled plastic container, that's probably OK. But storing 1,000 gallons of gasoline without certain safety measures is unsafe. So it goes with battery capacities.
The company L&F referenced in this article were supplying said cathode material.
ref https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-plans-four-new-batt...
Struggling, not so much: '24/'25 revenue of just under $100B, with Q3'25 record profitability and deliveries yielding $1.5B net income. Strong liquidity and a current ratio of about 2, boosting short-term financial stability. Solid cash reserves and relatively low debt ratio.
High stock price: far exceeds that of traditional auto makers even though Tesla's revenue is significantly lower. High valuation reflects investor expectations of growth and future tech upside. Exuberant? Probably. OTOH, Tesla has delivered better ROI for investors than the other automakers.
The people voting Afd et al. are NOT people buying EVs. The venn diagram of those groups is two circles.
The two most popular EVs in China are the Wuling Mini and the Geely Xingyuan. The first one costs $4500 for the base model, and the second one is $9800. And you can get a very decent EV for $15k with plenty of options.
In 2-3 years, these $5k and $10k cars will only get better, and they'll just slaughter all the competition in markets outside the US and Europe. Especially once used cars start appearing at a fraction of the cost.
Traditional auto manufacturers are dead. Full stop. They just haven't realized it yet. Tesla had a chance to compete in this market with Model 2 but Musk decided to blow their lead on a completely stillborn and gimmick-filled robotaxi.
Not sure whether you know, but Geely entered the automotive business in 1997 (founded in 1986).
The company has subsidiaries / joint ventures with automakers like Volvo, Polestar, Proton, Smart, Lotus, Renault, etc.
Lin Shufu, Geely’s founder and chairman bought just shy of 10% of Mercedes Benz in 2018, making him the second biggest individual shareholder in the German carmaker. The #1 spot is occupied by The Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Co. (BAIC), via its state-owned parent.
Even Toyota is slowly waking up, with a reasonable bZ3X SUV for $15k (China only).
This fully explains the market valuation, of course! Never mind a swarm of retail investors driven by a news media that covered Musk as if he were Tony Stark for years, this market cap is fully based on solid fundamental analysis of expected future revenue.
The big dog is BYD though. Twice as many as 2nd place Tesla.
Indeed. Global 2024 data shows Tesla selling about 1.8M. EV's only by that group of automakers comes to around 1.5M. Toyota and Ford are hybrid-first, not EV. VW is the only legacy automaker that comes near Tesla's EV scale. Mercedes prioritizes margin over volume. Rivian is capacity-limited.
But it is stunning that legacy automakers are sticking to fossil fuels.
They also know that this means that the EU will push the target date for the end of fossi fuel cars.
Sales have been flat for 3 years and the delivery numbers in Europe are catastrophic
on a fully diluted basis, the market cap is above $1.6tn, so at a PE of 20, they'd have to generate something like $80bn in profit per year - hard to do in an industry that is as brutally competitive and low margin as passenger cars.
We must live in parallel universes.
From 2009 to 2022, China offered national purchase subsidies for EV buyers. Peak subsidies: ¥40,000–60,000 per vehicle (~$6k–9k). Combined with local subsidies, some buyers paid 30–40% less than market cost. These subsidies were phased down and formally ended in 2022, but the industry had already reached massive scale.
This policy alone created the world’s largest EV market.
Even after direct subsidies ended, China continues to provide: EV purchase tax exemptions (10% tax waived), extended through 2027.
China provides EV manufacturers with: Cheap or free land, Low-interest or state-directed loans, Preferential electricity pricing, Grants for factories, R&D, and tooling, State-backed battery supply chains.
China strategically subsidized battery production: CATL, BYD, and others received R&D grants, Guaranteed demand, Export financing.
China now controls ~75% of global lithium refining and ~80% of battery cell manufacturing.
This dramatically lowers EV costs versus foreign competitors.
No value judgement about subsidizing, but to say it is a myth that China has and continues to subsidize their EV industry is false.
----
It might be tempting when one has been asleep at the wheel to chalk up the rise of Chinese carmakers led by BYD to unfair subsidies, especially since leaders in Washington and Brussels have done so. No doubt, China is far from a free, fair and open market. The scale and pervasiveness of corporate subsidies at the federal and local level far exceed what other market-based economies offer.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-10-17/byd-s-...
----
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-10/china-s-c...
EVs were subsidised in the west, e.g. in California (#4 "country" by GDP), Norway, and US tax incentives - which have gone away after the Trump anti-renewables Bill of 2025. MRSPs for EVs were slashed after September 2025 due to the loss of this subsidy, and 2 months later Ford cancelled it's electric F-150 program.
Their profit growth has slowed (significant drops in profit YoY). Even revenue has dropped in some quarters.
Investors had very high growth expectations given their past rapid expansion, but investors now see only moderate growth.
Intense competition and pricing pressure.
China EV market is slowing. Overcapacity is emerging over the sector and govt subsidies are softening.
Finally, global macro and sentiment towards Chinese stocks is cautious.
It'd like me saying that Barry Bonds only won the home run records because he used steroids. It wasn't entirely the steroids but I'm sure they certainly didn't hurt.
Of course, the salaries and working conditions are going up in China while west is eroding worker rights as fast as we can. One the factories will come back here simply because we'll end up cheaper. Don't buy solar made by Xinjiang forced labor, by solar panels made by illegal immigrant prison labor!
They are also way cheaper and at comparable quality to western cars.
They lost the massive US subsidy making EV’s appealing and are getting outcomes in China. Model E and Cybertruck have anemic and shrinking sales numbers etc.
Yeah, sure.
On the contrary, Teslas remarkably high stock price means it's less likely to go up and a big correction is more likely.
You're misreading. $100B annual revenue. 1.5B quarterly new income.
Q3 2025 was record revenue of $27B (up 12% YoY). Operating margin was 5.8% (down from 10.8 Q3 2024).
Why the lower profitability? Higher expenses for AI and R&D costs, lower EV prices (very strong competition), etc.
How does that justify Tesla's valuation?
Is it based on the idea that the margin can be improved?
You got it reversed.
For Q3'2025, GM net income $1.3B on $48B revenue (down 0.3% YoY). Tesla, in contrast, generated $1.5B income on $28B revenue (up 12% YoY).
GM's income was down 56.6% while Tesla's was down 37%.
GM had higher operating income than Tesla, however. Explained by Tesla's more aggressive investment in R&D and AI.
It sounds like you're arguing that high valuation compared to fundamentals means buyers expect gains from future buyers paying more sounds like a Ponzi, but it isn't, it is speculation.
The comparison doesn't make sense. Some surface features of speculative markets can look Ponzi-like, but the underlying mechanics are very different.
A Ponzi-scheme returns to earlier participants directly from money contributed by later participants, with no real underlying business generating value. In a Ponzi-scheme, there is no real product (or it is irrelevant), the operator controls payouts, and investors are promised steady or guaranteed returns. None of that applies to Tesla stock.
Ponzi-schemes hide losses, smooth returns, collapse suddenly. Tesla stock is volatile, has had large drawdowns, and public reflects bad news, margin compression, demand shifts. Volatility is a sign of a market, not a Ponzi.
If BYD was in the US I think we could check this box reeeeaaally quickly. It would make Tesla irrelevant.
Why? What's your logic?
There's a huge market opportunity here that all our manufacturers are missing, seemingly on purpose. BYD, and others, would absolutely sweep the competition.
They have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to never make low-margin (read "cheap") cars. If someone is looking for a competitive automotive market, they won't find it in the US. The financial engineering is world-class though.
I personally prefer a BYD, Musk has damaged his brand by being so political, but the BYD product is (IMO) superior.
Having said that BYD isnt without its issues (eg. over reporting of range)
This part is the smell.
"It's not a car company, it's a AI/Robot/whatever company." The valuation is supposedly justified by a future product that perpetually fails to materialize.
It's obviously not a classical Ponzi scheme in the mechanical sense where payouts are controlled by a central party. It has major Ponzi vibes though, with new money continuing to reward old money even though the fundamentals and products haven't done anything to justify that continued influx - only the hype has.
The actual underlying product, the cars, don’t match the crazy valuation.
So these people are no longer shorting. Sane long-only people, likewise have been out for a long time. You're left with a clique of people who won't sell regardless, and when Elon promises to make ice cream with robotaxies, they'll buy a bit more stock.
When only irrational people trade something, the price and market for it are irrational too.
67% of Americans have said they'll never consider buying a Tesla. 56% cite Musk as either the entire reason or part of the reason. [0]
Tesla IS Elon Musk. Without him they're nothing, with him they can't access 2/3rds of the market. Why would anyone invest in that?
[0] https://www.yahoo.com/news/two-thirds-of-americans-now-say-t...
* don't believe the 67% will follow through with that after experiencing FSD
* don't need 67% of Americans to purchase the car. Robotaxi use is plenty.
* look beyond the American market and its pathetic 5% EV share.
Thanks for explaining the other side of it.
I’ve tried v13 few weeks ago, knowing it works so well. Still got shocked how good it is.
They’ll have to drop the price of it tho, but even then 10M cars * $100 per month is $12b of revenue per year.
I'm fairly certain every auto manufacturer and many non-auto manufacturers are working on it. I doubt they'll be able to patent anything truly important to the process, since others beat them to the market with most of it. Or am I missing something essential?
It's a race between how fast Waymo's COGS can decline and how fast Tesla's FSD can achieve actual self-driving. At this moment, given all the evidence available, my inclination is that Waymo is in a better spot.
I feel like people will be willing to wait until next year for the Alphabet or Mercedes version, but maybe I'm overestimating the average person's attention span or underestimating how far behind the competition is.
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary...
It's not. Waymo could license a version of its stack using the Android model (specifies a minimum sensor suite OEMs have to qualify models on).
Musk is a shit human, but to an investor, everything he touches turns to gold. Whether his companies make anything useful doesn't matter, what matters is that the stock price in his companies goes up, so people give him more money. This works until it doesn't.
Just because stock is trading on memes, doesn't mean it can't keep doing so well past your solvency to short it...
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Meaning you also need to get the timing just right otherwise you'll lose big, even if Tesla crashes and burns to zero just after.
Musk can move money around SpaceX/Tesla/XAI/whatever the next story to investors is to prop up valuations and share prices, but can he win against China's clean tech export machine? Long term, I think not (China is a third of global manufacturing capacity as of this comment, and the world is their TAM). So he'll do the tech bro thing, giving talks, going to demo days, spending his wealth on pet projects, etc, while innovators innovate and point the firehose of these products at the world. Are you going to talk people out of his religion? Unlikely. The faithful will remain so, because that's how the human brain sometimes operates.
Ember Energy: China Cleantech Exports Data Explorer - https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e... (updated monthly) ("In 2024, China produced around 80% of the world’s solar PV modules and battery cells, and 70% of electric vehicles.")
US warns China overproducing EVs, batteries, semiconductors for global dominance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41909869 - October 2024
China's Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954508 - July 2024
China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40933773 - July 2024
(as of this comment, ~50% of light vehicle sales in China are NEVs [battery electric of plug in hybrid] while exporting ~6M units/year, more than total annual US light vehicle sales)
It doesn't mean that Tesla stock won't crash unless it actually delivers a Holy Grail. Which is supremely unlikely
> "Short it then"
I can smell your personal finance through the screen.
Imagine an investor's experience with TSLA. From the beginning, they're flooded with news reports about 'fundamentals' this, 'fundamentals' that, about how Tesla would imminently collapse, how it's a scam, yada yada. Said investors _constantly_ see themselves being right and those skeptics wrong. Tesla is in fact disrupting an industry. They really are just continuing to scale. Marginal profitability keeps going up. Their cars keep getting better. FSD keeps getting better. The competition that people kept pointing at kept failing to materialize. None of this seems to change the skeptics' byline.
Tesla is actually in a materially worse position than it was a few years ago, by many metrics, but the stock price isn't set by 'fundamentals', it's set by the people setting demand for the stock. With TSLA, this is disproportionately going to be people who have learned to and gotten rich from ignoring the people loudly telling them why investing in Tesla is a bad idea.
A market will correct eventually, but corrections either require people to change their minds or run out of capital. Neither has happened yet, so the market can't correct.
SpaceX Buys over 1000 Cybertrucks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46405984 - December 2025
Last week: Elon Musk's SpaceX bought tens of millions worth of Cybertrucks Tesla can't sell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46317462 - December 2025 (6 comments)
Elon Musk's SpaceX and XAI Are Buying Tesla's Unsold Cybertrucks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45572152 - October 2025 (8 comments)
Tesla's European Sales Plunge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46391352 - December 2025 (3 comments)
Tesla US sales drop to nearly 4-year low in November - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46248803 - December 2025 (60 comments)
Tesla looks to reset strategy amid sluggish India sales - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46084554 - November 2025 (2 comments)
Tesla's European sales tumble nearly 50% in October - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46063634 - November 2025 (57 comments)
Tesla sees worst sales performance in China in years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45881302 - November 2025 (1 comment)
BYD Pulls Ahead of Tesla in UK, Closes Sales Gap in Germany - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45859618 - November 2025 (35 comments)
Tesla's German car sales more than halve in October as wider EV sales jump - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45827314 - November 2025 (135 comments)
[Flagged] Tesla sales in Germany have cratered from last year, data shows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826384 - November 2025 (28 comments)
Study: The Musk Partisan Effect on Tesla Sales - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45825382 - November 2025 (2 comments) ("Without the Musk partisan effect, Tesla sales between October 2022 and April 2025 would have been 67-83% higher, equivalent to 1-1.26 million more vehicles. Musk’s partisan activities also increased the sales of other automakers' electric and hybrid vehicles 17-22% because of substitution, and undermined California’s progress in meeting its zero-emissions vehicle target.")
Tesla Cybertruck sales are flatlining - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45573985 - October 2025 (17 comments)
Tesla Pivots to Robots as Investors Question Sales and Soaring Valuation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45228566 - September 2025 (3 comments)
[1] https://www.thebignewsletter.com/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=thebignewsletter.com
I don’t even know what to call the kind of system we have.
> BYD announced in 2022 its plans to launch a fleet of car carriers to build what it calls a “maritime bridge” to support its global sales growth and supply chain. The company said it would invest about $687 million to develop a fleet of eight car carriers. The first of the vessels, BYD Explorer No. 1 was delivered in January 2024 followed by BYD Changzhou in December 2024, and BYD Hefei, which was the company’s first owned PCTC. Each of the first three vessels has a capacity of 7,000 units. [My note: current BYD vertical integration marine fleet capacity is ~30k units when including the Shenzhen vessel mentioned above, but does not include capacity through third party charters]
[1] China EV Exports Worldwide Rise 87% Year over Year to 199,836 in November [2025] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-29/china-ev-... | https://archive.today/Q80Zs - December 29, 2025
[2] Chinese EV Manufacturer BYD Takes Delivery of [World's] Largest Capacity Car Carrier - https://maritime-executive.com/article/chinese-ev-manufactur... - April 24th, 2025
(think in systems; US light vehicle TAM is ~18M units/year, global TAM is ~90M units/year; Tesla US sales will finalize at ~600k units for 2025)
It's why the entire S&P 500 teeters on the back of 7 companies without any presently viable paths to profitability that would justify the current valuations.
It's why repeatedly lying for a decade+ made Elon so rich even though the business output and fundamentals never really matched the valuation.
Still doesn't - this valuation is mostly vestigial beliefs that AI would eliminate an entire workforce ("history often rhymes") of drivers and replace car ownership with subscription.
The majority of the performance in the market has little to do with actual material value being produced and everything to do with how much rent finance bros think they can extract from the stock.
https://fortune.com/2025/03/20/howard-lutnick-pumps-tesla-st...
“If you want to learn something on this show tonight, buy Tesla,” Lutnick told Fox News host Jesse Watters.
In this economy we have a billionaire clan selling hot air and backing each other up. The main "achievements" of this administration are in pumping Bitcoin, "AI", cannabis sales and and online gambling.
Two things can happen:
The dream is a bust, and Tesla is worthless.
Or the dream pans out, and almost all other car companies are worth a lot less.
Unless you absolutely want to believe that either self driving is impossible, or Tesla is uniquely unable to achieve it, the valuation is not entirely unwarranted.
Put shortly, Tesla is not a car company, it's a bet on self-driving cars.
Tesla is not the only company to achieve self-driving, and all companies that achieve it share the market with them.
(Or the fourth option, it will take decades for self-driving to take even a significant market of "driving" as humans continue to want to own and drive cars rather than short-term rentals.)
It omits a lot of other scenarios that increase the actual risk of betting on Tesla...
Self-driving becomes a commodity and so there's no unique Tesla win.
Self-driving becomes something only Tesla controls but (in the fleet/rental model) doesn't bring back returns to justify this investment because of extremely high capital, maintenance, regulatory, or other costs.
Self-driving becomes something only Tesla controls but (in the personal-owner model) doesn't bring back returns to justify this investment because it doesn't motivate the entire world to splash out on new vehicles overnight and also doesn't override other existing biases/preferences.
Self-driving is won by someone else (maybe someone with less religious views about Lidar, say) and Tesla no longer can even sell that promise.
Those are just the ones that occur to me in a few minutes!
The real question is if Tesla is uniquely ABLE to achieve it, above others in the market... including new startups or tech/auto-maker partnerships which may yet form.
Tesla has some supply chain innovation, but none of what they do can't be replicated... and Musk's slavish commitment to video as opposed to LIDAR is hobbling them.
They abandoned the hardware most promising to help enable self-driving.
So something isn't being priced correctly.
> No, that is not a typo. $2.9 billion to roughly $7,400.
Ooft. That’s one hell of a write down. Imagine the person that had to do the calculation and report it back.
As in they literally expect to build one more Cybertruck battery and that's it. I'm guessing the excess stock in the Tesla factories covers spares for a few years already.
I wonder when the cancellation will be announced by Tesla? It's all but leaked at this point.
A '99% write down' is such an uncommon term that many people might not register it.
Tax reasons? Keep it on the book and write the loss off against other profit over coming years? No clue how it would work in practice but it sounds taxy.
Teslas aren’t perfect, and they are definitely starting to get a bit dated, but the list you made has precisely zero “great EVs” imho.
Tesla has everyone else beat on charging infrastructure, that is true, but I don't need that except for about 0.5% of the miles I drive (and even there, Tesla's competitors exist and are fine on the routes I'd take).
Fewer new entrants? America has Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, et cetera in the EV native camp, and Waymo in the autonomous-native camp.
If we limit ourselves to export variants, Europe has Polestar. (And by this metric, China has dozens of new entrants in both fields.)
The problem is: they can’t make them cheap enough to compete with China in developing countries. I’m not sure if they even want to do that at this point, the margins there are so low. It’s easier to just rebadge a Chinese car as your own (Renault and GM already do that in SA).
Innovator's dilemma. It's not a coincidence that the two largest EV makers in the world are battery natives [1], and that they outproduce Nos. 3 (Geely), 4 (GM) and 5 (VW) combined.
I think short term focus is far too rewarded in Western companies. In fact that's pretty much the only oversight given to the CEOs. The next quarterly report is all that matters. Even if you wanted to do the right thing and focus on long term goals office politics will ensure that a single down quarter where you focused on long term investments will be punished by those looking to move up. Pump the numbers each and every quarter and don't bother about long term visions since those aren't important for your career, bonuses and golden parachute. The big shareholders too aren't worried about the long term either since shareholders are fluid. Pump this quarter and they can move their investments to the next company before the rot sets in.
The companies that do extremely well in the West are those with singular stable long term leadership where the leaders have authority (or simply majority ownership) to take risks. Berkshire Hathaway, Meta, Nvidia, Amazon, Musks companies, Apple (under Jobs when he was around), etc.
This is partly why Tesla stock price is ridiculous. The competition is the traditional car companies which are extremely poorly run while Tesla is seen as a company run by a singular individual with more authority to take on longer term projects than just the next quarters goal. I think the market isn't correctly taking into account the possible mental illness from Musk but none the less there is merit to the idea that a company with singular stable leadership will be more successful than those which have quarterly focus.
This can be seen in many many examples. I actually don't think SpaceX is particularly well run either but their competition are companies where the only thing that matters for their leadership is the next quarterly report. So it's a case of a poorly run company vs an extremely terribly run company (eg. Boeing). No wonder SpaceX is doing well when their competition is fucking Boeing. Likewise with Amazon vs Walmart, Apple under jobs vs Apple not under Jobs, etc.
China commonly avoids this trap with stakeholder rather than shareholder based governance. This is less than perfect but it's still a league better than the race to the next quarter that Western shareholder governed companies have been doing. Details from an academic point of view: https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2025/06/18/what-chinas-e...
In other words the Western incentives for leadership is pretty broken (except when the leadership has the stability to avoid worrying about these short term incentives). I have the opinion that it's likely to lead to the fall of the West in the long term. We can see China repeatedly winning in various fields, electric cars being a clear example. We can also see in the West whenever we have shareholder based governance the companies have poor long term outcomes.
Zero auto companies outside China, America and Europe have successfully pivoted to EVs. And even within China, it's basically Geely and Changan. All the others are new entrants.
> China commonly avoids this trap with stakeholder rather than shareholder based governance
GM's unions own a significant fraction of its shares. This is a stakeholder system. What you may be referring to is state ownership, not stakeholder-based governance.
And in North America they failed to bring dealers to heal.
It's ok, it's only our children's future at risk.
That's who is sock-puppeting all these misanthropes.
US capitalism was fine with a few wealthy people driving around some novelty luxury cars with EV motors in them. China turned it into an actual mass market product.
Look at solar, an industry that has continual bankruptcies, yet is eating the world. New players grow, die, and get replaced all the time, in a continual churn of new technology.
That Tesla would die a death was not inevitable, merely a choice due to recent years of extremely poor leadership and terrible mismanagment. Even now, Tesla may pull out of the slump and recover! It's doubtful it will ever justify its share price, but it's likely that if it ever gets fairly priced as a company, it could be sold to a US auto major that is regretting it's failure to produce EVs for the international market, and wants to try to catch up. Maybe. That time might have passed too...
It was only once he realized that he has been duped and those will never materialize that the coverage turned negative.
The word on the street is this is only 2 weeks out.
Right after fulfilling the roadster orders.
And right before the Dyson sphere that will power Grok AI is deployed.
And when it's straight up facts easily verifiable from others sources, pretending that it's not based in reality is just sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming "la la la la" which is something that even very few 12 year olds do.
Indeed, they've been stubbornly siding with reality instead of Musk's cheerleaders, stockholders, hype and vapourware.
> pausing whilst they get ready to ramp up cyber cab production lines
Makes me think of the Rick and Morty line: "Wait, maybe he's pulling out his sword to surrender"
The actual facts of this reporting could just as likely be explained by vertical integration, very typical of Tesla, or of a supplier shift due to absurdly high tariffs.
We needed a car again. Sold ours a year ago and got by with Uber, rentals, taxis. Life changed a bit and we needed something more predictable. I was planning to buy something used and boring and didn’t really care what.
My wife asked, “What about an EV?” We can’t charge in our rental garage, but there’s a Tesla Supercharger literally across the street. Took a Tesla test drive mostly out of curiosity.
And… I drove maybe 1% of that drive. The rest was on full self driving (FSD).
Fast forward, I now own a Tesla, and about 99% of my driving is on FSD.
Important context: when we picked it up, it was still on v13. It immediately made an illegal turn and scared some pedestrians in a crosswalk. So yes, I get the concern and skepticism. I had it too.
Then v14.2 landed.
Whatever they changed in that release feels real. It’s not just incremental. It feels like a different system. Elon says “we finally cracked it” (and probably says that all the time), so take that with a grain of salt, but with my very small sample size… it kind of looks like they might have.
Two moments that really stuck with me:
While self-driving, the car clearly anticipated a bus making a massive wide turn into our lane and hung way back until the maneuver was complete. It saw that developing long before I did.
At ~70 mph, I was mid lane-change with my blinker on when a driver towing a large trailer decided to drift into the same lane without checking their blind spot. The Tesla instantly aborted the lane change and smoothly moved back, avoiding what would’ve been a nasty accident. No panic, no hard braking, no drama.
I know this probably sounds like shilling. I’m not interested in the politics and don’t want to defend any of that. But it genuinely feels like stepping into the future, and honestly a much safer way to drive.
I want Rivian, Waymo, whoever to nail this too. I hope they do. But right now, Tesla seems to actually have something that crossed a line from “demo” to “wow, this is real.”
I didn’t expect to come away thinking that. But here we are.
Get rid of the touchscreen and the four-wheel-drive steering and the electrical flush door handles, the hatch thing in the back, smaller wheels, any other electronic features like 120v inverters, etc. solid rear axel would be nice but that would be a major redesign.
this sort of happened. the people who sold these battery materials for the 4680 thought they were making a B2B sale, and they still wound up making a B2C sale - that ended in disaster - in disguise.
It looks like this: https://www.amazon.com/JESSY-3-7-Volt-Rechargeable-Battery/d...
These cells aren't special, they're all off the shelf designs. The 4680 got some marketing spin, but really it was just a bigger form factor with a tweaked chemistry that apparently just didn't work out. And of course that means you can meta-spin the failure as "supply chain collapse", etc...
Obviously, no, you can't just buy a bunch of 21700 cells and stuff them in the car yourself, the balancing and calibration needs to happen in an integrated way and that repair (digging into a 400V DC battery!) is just way too dangerous for amateurs. But the batteries themselves are mature technology and kinda boring.
Distributors usually won't sell to regular consumers, but there are specialized retailers who base their reputation on selling quality goods, usually to the RC, flashlight, and vape market.
He has been promising fully autonomous Teslas since at least 2015 and “level 5” self-driving within a couple of years, yet cars still require human oversight and true autonomy remains elusive.
He said Tesla robotaxis would be on the road by 2020 and then “next year” repeatedly, which never happened.
He promised an affordable $35,000 Model 3 and a cheap family EV, but those never materialized as advertised.
He unveiled the Cybertruck with specific features and price points that did not pan out, and several promised add-ons never appeared.
He set repeated production deadlines for the Tesla Roadster that kept slipping for years.
And his Mars colonization timelines are still nowhere near realistic.
The same cycle keeps repeating, with fans focusing on a few wins while ignoring a long list of missed commitments. At some point it stops being bold vision and starts looking like a confidence game.
But don't let facts get in the way of some good bullshit!
You know, evidence, instead of just something that resides in your brain.
vs
> where the batteries are being used
It's just a different battery cell size with less overhead. 46 by 80 mm instead of e.g. 21 by 70 mm.
So besides speculation, where is the evidence. In particular I'm wondering about production within Tesla, another supplier, anything that suggests there is a model adopting them.
Cyberteack is a flop. This battery has a parallel track and is used elsewhere so conclusions are just basesless .
Because batteries are the only part you can criticize, take a look at the sodium batteries made by CATL:
https://cnevpost.com/2025/12/29/catl-expects-sodium-batterie...
https://carnewschina.com/2025/12/28/catl-confirms-2026-large...
It's a real breakthrough in battery tech. With gasoline you simply can't have this.
(And don't forget that Laserdisk was quite successful for what it tried to do, and that when you buy physical videos today, they're in optical disk format.)