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DrBDH's avatar

Future textbooks will use Musk as an example. His worshippers claim it will be because he’s an engineering genius, but the last two months are showing he’s a reckless, feckless, authoritarian. Thanks for providing the info on his crumbling empire of outdated cars and exploding rockets.

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Geoff Anderson's avatar

"Musk needs to do anything to keep Tesla afloat. So, what does an authoritarian neo-fascist tech bro do in such hard times? Use his bought-for presidential bully to defend his turf for him."

Um, you make the point that TSLA is basically a meme stock. For a long time I had lots of the technorati tell me that Musk and Tesla was a tech play, akin to Google, Microsoft, and Apple, but more on the edge, and that justified the 100+ P/E and the valuation to be worth more than all the other major car companies combined.

That was bullshit then, and it's bullshit now. Tesla is a car company, and car companies run on razor thin margins with tons of seasonality to their market, and fickle customers who expect regular cadences of major updates to refresh the products.

All the Tesla vehicles that actually sell are what Tenpenning and Eberhardt planned with their original business case. Start with the Roadster as a PoC, then a luxury sedan, then an SUV, then the mass market sedan, then a mass market SUV, and finally the commodity market (the sub $25K market).

Musk had all of that loaded but he felt he needed his vision, so that was first the Cybertruck, and then the vaporware of the 600mile range Roadster 2 that he took 1,000 reservations for, at $250K a pop, a cool $250M cash injection that still doesn't have a working prototype.

A lot of the Musk fans are deep in the delusion.

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