The best counter argument to that is that he did manage to predict/make into reality electric vehicles (when going into that industry was crazy) and reusable rockets. If someone makes a thousand moonshot attempts but still succeeds with two that's impressive.
It's really amazing. Anyone still remembers Dojo ? 2 years ago or so they stated that they start to mass produce Dojo and it was supposed to be a top 5 supercomputer in the world by the end of 2024...
The model Y is a genuinely good car... I can't think of an automaker with better software.
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....
Pretty much every electric car has charging stops built-in to the navigation. For some the quality of the data isn’t as high, but it will be there.
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.
If they're not available, then I can't consider them an option?
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.
It's incredible there is something wrong with a group of people completely unable to see when someone is lying to them. And no matter how many times they are lied to, as long as they are rich enough they believe them.
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.
Beyond a certain point it becomes self-reinforcing. You will distort everything else about your world view to support that lie. You will surround yourself with other people who believe it and live in a completely internally consistent reality, surrounded by a vast conspiracy trying to bring you down.
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.
The problem with the stock market is, even if you know with 100% certainty that EM is lying and Tesla is overvalued, you only can cash in that knowledge if the stock price makes contact with reality.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I just don’t get it? Do people hang off his every word just because he’s rich? What are they expecting for this worship… it’s not like he’s going to start throwing $100 bills to people because they agree with him on Twitter
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 of those things we've been told, a high percentage of them have had to do with battery technology. Science is full of discoveries, science at scale doesn't always work out like we've hoped.
Everything I remember about the Jobs RDF was entirely about things like MacWorld Expo presentations. Selling lesser-performing products for more by claiming they did more with things like Photoshop bakeoffs, or with (claimed) style over substance. (I was a big long-term Mac user so I felt like Mac OS was enough of an advantage over Windows for a long time that it wasn't just style over substance.)
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.
Doing a quick bit of searching based on the 4680 makes me think that there has been or will be a change from NMC811 to LFP chemistry in the 4680, including one article talking about changing to US and European-based in-house manufacturing and reducing dependence on China.
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."
A headline that actually undersells the article. The 2,900,000,000 $ deal to 7,400 $ is not just a 99% reduction, it is actually over a 99.999% reduction. I guess that is one way to get the "march of nines" they keep promising.
Reuters earlier this year - "The development of the 4680 battery has been facing troubles, with the company losing 70% to 80% of the cathodes in test production compared with conventional battery makers, which lose fewer than 2% of their components to manufacturing defects, the report said."
The company L&F referenced in this article were supplying said cathode material.
Tesla stock dipped a little today it seems but it's still up 8 percent over the month. I really don't understand those investors and how they price a struggling company so highly.
> I really don't understand those investors and how they price a struggling company so highly.
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.
Tesla is probably the only EV maker with declining sales for the last two years. Quite a feat in a booming market, and remarkable considering that the stock already has a few orders of magnitude of growth priced in.
Ah, but you missed the pivot, Tesla is no longer an EV maker, it's now a robotics company.
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.
I really, really doubt FSD is the limiter of European sales. It's pricing and competition. The US car market is laughably uncompetitive, with most manufacturers opting to make luxury landboats. It's easy to compete when all your competitors refuse to introduce an EV under, like, 50 grand.
The declining sales is a concern. Was curious though so I looked it up and Tesla is currently selling more than Volkswagen, Ford, Rivian, Mercedes, and Toyota combined. Interesting.
The big dog is BYD though. Twice as many as 2nd place Tesla.
> Was curious though so I looked it up and Tesla is currently selling more than Volkswagen, Ford, Rivian, Mercedes, and Toyota combined. Interesting.
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.
there was a rush to buy electric cars in the US for as long as the $7500 incentive was in place, so the Q3 2025 number if inflated; it's a pull forward effect.
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.
there are around 140 EV companies in china competing very aggressively, they have excess capacity and are flooding the world market with cheap EVs, tough for Tesla to have a healthy margin in that environment
It's a myth that China heavily subsidises its EV industry. See e.g. this Bloomberg article titled "China Can't Cut EV Subsidies It Isn't Paying": https://archive.ph/5olix
From the article that you added in addition to the statements below, I don't think BYD is succeeding only by subsidies. I'm solely stating that they're heavily subsidized. China has a strategy where most western nations don't appear to have one.
----
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.
Lately I've realized that "Chinese subsidies" are psychologically useful for people outside China to believe in, as cope to handwave away their own failing industries. Solar panels aren't really subsidized in China either.
China has a plan. It subsidizes technology that it sees as important. There's nothing wrong with that per se.
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.
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.
Look at the free cash flow, and the situation looks maybe even worse. They're basically not worth much, if anything, from a free cash flow perspective.
> It has delivered a better ROI in the same way a ponzi scheme can deliver higher ROI.
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.
Mechanics is exactly the same - it's not Tesla revenues driving returns for investors, it's new investors putting their money into the stock at very high price.
The cars are higher quality and, more importantly, cheaper. US manufacturers can't make a cheap car to save their lives. The average age of cars on US roads is now 13 years, nobody can afford new cars.
There's a huge market opportunity here that all our manufacturers are missing, seemingly on purpose. BYD, and others, would absolutely sweep the competition.
> In a Ponzi-scheme, there is no real product (or it is irrelevant)
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.
Yeah, the target keeps moving. Earlier it was “it’s not a car company, it’s a battery company”. Then it was all about FSD and robotaxis. Now that that is not working out, it’s going to be a robot company.
The actual underlying product, the cars, don’t match the crazy valuation.
Stock valuations are not a democracy of public opinion, they are the product of investors putting their money into the stock.
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.
Can't win against irrational exuberance and fraud that isn't prosecuted in the capital markets ("voting machine vs weighing machine"). Just have to wait for failure of the enterprise, equity wipeout, and recapitalization under better human management (if you're optimizing for a company that actually manufacturers and sells a product vs a shell to pump a stock and enrich the board members who enable him with a lack of corporate governance). The factories and Supercharger network will remain intact under a reorganization.
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.")
(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)
If you want to understand how Tesla bulls pump the stock, check out any of the numerous videos of Dan Ives you will find on YouTube. He is regularly invited on CNBC and other financial new media as well as on financial blogs/vlogs. Here is one recent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecLsZ4bkW6Q
have because despite the story that most people try to tell about the market and the economy... in the late- and post-ZIRP era, it's been mostly based on Hype, Feelings, and Vibes.
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.
TSLA exposure is a call option on Musk succeeding (with success criteria being "TSLA price go up") regardless of reality. SpaceX is buying up Cybertrucks; is it illegal? Will anyone do anything about it? That sort of success (quasi fraud). The product is the stock and the hope there is a greater fool who will buy it eventually.
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.")
The "new economy" is full of self-dealing. That's the result of loose (or non-existing) regulations on monopolies. It all starts with Wall Street controlling stocks on thousands of large companies that are ultimately owned by small groups of the same shareholders. Now it's evolving to large sectors owned by fewer and fewer people.
I don’t think self-dealing is new. Although it was eye-opening, when I learned that BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity all own 5-10% of every company and competition between the companies they hold is not meaningful. Everyone just has to have nice steady predictable returns and nobody is allowed to innovate too far ahead of anyone else for fear of devaluing the real bosses’ other assets.
I don’t even know what to call the kind of system we have.
That is certainly a contributing factor, which Matt Stoller has documented robustly in his newsletter "Big" [1] [2], as well as the More Perfect Union org [3] [4].
All BEV sales, not just Tesla, are tanking, at least in the USA. Ford and and others have retreated on their plans as well. Tesla may be worse off because of Musk's extracurricular antics but BEVs are not selling well.
In the US, which is due to policy, which is temporary. The rest of the world remains very hungry for affordable electric vehicles [1], which only China seems interested in producing at scale. Once that manufacturing capacity and distribution systems are spun up (BYD has its own car carrier for exports, the BYD Shenzhen, for example [2]), it will remain in production. "Can Tesla survive until regime change?" is an important question for those with economic exposure to it. Ironically, its peril is entirely self inflicted.
> 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]
“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.
Because you're getting a biased storyline both here and over there. The 4680 supply chain isn't a requirement for anything to succeed at Tesla. The product still sells, just with lower profit per unit. At best, it marks the removal of the current Cybertruck battery pack chemistry. Everything else about the future of Tesla is (as always) clickbait speculation.
The promise of self driving is what's driving Tesla stock.
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.)
A more likely outcome is that all major auto manufacturers offer self driving.
Ford and Mercedes already have Level 3 systems. Toyota is working with Waymo. Several Chinese automakers have self driving, at various levels of quality.
It's going to become a routine feature of cars. Tesla isn't even the leader.
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!
Framing it as unwarranted to not think "Tesla is uniquely unable to achieve it"...? Seriously?
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.
$7,386 seems to be roughly one Cybertruck batteries worth (the only vehicle that uses that battery).
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.
> Maybe they did this to keep the contract with a symbolic value;
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.
Electrek’s ‘reporting’ has proven so one-sided that I take all their stories with a bucket of salt. Even if the truck has been a flop I doubt their whole battery program has been. Perhaps they’re rejigging suppliers and pausing whilst they get ready to ramp up cyber cab production lines
And what evidence do you base those assumptions on? According to the journalists at electrek despite Tesla having capacity to manufacture 250k cybertrucks per year, they're only selling 20-25k per year
I actually get a kick out of Eletrek’s roasting of Elon and Tesla, but if you read a few of their articles, it’s clear they don’t like him. Lots of opinions and editorializing in the articles. I have no problem with that, you just have to realize where they are coming from and base your interpretation accordingly
The reason for that is actually very funny. Electrek guy (Fred) was one of the main propagandist for Tesla's cult - he 'earned' 2 free Tesla Roadsters for his convincing enough people to buy a Tesla.
It was only once he realized that he has been duped and those will never materialize that the coverage turned negative.
When somebody is siding with reality, especially a media source, that's a reason to listen to them more not less.
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.
I honestly don’t follow this much but I doubt that production ramp up is the Cybercab’s long pole when they’ll need a significant number of market approvals for FSD to reach critical mass.
The haters on here are ridiculous. If everyone who ever had a product that failed in the market was called a fraud on HN then probably almost everyone would be. SpaceX failed on their first three launches. All the haters here would have voted to shut it all down. Glad Elon's able to recover from business failures without going to the HN comments section to find out what he should do next.
The future of electrification is at risk because the market chose to bet on TSLA. Many companies backpedaled on EV and the POTUS is making a major push towards oil (including invading Venezuela). The future looks grim.
All the traditional car companies in the west failed.
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.
All the established brands (except for maybe Nissan and some parts of GM) wanted their cake and eat it, too. They wanted electrification while still holding onto high margins. So they made almost their EVs all sit in the luxury segment.
And in North America they failed to bring dealers to heal.
VW, Mercedes, BMW, Peugeot, Polestar all make great EVs and they absolutely dominate the European market. They built manufacturing capacity in EU first for the domestic market, but are not competitive on the US market because of Trumps tariffs. China produces very cheap, they‘re still competitive even with tariffs. European car companies either have to build EV manufacturing capacity in the US first, or hope for the next administration.
The "theft" they are really worried about is the loss of oil industry profits.
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.
Only investor's share prices at risk, there's no risk to the future of electrification.
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...
i don't understand americans, two years ago i wanted a tesla, now i want a byd, you've let down the only american company competing against the chinese, all because of trump and politics
Elon's personality has been known before he ever came out in support of Trump. Think back to when he called someone trying to rescue kids a "pedo" because they ignored his idea of building a submarine. Moreover, his inability to deliver on promises has been a well-known fact for years.
I think you're underselling what Trump and Musk has done to the stability of Democracy in the US. Aside from all that, there are other American car manufacturers with great EVs: Mustang Mach-E, Chevy Equinox/Bolt/Blazer, etc. Not saying that BYD isn't better, but comparing to Tesla, there is plenty of US competition.
Aren’t shaped prismatic cells the current state of the art anyway? The article mentioned BMW and Rivian using this size of cylindrical cell but I believe the latest from GM, Hyundai, and VW are all prismatic after the earlier designs were either pouch cells or cylindrical.
Worth noting this Branden Flasch video from a year ago talking about how the charging speed on the 4680 pack tesla Model Y was uncompetitively slow and arguably shouldn't have been sold: https://youtu.be/eQeziVkRwSA
The thing you made up sure seems odd yes! The facts are that it is not currently used in any other vehicle and we can assume by the fact that the contract was written down by 99% that there is no plan to do so in the near term, otherwise they'd actually, you know, need the batteries.
But don't let facts get in the way of some good bullshit!
A little tangential, but seeing now the name of the steering-wheel-less cabs, why'd they name it Cyber{truck,cab} anyway? Doesn't it imply we use them to drive through the internet?
The big lie that you've all been sold is that Tesla has any kind of battery technology at all. Outside of repackaging Panasonic (in America) and other batteries (abroad), Tesla has dabbled in a few experiments and they all failed.
I actually did want a lighter, 2 Wheel Drive Cybertruck (for $40,000). The "Long Range" trim was close. But it was actually $70k not the $60k they were saying.
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.
what would it look like to directly sell EV batteries to consumers? what would have to happen?
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.
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.
Note that you should never buy raw cells from Amazon. They are always fake or under-spec. At the very least, this seller claims "Multiple Protections" when this is a fully unprotected cell.
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.
FWIW, this is definitely the opinion among Ego tool users on reddit. The aftermarket stuff comes with a discount and the possibility of a free surprise inside every box.
Musk increasingly feels like a charlatan selling snake oil. He is great at hype and storytelling, not so great at execution. Big promises, missed timelines, excuses reframed as genius.
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.
I don't want to pile on you as I see you've already taken a hit - so I'll leave the voting out of this. But consider how many people you knew in the 80s/90s with a Laser Disc player. It was very niche. You likely had one techy nerd friend, or you had a friend that had a dad that was always buying "the next big thing". I think I knew ONE GUY that bought a laser disc player. Contrast that with just Tesla (not even EVs). You likely know 4 or 5 friends or family that own one. The model Y was the best selling vehicle last year. Whether that trend lasts into the 2050s, none of us can know. But calling it a failure? I just don't see it.
Electric cars were a failure, their market share tanked back in the 1910s. So a vague "electric cars failed in the market" is technically true. However, that past failure is quite distinct from the current electric car thing.
The technology is fine, it's the leadership. Plenty of other countries are rolling out EVs fine, we (the US) just can't seem to build out the charging infrastructure or standardize on a charging port.
(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.)
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.
The question - is Musk lying on purpose, or is this more 90-90 rule where he made (obviously wrong) assumptions based on current progress?
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 care actually attractive.
https://thedriven.io/2023/06/22/tesla-to-start-building-its-...
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.
In an EV it's a necessity.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuDSz06BT2g
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.
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.
But the stock keeps hitting new all time highs.
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.
They mistakenly believe, like temporarily embarrassed millionaires/capitalists [1], that they are actually in the winning group.
[1] _ https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck#Disputed
It's available! Everyone in the US can go to Austin and get a ride in a Tesla robotaxi!
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.
Both SpaceX and Tesla are accomplishments if you consider where their competitors are.
If not for crew dragon, the US would be begging Russia for seats to the ISS still. Is that your preferred outcome?
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...
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.
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.
----
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, sure.
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.
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)
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.
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.
On the contrary, Teslas remarkably high stock price means it's less likely to go up and a big correction is more likely.
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.
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.
It doesn't mean that Tesla stock won't crash unless it actually delivers a Holy Grail. Which is supremely unlikely
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)
> "Short it then"
I can smell your personal finance through the screen.
Our so-called "gdp" is mostly rent and legal ponzi schemes
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.
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)
I don’t even know what to call the kind of system we have.
[1] https://www.thebignewsletter.com/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=thebignewsletter.com
[3] https://perfectunion.us/
[4] https://substack.perfectunion.us/
> 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)
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!
They abandoned the hardware most promising to help enable self-driving.
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.
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.
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.
It was only once he realized that he has been duped and those will never materialize that the coverage turned negative.
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"
It really isn't. BYD is progressively becoming ubiquitous here (large South America city)
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.)
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.
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...
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.
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.
But don't let facts get in the way of some good bullshit!
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.
https://www.slate.auto/en
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.
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.)