Tesla has Apple-like brand value without the Apple-like manufacturing efficiency or profit margin. For Tesla's stock price to be worth the current value they need to at some point be making industry-high profit on every car sold - so far they're barely breaking even on the model 3s.
They've _always_ fought against the odds and always looked like a bad bet if you only looked at numbers. The thing is nobody knows how far that brand value - which maybe only 2 or 3 other companies have, can take you: it's the confounding factor when it comes to 'Tesla predictions'. Fans probably buy into the Musk brand while skeptics underestimate just how far brand can take a company.
Funding shouldn't be problem for Tesla for the next couple of years, and neither should selling cars that they've made. But the so called production ramp up has been postponed for a year now.
If they face two or three more 'unexpected hurdles' in manufacturing and have an autopilot scandal or two, they are in trouble once Merc/BMW/Lexus/Audi start coming up with electric cars by 2020ish. That's the real danger. If they can mass produce model 3s by 2020, they should be fine.
Musk's companies are putting better rockets in space than NASA. Optimism does get a premium sometimes, because sometimes it actually pulls through. Frankly I'll root for them to succeed over a company based around showing me the last product I reviewed on amazon again. It shows we're capable of so much more.
There's no need to compare Apple with Tesla. It's like comparing apples and monkeys. They're two completely different beasts.
Everyone knows building cars is a capital intensive business. You need to build expensive factories for every new line you want to roll out. It takes time. I think Elon has been whipping his employees a bit harder in the last few days - and I'm confident they'll be able to turn the situation around. All their jobs depend on it...
Tesla is fundamentally trying to change a 100 year old industry and get cars off fossil fuels. If Apple never existed we'd have uglier mobile phones. If Tesla never existed the switch to electric cars might well be delayed by a decade.
Perhaps people forget the scale of the Gigafactory and how important batteries will be over the next 100 years.
Let's see when Apple starts giving all their patents away for free.
Until the recent declines they were already worth ~20% more than Ford or GM. The market cap had already baked in massive success, but the financing necessary to get them there was dependent on an every rising share value. A virtuous cycle until it becomes vicious.
There’s a floor for the stock value: the value of the mark to a Chinese upstart EV company (of which there are already a dozen producing a higher volume than Tesla).
You reminded me ... christ, can you imagine what a disaster an Apple car would have been had they continued pursuing it? Two companies competing in the same already-challenging space....
> the so called production ramp up has been postponed for a year now
In what sense?
Elon originally said they were going to try to start production in July 2017. He also said they’d probably miss that date due to supply chain failures, but that he needed to set a date so suppliers could set plans.
To say they delayed the ramp by a year, that would mean they were delivering the first units in Summer 2018. They’re obviously ahead of that so it would seem to me the delay is much less than a year.
It is clear that Tesla is failing to deliver any competitive advantage besides its early start.
It has failed to achieve what is the standard baseline for mass production of cars today, a sustained production rate within controlled quality parameters, and failed to differentiate in other areas, falling behind most other automakers (and non-automakers) in innovation (especially autonomous driving).
There is still hope that it will solve the Model 3 problems, but at this point (including the desperate "volunteers to prove the haters wrong" email) it seems more and more unlikely.
If they’re failing to deliver any competitive advantages, why are there still no competitive cars available from any other company, or even just announced?
So far the closest thing is the Bolt, and it’s not all that close.
> It has failed to achieve what is the standard baseline for mass production of cars today, a sustained production rate within controlled quality parameters
Which is ironic given that Tesla is in the old Fremont facility where Toyota schooled GM on how to do exactly that ...
I don’t see evidence of the failure. As far as I’ve seen, Tesla has met and then exceeded every single production target they’ve set, including Model 3 production start (which was on time even, last summer). Some were delayed by _years_ but they hit them.
The most recent goal they have set is 5000/week. It was originally slated for Q4 2017. So that date has slipped now by at least 3 months.
I doubt they’ll hit it in Q2. Maybe they won’t hit it until 2019.
But all available evidence suggests the will hit it. Every previous goal was met, why would this be the first one that isn’t?
Tesla high valuation is the only thing that has prevented it getting bought by one of the big car companies, and that's a good thing. GM used to buy smaller competitors to take them off the market and just keep the name as a token of the brand. Hundreds of players from the first half of the 20th century got swallowed into a few brands.
Tesla has pushed the car industry forward decades in a few years. The big players were just competing in price and size of vehicles and never taking risks. Elon Musk has the vision and charisma to execute and move Tesla to the forefront of innovation, keeping everybody else in its toes trying to catch up. I don't think the market cap will fall anytime soon for this company.
> I don't think the market cap will fall anytime soon for this company.
Really? The stock is down about 20% since the beginning of this month. It already happened.
I want Tesla to succeed. I think the company has done a lot to make electric cars mainstream, at least in people's minds if not in their driveways. But I see no justification for Tesla having a market cap in the same range as GM, which sells 10 million cars per year, or Ford, which sells about 7 million cars per year. Tesla sells about 100k cars per year and is burning through money pretty fast. It might have made a positive contribution to society, but at the end of the day it's a money-losing company and the stock price is going to reflect that.
> Tesla high valuation is the only thing that has prevented it getting bought by one of the big car companies
I don't think so. Musk doesn't seem like the type of person to compromise on a vision for a (relatively) small buyout. He'd have probably declined if given an offer.
I think at the end of the day they are solving a really hard problem and being one of the few players in the space actually innovating. There is a lot of appreciation and I think customers and fans of Musk and the brand will HODL. They need to get through the hiccups and learn as they go, but ultimately it's a space that has a future.
It's a space that has a future, sure. But the thing that kills more companies than anything else is failure to execute effectively.
Tesla is failing at manufacturing. They have been for a while but they got away with it because their innovation was perceived as far enough ahead. With Nissan, GM, Jaguar, BMW, Porsche, etc. now in the EV space and Uber, GM, Waymo, etc. in the SDC space they have meaningful competition.
They have survived on innovative products for a while...they are trying to continue that with the Semi and with the power wall, time will tell if they can actually build them - which is a precursor to just about everything else.
The mood on this site is funny you never worked on software project that delivered late? Did it mean that your company with multi-billion market cap was immediately doomed? The challenge they face now is big but on this road they already faced many challenges.
Car companies and software companies have completely different capital requirements and cash-flow constraints.
Tesla is not a small software startup. They are a 40-60 billion industrial manufacturing company that is burning through its already-dwindled cash reserves while struggling with manufacturing bottlenecks. Coincidentally, said manufacturing is Tesla's sole method of generating revenue. They already have massive amounts of outstanding debt. Even before Moody's downgrade, it was not going to be easy to finance.
In general, comparing a massive company's notable operational issues to "software project delivered late" is nonsensical. If your software company's sole source of revenue is selling packaged units of your software and your company is continuously showing that it's unable to deliver those units of software in time, creating massive cash shortages - then yes, the market cap of your software company is going to suffer.
Technology is not the only space where Tesla is innovating. Tesla has also very innovative financing and they are really starting to stretching it.
Tesla made financial bet that they deliver high volumes of Model 3. It does not matter if Model 3 is good car and customers love it. Tesla must ramp up their production very fast or Tesla runs out of cheap money.
Tesla has no problems with customers. They love the car with passion. It's the investors who will choke Musk to death later this year if he has to ask more money to continue with struggling production. He will get the money but it will have high interest rate and Tesla stock will come down 30-50 percent. Currently Tesla is producing 20% of it's target. Their production curve is not growing steeply enough. In fact it's slowing down.
ps. High flying arguments that don't look into details of each case, like "Never bet against Musk" or others have solved technical difficulties too, are not really useful for investor.
To everyone saying “they’re just about to ramp up production, then they’ll be fine”, keep in mind that might be “out of the frying pan and into the fire”. There are already some serious questions about quality control at Tesla, and a lot of suggestions that they are cutting corners to meet these production deadlines, which will come back to hurt.
> There are already some serious questions about quality control at Tesla,
Quality control specifically for the Model 3 or quality control for the Model S? Clearly the Model 3 quality isn't good enough right now, but it seems quite likely that given time they should be able to bring it up to Model S levels. I don't know if that's good enough, but I think it might be. Will Tesla have time to reach that quality level? I think they probably will, but they may have to raise more money to pull it off. And they may have to raise that money at a less than favorable valuation. However, the idea that they won't be able to raise money at all seems unfounded to me, just like the implied notion that they can't fix the quality problems.
There's a big difference between "Tesla is struggling" (yes they are, and it's not even the first time) and "Tesla is going to fail".
I'll tell you when I buy a car the first thing I look at is how many millimeters between the door panels. Nothing else makes me happier than to have a car with 2 millimeter gap between door panels. Driving Experience, fuel economy, range, safety - those are always secondary to 2 mm door panel spaces. And that is what people mean when they talk about Tesla's low-quality they mean 3 4 5 mm door panel spaces...
A year has hardly gone by over the last seven or eight, where the crowd hasn't largely proclaimed Tesla would die, and die very soon. Analysts were overwhelmingly bearish at every step. Competitors said none of what Tesla has accomplished could be done, including the Model S period.
I keep seeing people say that Tesla is dead in three months. They have ~$3 billion in cash with the ability to dilute at will. The irrational, negative emotionalism that's being directed at Tesla right now is incredible. I can't imagine where it's coming from or why. There's almost a lust for them to fail. Nobody cheered for the death of Fiat or Jaguar like this.
"If it bleeds, it leads." News media will rarely say something positive about any tech company, probably even worse so than the general bias towards negativity
Looking at the last week, I count at least five positive articles about tech companies, including Apple's new iPad, Waymo's expansion, an AI VFX startup, Dropbox's IPO, and Safari's picture-in-picture mode.
A big issue around Tesla is hype. Don’t get me wrong - FOR Tesla it’s great (boosts demand, brings in investment money) - but for those of us watching, it makes it hard to see what’s going on.
To be honest with y’all, I have no clue how amazing or horrible Tesla is doing. Headline after headline just pumps the hype and makes connecting the dots and fitting real performance into a context harder and harder. I do get value from others’ speculation as it helps me see things from new perspectives, however each new hyped story seems to obfuscate what’s really happening.
Obits for Tesla are premature. The model 3 won't have any direct competition for two or three years. Other EVs on the market are a generation behind, and have production numbers that are a fraction of today's Model 3 numbers.
On the other hand, to be worth its valuation, Tesla probably needs more than a year of uncontested dominance. So even if Tesla retains all the pre-sold Model 3 customers and is on track to fulfill those orders, "too late" could come sometime later this year.
NYTimes doesn't truly paywall anything. You get a finite number of articles each month but easy to get around that with incognito mode. That being said, I'll probably subscribe soon.
>And it was Autopilot that set off a race to develop advanced driver-assistance systems that can guide cars under certain circumstances and actively prevent collisions — though Tesla’s technology appears to have been surpassed by the self-driving systems from other companies, including G.M. and the Google spinoff Waymo.
Is this in any way true? My understanding was that Waymo, or even the DARPA grand challenges, were what kicked self driving cars off, and the driver assist features were picking up steam before Tesla.
A bit of both; there were self-driving cars before Tesla, but Tesla was the first to commercially field any kind of "autopilot" feature, spurring on the existing competition
It's a lot harder for a company to die than people think. Aol is still around. Bankruptcy is, by design, not a death sentence, and Tesla can always use that escape route if they need to.
For now it seems that investors will continue to pour money into them and they won't need to.
Bankruptcy is a death sentence if you rely on suppliers that won't sell you the supplies you need because they fear they won't get paid for them. This is what happened to Toys R Us.
You're right that it's not a death sentence because the brand/trademarks have value and are part of the bankruptcy process. But many companies that still exist in name aren't "really" the original companies. Such as Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, Blockbuster Video, or Atari, to name a few.
Seriously. I bought a Renault Zoe (in europe). What the F has Tesla to offer to maintain that kind of valuation?
I can find zero compelling reasons to by a Tesla compared to the Renault. Oh and also, I can't buy a Tesla at this date at that price.
I don't know about Tesla, so many people are saying how it's going to fall apart, but I'm fairly optimistic. But, maybe that's because I'm both a Tesla owner and stock holder?
I feel like Tesla is spending money like it's going out of style, because it's building a new industry. They have a great network of charging stations and are expanding it extensively. A year ago when I got a Model S I drove it 2K miles each way to the family's place (CO to NC). And honestly it went fairly smoothly. Since then the charging network has expanded dramatically.
When I first got the Model S, my fiance thought about taking a road trip from CO to Nebraska, but because I got the cheap model, I could make it to Nebraska because it was downhill, but I couldn't make it back uphill. But, they've dramatically enhanced the I-80 superchargers.
Ok, so if you are building a new infrastructure, how much money spend is too much? How do you know if spending money like it's going out of style isn't going to end up in returns later? Tesla is building out a great infrastructure for charging, nationwide. One of Tesla's products, and one of it's determiners for success, is the charging network. When I got my car, Dec 2016, we started on a trip cross country with the kids, and I was like "I only give us a 50% chance of success". Between not knowing how charging was going to work, and not knowing if the kids were going to get into a fight because of being cramped in the back. I expected we wouldn't event make it out of Colorado before something turned us back. But, we made it there and back fairly smoothly. Had to learn some things about electric cars, but it worked great.
I'm really a car guy, and I love the sound of a V8. But, the Tesla is amazing. Could I have gotten something better from Audi for $75K (about my spend after incentives)? Probably. Do they have better self driving? Probably. But, with the maintenance on my A8 that the Tesla replaced, it's cheaper to run the Tesla than it was my Audi. Which, honestly, isn't a high bar to reach. My 2008 Audi A8 was a better car in many ways, as far as toys. But, the Tesla I've put over 20K miles on, with $0 for maintenance.
I think Tesla is building the infrastructure of the future, and they are spending money now to make something of huge value in the future.
That statement is pretty irrelevant, though, when it comes to whether or not Tesla can be a going concern. There were tons of railroad companies in the late 1800s that "built the future", and same thing with telecom companies in the late 1990s. While we're still reaping the benefits of those investments today, almost all of those original companies went bankrupt.
Exactly what "new industry" are they building? They're just selling people movers that get you from A to B. They're an EV Mercedes of the 21st century... The implementation is interesting, but the idea is old and tired.
[+] [-] otalp|8 years ago|reply
They've _always_ fought against the odds and always looked like a bad bet if you only looked at numbers. The thing is nobody knows how far that brand value - which maybe only 2 or 3 other companies have, can take you: it's the confounding factor when it comes to 'Tesla predictions'. Fans probably buy into the Musk brand while skeptics underestimate just how far brand can take a company.
Funding shouldn't be problem for Tesla for the next couple of years, and neither should selling cars that they've made. But the so called production ramp up has been postponed for a year now.
If they face two or three more 'unexpected hurdles' in manufacturing and have an autopilot scandal or two, they are in trouble once Merc/BMW/Lexus/Audi start coming up with electric cars by 2020ish. That's the real danger. If they can mass produce model 3s by 2020, they should be fine.
[+] [-] Consultant32452|8 years ago|reply
To quote Peter Thiel, "Never bet against Elon Musk."
[+] [-] taurath|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonu|8 years ago|reply
Everyone knows building cars is a capital intensive business. You need to build expensive factories for every new line you want to roll out. It takes time. I think Elon has been whipping his employees a bit harder in the last few days - and I'm confident they'll be able to turn the situation around. All their jobs depend on it...
[+] [-] icc97|8 years ago|reply
Perhaps people forget the scale of the Gigafactory and how important batteries will be over the next 100 years.
Let's see when Apple starts giving all their patents away for free.
[+] [-] krrrh|8 years ago|reply
There’s a floor for the stock value: the value of the mark to a Chinese upstart EV company (of which there are already a dozen producing a higher volume than Tesla).
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kisstheblade|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|8 years ago|reply
In what sense?
Elon originally said they were going to try to start production in July 2017. He also said they’d probably miss that date due to supply chain failures, but that he needed to set a date so suppliers could set plans.
To say they delayed the ramp by a year, that would mean they were delivering the first units in Summer 2018. They’re obviously ahead of that so it would seem to me the delay is much less than a year.
[+] [-] ucaetano|8 years ago|reply
It has failed to achieve what is the standard baseline for mass production of cars today, a sustained production rate within controlled quality parameters, and failed to differentiate in other areas, falling behind most other automakers (and non-automakers) in innovation (especially autonomous driving).
There is still hope that it will solve the Model 3 problems, but at this point (including the desperate "volunteers to prove the haters wrong" email) it seems more and more unlikely.
[+] [-] mikeash|8 years ago|reply
So far the closest thing is the Bolt, and it’s not all that close.
[+] [-] bsder|8 years ago|reply
Which is ironic given that Tesla is in the old Fremont facility where Toyota schooled GM on how to do exactly that ...
[+] [-] tytytytytytytyt|8 years ago|reply
What other car has better autonomous driving?
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|8 years ago|reply
The most recent goal they have set is 5000/week. It was originally slated for Q4 2017. So that date has slipped now by at least 3 months.
I doubt they’ll hit it in Q2. Maybe they won’t hit it until 2019.
But all available evidence suggests the will hit it. Every previous goal was met, why would this be the first one that isn’t?
[+] [-] kwelstr|8 years ago|reply
Tesla has pushed the car industry forward decades in a few years. The big players were just competing in price and size of vehicles and never taking risks. Elon Musk has the vision and charisma to execute and move Tesla to the forefront of innovation, keeping everybody else in its toes trying to catch up. I don't think the market cap will fall anytime soon for this company.
[+] [-] twblalock|8 years ago|reply
Really? The stock is down about 20% since the beginning of this month. It already happened.
I want Tesla to succeed. I think the company has done a lot to make electric cars mainstream, at least in people's minds if not in their driveways. But I see no justification for Tesla having a market cap in the same range as GM, which sells 10 million cars per year, or Ford, which sells about 7 million cars per year. Tesla sells about 100k cars per year and is burning through money pretty fast. It might have made a positive contribution to society, but at the end of the day it's a money-losing company and the stock price is going to reflect that.
[+] [-] Mononokay|8 years ago|reply
I don't think so. Musk doesn't seem like the type of person to compromise on a vision for a (relatively) small buyout. He'd have probably declined if given an offer.
[+] [-] s2g|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattsfrey|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avs733|8 years ago|reply
Tesla is failing at manufacturing. They have been for a while but they got away with it because their innovation was perceived as far enough ahead. With Nissan, GM, Jaguar, BMW, Porsche, etc. now in the EV space and Uber, GM, Waymo, etc. in the SDC space they have meaningful competition.
They have survived on innovative products for a while...they are trying to continue that with the Semi and with the power wall, time will tell if they can actually build them - which is a precursor to just about everything else.
[+] [-] qaq|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ultraluminous|8 years ago|reply
In general, comparing a massive company's notable operational issues to "software project delivered late" is nonsensical. If your software company's sole source of revenue is selling packaged units of your software and your company is continuously showing that it's unable to deliver those units of software in time, creating massive cash shortages - then yes, the market cap of your software company is going to suffer.
[+] [-] Nokinside|8 years ago|reply
Tesla made financial bet that they deliver high volumes of Model 3. It does not matter if Model 3 is good car and customers love it. Tesla must ramp up their production very fast or Tesla runs out of cheap money.
Tesla has no problems with customers. They love the car with passion. It's the investors who will choke Musk to death later this year if he has to ask more money to continue with struggling production. He will get the money but it will have high interest rate and Tesla stock will come down 30-50 percent. Currently Tesla is producing 20% of it's target. Their production curve is not growing steeply enough. In fact it's slowing down.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/
ps. High flying arguments that don't look into details of each case, like "Never bet against Musk" or others have solved technical difficulties too, are not really useful for investor.
[+] [-] Analemma_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curtis|8 years ago|reply
Quality control specifically for the Model 3 or quality control for the Model S? Clearly the Model 3 quality isn't good enough right now, but it seems quite likely that given time they should be able to bring it up to Model S levels. I don't know if that's good enough, but I think it might be. Will Tesla have time to reach that quality level? I think they probably will, but they may have to raise more money to pull it off. And they may have to raise that money at a less than favorable valuation. However, the idea that they won't be able to raise money at all seems unfounded to me, just like the implied notion that they can't fix the quality problems.
There's a big difference between "Tesla is struggling" (yes they are, and it's not even the first time) and "Tesla is going to fail".
[+] [-] systemBuilder|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omarforgotpwd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|8 years ago|reply
I keep seeing people say that Tesla is dead in three months. They have ~$3 billion in cash with the ability to dilute at will. The irrational, negative emotionalism that's being directed at Tesla right now is incredible. I can't imagine where it's coming from or why. There's almost a lust for them to fail. Nobody cheered for the death of Fiat or Jaguar like this.
[+] [-] danielfoster|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wpasc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freehunter|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wpietri|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yorby|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arthurofbabylon|8 years ago|reply
To be honest with y’all, I have no clue how amazing or horrible Tesla is doing. Headline after headline just pumps the hype and makes connecting the dots and fitting real performance into a context harder and harder. I do get value from others’ speculation as it helps me see things from new perspectives, however each new hyped story seems to obfuscate what’s really happening.
[+] [-] Zigurd|8 years ago|reply
On the other hand, to be worth its valuation, Tesla probably needs more than a year of uncontested dominance. So even if Tesla retains all the pre-sold Model 3 customers and is on track to fulfill those orders, "too late" could come sometime later this year.
[+] [-] opencl|8 years ago|reply
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1114853_china-plug-in-e...
[+] [-] carlivar|8 years ago|reply
$900m in bonds due in early 2019
Loss of full $7500 federal tax credit probably in Q2 2018 but definitely Q3.
[+] [-] jaimex2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carlivar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imh|8 years ago|reply
Is this in any way true? My understanding was that Waymo, or even the DARPA grand challenges, were what kicked self driving cars off, and the driver assist features were picking up steam before Tesla.
[+] [-] BariumBlue|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] smt88|8 years ago|reply
For now it seems that investors will continue to pour money into them and they won't need to.
[+] [-] carlivar|8 years ago|reply
You're right that it's not a death sentence because the brand/trademarks have value and are part of the bankruptcy process. But many companies that still exist in name aren't "really" the original companies. Such as Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, Blockbuster Video, or Atari, to name a few.
[+] [-] kisstheblade|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linsomniac|8 years ago|reply
I feel like Tesla is spending money like it's going out of style, because it's building a new industry. They have a great network of charging stations and are expanding it extensively. A year ago when I got a Model S I drove it 2K miles each way to the family's place (CO to NC). And honestly it went fairly smoothly. Since then the charging network has expanded dramatically.
When I first got the Model S, my fiance thought about taking a road trip from CO to Nebraska, but because I got the cheap model, I could make it to Nebraska because it was downhill, but I couldn't make it back uphill. But, they've dramatically enhanced the I-80 superchargers.
Ok, so if you are building a new infrastructure, how much money spend is too much? How do you know if spending money like it's going out of style isn't going to end up in returns later? Tesla is building out a great infrastructure for charging, nationwide. One of Tesla's products, and one of it's determiners for success, is the charging network. When I got my car, Dec 2016, we started on a trip cross country with the kids, and I was like "I only give us a 50% chance of success". Between not knowing how charging was going to work, and not knowing if the kids were going to get into a fight because of being cramped in the back. I expected we wouldn't event make it out of Colorado before something turned us back. But, we made it there and back fairly smoothly. Had to learn some things about electric cars, but it worked great.
I'm really a car guy, and I love the sound of a V8. But, the Tesla is amazing. Could I have gotten something better from Audi for $75K (about my spend after incentives)? Probably. Do they have better self driving? Probably. But, with the maintenance on my A8 that the Tesla replaced, it's cheaper to run the Tesla than it was my Audi. Which, honestly, isn't a high bar to reach. My 2008 Audi A8 was a better car in many ways, as far as toys. But, the Tesla I've put over 20K miles on, with $0 for maintenance.
I think Tesla is building the infrastructure of the future, and they are spending money now to make something of huge value in the future.
How much is too much to build the future?
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|8 years ago|reply
That statement is pretty irrelevant, though, when it comes to whether or not Tesla can be a going concern. There were tons of railroad companies in the late 1800s that "built the future", and same thing with telecom companies in the late 1990s. While we're still reaping the benefits of those investments today, almost all of those original companies went bankrupt.
[+] [-] meddlepal|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jaimex2|8 years ago|reply
- Mass produce it without flaws
- Dont run out of cash.
Pick two.