Interesting article on Tesla. It was a market leader in EV but the rest of the world has caught up with it:
Bare Bear Crap (BBC), second line, first mistake!
In little more than a decade, it went from technology upstart to mass-market carmaker,
No mass market car yet, that’s coming next year.
The Captain
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You can make a boatload of money if you’re first in the parade with a desirable product and there is no one behind you. There have been lots of rocket-ship companies that have done it. AOL, when “on-line” was taking off. iPhone is an obvious and more contemporary product. But the list is long: Ford Mustang. Blackberry (in its era). Microsoft (once it had the IBM acceptance). McDonald’s. Amazon. Google. Intel. Polaroid. Xerox. Sony Trinitron. Barbie. iPod.
Sure, it’s a survivor bias list, and some have faded. Some had competition at the beginning, but once they pulled away they were dominant in their category for years and billions of dollars.
Musk is saying Tesla is “between two growth waves”, and it might happen but in my view it probably won’t, at least to the degree of the first flush of success.
The EV market is (surprisingly) maturing already, with competition coming from 50 directions at once. And it appears to be slowing to boot! If hybrids take the day, Tesla doesn’t have - and is unlikely to have - an entrant for a long time.
AI is a crap shoot, there are lots of people trying and there’s no guarantee that the victor will be Musk, or Tesla, or however it’s structured (which may or may not benefit Tesla shareholders.)
Musk seems to be placing all the chips on Robotaxis, which means a full implementation of FSD, which is always just around the corner. Given the other corners which have been abandoned (Gigacasting, charger network, unboxing) and increasing regulatory scrutiny, I certainly wouldn’t count them out, but it’s hard to see how they are going to have such a wide open field as they have had for the past decade in building EVs.
Unless the Robotaxi business comes true, but as I have noted elsewhere, I am skeptical. Replacing Uber but using your own capital to own the cars seems less efficient, not to mention limited, and convincing Tesla drivers to loan out their cars to strangers seems, well, fraught. The other supposed avenues for revenue (using the computer power for cloud sourcing, using vehicle power for load balancing) seem dreamy, given the unpredictables inherent like “will the car always be connected?” as only the most obvious.
Maybe the walking, talking robot humans will come to something, but that’s quite far away at least as a mega-business.
So, has Tesla jumped the shark? Yeah, maybe. Can it recover? Sure, but probably not to the same rocketship ride that investors have had for the past few years. I wouldn’t short it, but then I wouldn’t put money into it too hoping for another “growth wave.”
Oh. And “Twitter.” There you go.
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Here is the story of one laid off worker.
90 minute commute each way and a minimum 12 hour shift – they did him a favour
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