Of all the car companies you could invest in, only one is a game changer. Only one is truly 'challenging norms and conventions'. Only one has an audacious vision of the future, and is plowing all its profits back in to make that vision a reality. A few years ago everyone thought Tesla was a joke. Now they make 100k cars a year and other car companies still act like they are a joke. But for some reason Tesla is the one struggling to keep up with demand, while others are downsizing. What does that tell you?
This is the kind of virtue propaganda I am speaking to. "Game changer" is a virtue to you, completely devoid of financial meaning which is what I operate on.
I am not saying it is wrong. I am saying it is fact, and you are demonstrating it right here. Thank you.
Tesla has never had a year-end profit to invest in anything. Not once. They are spending investor's and creditors money. But you write here that they are virtuous by making a "vision a reality". Thank you again.
You don't care that there has never been a profit for 15 out of 15 years. It is the virtue, the vision, that matters. This is precisely why I find it so interesting. I am not saying investors with this view are wrong, any more than peope who contribute to performing arts theaters are wrong. It's their money.
The stock is selling at $322, I do not contest that fact. I celebrate it as the most authoritative voice on how the market is viewing Tesla. And virtue matters. Or perceived virtue, anyway.
Tesla has gotten $5.5 billion in various subsidies, grants, tax credits and so forth and places like Goldman-Sachs et al. factor in that success in their valuations. It is quite a legitimate thing to do. A state actor like Jerry Brown could declare tomorrow a requirement for electric vehicles in the state fleet. Or the Saudis could step in with their sovereign fund. Just examples of how a lot of other things matter besides virtue. Like getting billions in taxpayer money. Musk has been brilliant at that.
He is under an SEC investigation and lawsuits are piling up from investors that have quite legitimate damages from Musk's assertion he had a buyer at $420 to take the company private when that was now so clearly a lie. He's been insunuating it was the Saudis but that is just not true.
Autos have been in secular decline since 2009. That's "what that tells me". I don't see this as helpful to Musk. I see it as troubling for all auto manufacturers. Tesla has lost money. The others paid dividends to their stockholders. Because they made thousands of dollars in profit per car manufactured. That's pretty impressive in a market under secular decline.
You criticize Ford for declining
profits, yet are oblivious to the billions in
losses Tesla has racked up. No annual profit, ever. Always losses. That matters to me, a data-driven person. It tells me Tesla stock buyers are purchasing something else, not profits.
Ford's Board of Directors well should cut unprofitable lines. So that stockholder and lender funds are not squandered. This is the logical thing to do when they too could produce a lot more cars at a loss like Tesla. This is looked at by you as Ford failing and Tesla succeeding that isn't based upon profitability. Proving my point again.
Yes, Musk is selling far more vehicles than he was before. But his quarterly losses are now over half a billion dollars a year. Extreme negative earnings per share, off the charts.
He's got whistle-blowers that have come forward with some pretty damning information on installation of damaged batteries, the skipping of brake tests and so forth he ordered to make a production surge of "factory gated" cars, 86% of which had to be re-worked.
Getting involved in the Thai cave rescue, bungling his own approach and calling a real rescuer a pedophile - doubling down on it...
These are signs of someone coming apart at the seams as a number of pressures mount. Tesla has a vacancy in the most critical position, before it was the engineer in charge of both production and development and might be called a chief operations officer, whatever. But all these engineers resigning, especially at the top - while the assembly line is under constant revisions/rebooting... really bad signals here. In terms of company management and staffing.
So it only becomes more fascinating to me. He doesn't have to make cars at a profit. He is virtuous game changer, he is challenging norms and conventions, he has an audacious view of the future, none of which are measurable with the tools I was trained in. Financial analysis. Quarterly reports. Balance sheets. Income statements and statements of retained earnings, P/E ratios, debt to net worth, & etc.
I wondered, if I may ask. What is that vision of Musk's exactly? I couldn't care less if he was in potatoes or pork bellies or oil, chemicals or strip clubs. I just look at financial reports and what we see here is historic. Not Tulip Bulb level historic, not Bernie Madoff level. Just notable.
So it is of interest what you think Musk's vision is, what you mean by "game changer", why challenging norms and conventions is virtuous, and what these norms and conventions are.
And no, I did notice Tesla does more than cars. As a matter of fact the Solar City purchase has been a financial disaster, it was about $5 billion in stock and debt assumption, a company run day-to-day by Musk's cousin - a conflict of interest too obvious on the face of it. Massive lay-offs and the loss of the Home Depot partnership since the purchase...
His board is asleep at the wheel but again profits are not the thing. The virtue signalling over solar is the thing, right?
