HN user
If anyone else were constantly writing one-sided articles on a product or company, with referral links in their signature, they'd be down-voted like crazy. Yet Electrek repeatedly makes the front page.
They want to be a GM, GE, ConEd, Exxon and Uber rolled into one.
They have a long way to go to be compared to any single one of those companies, let alone all of them combined.
Betting on any company to be the biggest in the history of history is a fool's errand.
But you can't judge them based on your own made-up ideas and standards.
I can't judge them by my standards? News to me.
I am trying to be surprised to find criminal activity in Finance but I cannot work up the passion.
I'll take greedy financiers ripping off other greedy financiers over the vast surveillance industry that Silicon Valley is currently building out. But everyone on these boards is innocent of that, of course.
This graph shows you they spent money to launch the Model S, then went profitable.
The graph doesn't "show" anything. You are interpreting it in a specific (favourable) way. I don't agree. Also, free cash flow positive is not "profit".
One sure mark of a hater is that there doesn't exist a configuration of reality that will satisfy their objections.
Oh, there it is. Any criticism means you're a hater.
I'm looking at the numbers. That's reality. You, on the other hand, are operating on future assumptions that may or may not come to pass. "Becoming profitable" isn't a given, just because Elon said so. As of right now, they are losing money at an accelerating rate. I guess we'll see.
And by the way, I'm not hater. I can see Tesla being the next Mazda, who make some of the most popular cars in my area. Great cars, great company. Do you know what its market cap is? $8BB. At Tesla's current market cap they need to build millions and millions of cars at substantial profit. You can believe that they'll achieve that and an investment today still wouldn't be worth it. Does that surprise you?
purchasers of Model 3's now expect OTA updates so there is a little bit of R&D cost in the future but it's very minor compared to what's already been spent.
Toyota spent almost $10 billion on R&D last year. Ford $8 billion. VW spent $15 billion.
Tesla spent $1.5 billion. What is it that makes people think that Tesla's R&D spend is so significant, and that it will diminish drastically in the future? This is an R&D intensive industry.
Check out their free cash flow [1]. You'll see that it's always in the red before production scales up (Model S first, then the X, and now the 3).
That's a charitable interpretation. From your link it's nearly always significantly in the red, outside of a couple anomalous quarters 5 years ago, and the one quarter they sold a bunch of ZEV credits.
It certainly doesn't look like "it's positive, except when they're scaling up!" to me. I guess one sees what they want to see.