I may be delusional but I actually own a VW Group car, I know of people who make their living on mostly repairing VW's past mishaps (stuff like this [1]), I have no stake whatsoever in Tesla's future financial success, and as such I can tell you that VW (and the Germans generally speaking) are way, way behind in terms of EV technology compared to Tesla because stuff like this it's not in their engineering DNA.

$10 billions is a pittance, it gives you two thirds of Whatsapp or the entire Skype before it was acquired by MS (adjusted for inflation), so I don't think I'm delusional when I'm saying that it is not a great sum to pay when the future of your entire industry depends on you being best at building EVs (and Tesla now is the best).

I've had the same discussion on places like /r/cars, i.e. that Tesla doesn't sell cars, it sells batteries and the accompanying software (with some wheels attached to the whole thing), while companies like VW, MB or BMW have almost no clue on how to build the best batteries, never mind the best software, they're only good at building cars (and lately not so good even at that), which is an industry on its way out.

[1] https://mybroadband.co.za/forum/threads/tsi-engine-problems....

Also other companies might be willing to go in on at this price to be a top compeitor for self driving or batteries. Apple must have considered it. Uber. Tencent. Facebook. Alibaba. Walmart.

Outside car manufacturers there's a lot of cashed up companies that would like to take a punt in this space.

I could not have said it better. I own a Model X, and I always tell my friends "Tesla is a tech company, but they have no idea how to build cars". I think I'm going to expand that into what you said.

Access to the Panasonic battery supply is likely worth a pretty penny. I've been hearing about battery supply problems from Jaguar and Audi already.

> Access to the Panasonic battery supply is likely worth a pretty penny.

Licensing/partnership contracts are often written so that they don't automatically survive changes of ownership, which makes buying into such a partnership by acquisition less than reliable.