I've been both a shareholder (since 2013) and customer of Tesla, and probably won't buy one of their products again. I feel deceived about spending over $5k on that "full self-driving" package that three years later still does nothing of the sort.

The fact that I made a little money on Elon's coattails doesn't make it OK for him to constantly lie to customers.

150x on your investment in 9 years is more than "a little money".

It was a very good return on a small investment. I mostly missed the post-pandemic boom selling too early, so I guess I made around 20-30x overall.

Doesn't change my opinion of Musk's practices. If he's selling very expensive features that are actually donations into the hopes & dreams tip jar, it should be clearly marked as such.

~10x? Or were there a lot of splits my numbers aren’t showing?

Depends on when you bought in 2013. I bought in early 2013 at $32 (pre-split), for about 200x.

If you bought late in 2013 you probably paid ~$180, for only 30x.

I bought a Tesla in 2019 and chose not to buy FSD because I knew it wasn't implemented yet and won't be for several years. If you thought you were going to get FSD any time soon, you weren't paying attention.

Paying attention to what? The lackluster sensor hardware on the Model 3? I guess I wasn't paying enough attention to that at the time.

That's not some kind of consumer protection escape hatch, though:

"Yeah, we sold them software that will never exist, but because it's actually impossible to implement on our hardware, it's their fault for buying it."

I disagree with the idea that the hardware isn't adequate. I think it is, but that the software is much harder than Elon thinks, and even after nearly 10 years, he still hasn't learned how hard it is.

I think the software WILL eventually exist. Just not on the timeline Elon thinks it will.

Maybe Musk himself wasn't paying attention?

"I would be shocked if we do not achieve full-self-driving safer than a human this year. I would be shocked." - Musk in a 2021 earnings call.

Do you realize how short sighted this sounds?

"I don't care what Elon does as long as it makes me money."

Why is that short sighted? That seems the opposite.

If you had a money printer, wouldn't you give it a lot of freedom? Personally I'd draw the line at killing a dog or cat. Other than that, well... If it wanted to knock out a few walls, I'd just sigh and put up with the noise for a few months.

(For context, I'm undecided about Elon. But none of the counterarguments to his behavior seem persuasive yet.)

Because short term gains at the cost of long term sustainability is simply putting off problems for the future.

Your money printer may print you money today, at the cost of putting you in jail for counterfitting tomorrow. It could result in the Mafia to come and break your legs to take it (and the money it printed) from you. Or greatly increase inflation (since mechanically, inflation is a result of more money being added than removed from circulation) in the future so your future earnings are worthless.

You interpreted me wrong.

What I'm saying is

1) that I care about the merit of the company (the products) much more than I care about what their talking heads say

2) that I don't think Elon's that bad as some say/ IMHO he's a semi-autistic person (don't know what his exact diagnosis is) who fucking loves technology and sometimes gets over-excited. I cut him some slack because he delivers - even if late and something's missing, well so what - it's still revolutionary and that's more than enough for me, everything on top of that is a bonus

You can generate great returns for investors and mislead them at the same time.

I don't feel being misleaden. Yes, Elon is sometimes over hyping things. I don't mind. He makes extremely cool stuff which sells by its merit. I like the visionary talks because a company that never talks about the possibilities of future is super-boring and IMHO can't be as successful as Tesla is - even if it doesn't materialize in the specified time span or in its entirety - because there'd be nothing truly new, just linear change otherwise.

> I don't feel being misleaden.

That doesn't mean you weren't.

The rest of your comment almost reads like stockholm syndrome - or mostly just rationalizing being misled.

Let me decide that, thanks.

There's nothing to rationalize. Elon had some nice visionary talks which I like, but mostly don't care about - and I'm not going to be mad just because he said something will be in 3 years and it's in 6 or 9 - even 12 is good in my eyes, so what. I like his optimism much more than the """realism""" (read: pessimism) of mostly any other public company's management. His optimism is one of the primary things pushing Tesla forward - kill that and you kill the company.

I mostly care about hard facts on the ground, and these go more than well enough. Along with my investment.