My guess is that this robotaxi launch will make or break the company. If the product looks like any other first-gen driverless service, Tesla is screwed.
The price to upgrade all those older Teslas is gonna be gigantic and the company is already heavily scrutinized for their lackadaisical approach to QA and safety.
Downvote if you must, but the man knows how to protect his moats while branding it "ending wasteful government spending".
The stock seems to be waking up to the problem. Sales are down 12% in Europe in Jan. Down 60% in Germany. Apparently German electric car drivers are not fans of Nazis. Who knew?
can't be further from the truth. if you drive tesla and then drive all of the competitors tesla is faaar superior car. cars are great. the core issue here are margins - before competition tesla's could retain the huge margins on their vehicles. feels like in order to compete now they will have to drop the prices and hence their margins and with the forward p/e ratio of 1,000,129 that won't go well for the company's financials. and of course elon being a tool isn't going to be helping with this :)
The robo-taxi attempt is fraught and Musk's mind seems elsewhere -- swinging a wrecking ball on government, turning Twitter into his microphone (with great damage to its value and creating a real opening for competitors), posting videogame results reminiscent of the old North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung-style, where the newspaper would report on his games of golf in which he swung 18 hole-in-ones.
By hitching his wagon to political movements most despised by the consumers of EVs he's alienated Tesla's audience. By his further actions he's shocked and disgusted them so that driving a Tesla is becoming an embarrassment. The brand is kaput.
There's maybe a separate China story but it's no better. Tesla taxis in China, really?
[1] Global electric vehicle sales up 25% in record 2024 - https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/global...
Companies simply do not survive this in the long run unless very specific inelastic demand (I'm thinking bp oil spill as the only example) exists, and even then BP wasn't as international or charged or so ... Nazi.
Tesla is musk. Musk is a Nazi. Musk was a progressive environmental future in the previous media construction.
That radical shift means no brand, no customers. How many people want to drive a car that basically has a swastika on it? 4% of the population?
On top of this, musks absent leadership since the model Y, in addition to Tesla's general problems getting new designs out the door, and his marketing ignorance in the good days, means Tesla has no badge diversification a luxury marque, no extensive model diversity for all the markets of the world, no cabin options for their extreme design, no trims and body style variations.
It's just the 3 and Y basically.
Tesla should have bought another car company to gain engineer, design, oem relationships, and manufacturing capacity.
Too late. Tesla is now a pump and dump scheme, musk wants his 60 billion that Delaware is holding up and then he'll sell off just like the board is doing now.
China will seize teskas assets on a whim from a trade war or a hot war with Taiwan.
The energy sector is not one I look forward to, Tesla doesn't have any advantage in battery packaging or battery technology("battery day" is now officially a dud), and lfp lmfp and sodium ion chemistries are far more suited to grid storage and home storage.
We all know AI driving at Q4 isnt happening under musk. It's a long slog and musk fires software teams too quickly, because he treats them like hardware. That's basically all the hype.
For your hypothesis to make sense, first you would have to establish that Musk's antics have no negative impact on Musk's public opinion or public image.
In the meantime, you've started to see a global wave of both Tesla stores and Tesla cars being vandalized in protest over Musk's public support for Nazism. In some cases such as Germany you even had public protests against the neonazi party that Musk supports and promotes.
So you establish the fact that throughout the world people started protesting Musk due to his public actions. Do you think this change in public sentiment brings with it a neutral impact on sales?
Tesla sales are static or shrinking
Take January YoY in the UK, EV sales rose 24%, Tesla's sales dropped 8% ish
In the best of times Musk's leadership brought us stuff like "Joe Mode" just because he saw someone complain on Twitter.
Now he's completely unhinged and we can't trust him even as much as before. He might just decide something crazy and force the factories to change it just because.
Tesla's sales are spread over a few models, VW's EV sales are spread over ten or so models
Imagine if pretending to be your friend was basically a fortune 500 size industry.
No, he is greedy, this is greed. He is greedy for power and money.
As Terry Pratchett alludes to many of his books, the problems start when you treat other people as "things". And this is rife at the moment. So mental breakdown doesn't really cover it.
Come on, you cannot have missed this.
We started seeing signs of it when he called that diver rescuer a pedophile. Most recently its been him high on ketamine doing hitler salutes on the inaguration
Nazi salute (two actually) on national television? Destroy government extra legally with presidential pardon immunity? Bust on minorities etc with social impunity?
He doesn't just have eff you money, he has eff you status. No longer being restricted to the milquetoast middle ground CEO trap. Unrestricted treatment of low money people as subhumans. nothing like rights or laws to get in the way.
Thing is, his stock is very very tied to perception, which is a synonym for "hype".
You can see this emerging unrestraint coming from virtually all of silicon valley "leadership". Allin podcast. Zuck the MMA wannabe. Larry Ellison (the archetype) in orbit with trump. Gleeful twitters about eliminating all jobs with AI.
And yet we are entering an era of geopolitical uncertainty, war, reonshoring of manufacturing. To fight looming conflicts with China and Russia, what is needed is functioning institutional democracy, not venal banal oligarchical corruption.
The other historical danger is that the rich poor gap is indicative of a forthcoming rebellion of the lower class. Trump is himself a symptom of this, and while the poor continue to divide themselves between the two parties, Trump shows that wild unpredictable swings in voter sentiment can bring unexpected candidates to the fore.
All it takes is one charismatic candidate to pledge to cull the rich and being universal healthcare...
Did you have any actual statistics to back up your assertion?
Vehicle Model | Total Units | Fire Fatalities |Fatality Rate (per 100k)
Tesla Cybertruck| 34,438 | 5 | 14.52
Ford Pinto | 3,173,491 | 27 | 0.85
A meaningful comparison would say that the Pinto could catch fire as a result of a low speed collision and the cybertruck apparently does not.
Of course, a gas can with a spear pointed at it isn't a great design. But the rest of the cars were also dangerous as well.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Retrospective_safet...
I know that neither you nor the other commenters nor the person who made that website needs anyone to explain to you why this comparison is invalid. It is such a facile comparison that to describe it is to explain why it's invalid.
So, again, I'm confused as to the point of your comment.
I'm confused as to the level of your incompetence.
Also, Tesla stopped selling the Model S here.
In 2024, Tesla reported a 17% drop in Australia despite EV market growing.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/gonzales-elon-musk...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces_oat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Uniformed_Servic...
(The Soviets, unable to put in as big an investment, built the wall to stop DDR citizens from making the opposite trip).
Worthwhile reading on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Burned-Bridge-East-Germans-Curtain/dp....
In some ways, the existence of a physical border begat the political and economic division, as much as the other way around!
There is enough to criticize in his actions.
https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2025-01/elon-musk-hitler-salute-i...
I mean, that was a link to a German newspaper and the headline is:
> A German Eye On Elon Musk's Hitler Salute (Yes, That's A Hitler Salute)
But I have just tried "Musk Geste" on google.de news tab (I don't know how Google is personalising either my search results or your results, but FWIW I'm in Berlin), and of the first page, 6/10 links explicitly call the gesture a "Hitlergruß" in the summary, and the other four call it that (or note that some people have called it that) in the body.
We shouldn’t let that argument distract from the impact it has had on Tesla demand in Europe. For me personally it was the final straw and I won’t be buying one as I had hoped to.
Along with other actions certain to hit sales, and the lack of an apology (which would have been wise, even if you didn’t mean it as a nazi salute) suggests that Musk doesn’t care about Tesla car sales.
I suspect he knows the writing is on the wall for Tesla, so he’s betting on robotics as an escape hatch. I wonder if he’s also hoping tariffs against china will help vs their EVs. Either way, I don’t see much hope for Tesla right now.
Either you've been living under a rock or you're trolling. In the very least, beyond the very public way he repeatedly did the Nazi salute and was very unapologetic about it, you can't ignore away how Musk went way out of his way to support a neoNazi party from Germany.
Pound your heart and give it to an imaginary audience...suddenly it begins to resemble the salute.
Elon Musk also endorsed and spoke at an AfD event[1], which comprises members that are 7.5X more likely to participate in Holocaust denialism: believing that the Holocaust is Allied propaganda[2]. Multiple former leaders (including a co-founder) of the AfD describe the party as extremely far-right and authoritarian[3][4]. Elected members of the AfD have been found on a Facebook group sharing memes about baking Anne Frank in a pizza oven and insulting interracial couples[5]. Maybe you could claim that these are past events, but the frequency of these issues are alarming. Even so, we have a more recent example: in 2024, a leading member of the AfD was fined for using a slogan that was used by the Nazi military[6].
At best, you could call Elon Musk an absolutely bone-headed moron who has no idea who he chooses to support or where he chooses to attend. With Occam's razor it seems like he has embraced a lot of hateful ideology.
Oh, and also, it was a Nazi salute.
[0] https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1724908287471272299 [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2025/01/25/elon-musk... [2] https://www.kiwi-verlag.de/buch/meron-mendel-ueber-israel-re... [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20230604004557/https://www.tages... [4] https://www.fr.de/politik/lucke-verlaesst-seine-11155453.htm... [5] https://www.stuttgarter-nachrichten.de/inhalt.angst-vor-scha... [6] https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/14/german...
You might not know him for that, but people who pay attention do.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/17/business/elon-musk-reveals-hi...
[To people who think he's a Nazi: yes, I've read all the arguments, no, I don't care - giving him the benefit of the doubt still makes him a gigantic shitlord who think its funny to do Nazi salutes.]
If you own a social media platform and have this amount of reach you can never be “just a troll edgelord”.
Musk has been going to far right rallies and jew hating for some time now.
eg: https://clearthis.page/?u=https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/01/...
The goalpost does not need to be moved to "if he's not literally operating a gas chamber, he's fine".
The best interpretation is that he doesn't care how it looks to others when he does a Nazi salute. Like others said, he's more 90s edgelord than actual jew-hating Nazi.
And the car markets in Europe are showing him what they think of people who do Nazi salutes publicly.
Pretending at equivocating just to troll will tank your own credibility.
Of course you can argue in bad faith because it costs you nothing to be wrong but does that imply you are promoting this behavior? Seems like the obvious implication
The media is outraged because a duck quacks like a duck
But the Anti-Defamation League, an organisation founded to combat antisemitism, did not agree.
"It seems that Elon Musk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute," it posted on X.
Double jeopardy would stop the state from continuing with the prosecution, and the pardon means no consequences.
I hate that I consider this an actually possibly.
After which, he will look very tired, and suddenly stop being "turbulent", as per the meaning several judges have recently noted in Trump trials was once infamously said by a king of a priest.
Then I will be sad, because I would have liked to have gone to Mars.
I dislike Musk as much as the next person, but I can't think of any major state actors or criminal organizations he'd currently be antagonizing.
Eg. Starlink connections in Ukraine are geofenced. Which would piss off both sides in various ways. Pisses off ukraine because they have legitimate targets outside the fence and pisses off russia because they have legitimate targets inside the fence. That’s walking a fine line.
This was debunked. Starlink was never active in Crimea because Crimea was sanctioned by the US. He said if the US government asked him to activate it he would. They did not.
What happened to Rockefeller, Carnegie and JP Morgan? It wasn't the plebs and their jabbering (see muckrakers) that directly took them down, though that jabbering did help give an unusual dude from the NY aristocracy named Teddy(who couldn't stand the muckrakers) political cover to move against them.
Also worth reading about the 2 elections preceding Teddy's fascinating rise to power, where the oligarchy bought the Presidency.
of the UK, for calling for a government minister's arrest and for his "civil war" tweet: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ydddy3qzgo and https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/elon-musk-need... and https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-called-uk-ministers-not-a...
of Germany, as "Germany's lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, is investigating whether Musk's support for the AfD on the platform where he has 210 million followers could constitute an illegal party donation": https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/elon-musk-investigated-...
(also note that the party he's supporting, AfD, is getting investigated for being hostile to the constitution: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-69003733)
of Italy, where he has been warned by "Italian President Sergio Mattarella to stop interfering in the country’s affairs after a controversial tweet on his page asked for judges to be dismissed": https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/01/04/germany-accused-mus...
of Canada, because of what he's doing in so many other places: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/musk-angus-trudeau-poilievr...
I too would have liked to see Musk go to Mars.
Maybe he also takes a page from Putin’s playbook and puts him on trial in a very public and humiliating way, sending a clear message to all the other oligarchs.
I know a lot of people don't like Cohen. I have my own friends I've had for 15+ years and I know them well, just as much as Cohen knows Trump, so I feel there might be some validity to his thoughts.
Do you think Trump of 8 years ago would have allowed Musk to usurp the news cycle? Or even allowed the merest notion that he's not controlling _everything_?
Remember, Trump actually underwent a colonoscopy without sedation to avoid relinquishing the control of the nuclear weapons to Pence. This dude is a control freak.
Even endoscopies are possible without sedation, but most people don't have the ability to not squirm or gag for that one. You can even see youtube videos of people doing that one without sedation.
Trump is basically immune from scandal. The people that vote for him either don't care, are low-information voters that somehow don't even hear about it, don't believe the news reporting on the scandals, or even worse, actively support him because of the scandals.
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
The one that has to be somewhat transparent is looking pretty shaky
> How much of it is tied up to a criminally overvalued Tesla stock though?
- Dec 15 2022: Sells 22m shares for $3.6bn
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/15/investing/elon-musk-tesla-stock-sale/index.html
- Nov 4-8 2022: Sells 19.5m shares for $4bn
https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-business-climate-and-environment-9ab47198753931c7bea91f6e678f1d17
- Feb 2022: Elon has $11bn tax bill from a $23bn taxable income. Article discusses 2 sells
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/10/investing/elon-musk-tesla-zero-tax-bill/index.html
- This article says notes $1.52 billion between 2014-2018
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/20/elon-musk-says-he-will-pay-over-11-billion-in-taxes-this-year.html
I believe we can agree that this sum of money falls into the category of "never will be poor." Where it is nearly (if not entirely) impossible to spend such sums of money. Remember, we're talking about a sum of money where you could easily line up $100 bills all the way across California, from top to bottom[0].
[0] A bill is 155.956mm x 66.294mm (0.155956m x 0.066294m) and CA's dimensions are 400km x 1220km. So 1220000 / 0.066294 = 18.403e6. You need ~$18.4m to do this with singles, $368.01 with $20's, and $1.84bn with $100's. So $30bn is 16 rows (2.5 meters wide) and $391bn (current Forbes value) is 212.5 rows, or 33 meters wide. A bill is 0.11mm thick if you want to calculate height. Maybe someone can come up with another fun visualization, because this one is well beyond imaginable already.
I’ve been looking at the idea of a tunnel between the UK and Ireland. Recent rough estimates were €15Bn and that probably didn’t include high speed trains on each side.
A new city, a 500km/h maglev line, paying spacex to build a moon base, launching a billion dollar prize fund for room temperature superconductor or graphene space elevator material research, paying a geoengineering project like military jets releasing reflective vapour into the upper atmosphere (last time I saw that price estimate was 2Bn and that was years ago), building a vanity vehicle project from scratch like reigniting the ocean going Ekranoplans or the Fairey Rotodyne, building the Elon Musk solar power plants in Texas to “unleash American energy“ with his name on it…
You would not casually spend that much on Lamborghinis and mansions in the Hollywood Hills, but if you wanted to do audacious or philanthropic things or get your name on mega-projects there are many countries with billion dollar projects one could fund. $30Bn would pay the city of Los Angeles budget for 2-3 years.
$30Bn he could give every American $90.
An important thing to note is that it takes time to spend money and money makes money. Even a very modest interest rate yields an incredible amount of money. The money is so large, it works differently than money does for us normal people. For example, say you have $30bn a year and are getting a modest 5% interest yearly, that's: $1.5bn a year, $4.11m/day, $171.2k/hr, or $2854/min. As you can imagine, this has a big effect. If you're trying to buy a McLaren F1, well, you can wait 5 days. Which it'll probably take that long to make this transaction happen anyways. So there would be no net loss of money. So, supposing you wanted to make your $15bn (I know, but we're approximating anyways and they're similar anyways) tunnel, you somehow got permission to do it, and you are doing it all out of your pocket, you have to realize that this does not equate to taking out $15bn from your net worth. Because... it takes time to build such a tunnel. Let's approximate again, saying it takes 5 years (very aggressive) and you pay at the end of the year, then the net decrease of your wealth is $7.5bn, not $15bn. At 10 years, you have no net change, and any longer you've had no effective loss. (To be clear, I'm not saying there's no cost, I'm saying that it doesn't change your net worth)
The problem is, your money makes money too fast. For most things, faster than you can spend it. Every second you aren't spending it, it grows.
I should also clarify an assumption that I guess is not obvious. I'm saying it is essentially impossible to spend these amounts of money on things that personally benefit you. You can't buy enough houses, personal jets, yachts, and so on. We agree. But mega projects take a lot of time, as well as philanthropic endeavors. If you want a real world example, see MacKenzie Scott. She has given away 50% of her wealth, yet her net worth is identical to that in 2020, when Forbes started tracking her (divorce was in 2019). She is worth $36bn and has given over $17bn away, and in those 4 years (I'm sure some of this money is pledged and not yet in peoples' hands but that's standard philanthropy, right?). So yeah, she could have built that bridge for no change in her net worth. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But in your favor, I guess Elon did buy Twitter and with his great negotiating skills offered a 27% premium (and not in a one-time lump sum). But also, this has seemed to have no real effect on his net worth due to how his wealth is actually held and showing the nativity of our approximations, as most billionaires are getting much more than 5% interest on their money.
This bit changes my reply, I have to agree with that. The rest though - yes the normal way to build a tunnel would be to make sure it will be financially profitable and get investors, but what I'm saying is that a UK-Ireland tunnel would not be profitable. One estimate said it would cost double the UK-France tunnel but get 20% of the use. Nobody would "invest", it would have to be funded personal money as a passion project just because they want to see it exist in the world.
> The problem is, your money makes money too fast. For most things, faster than you can spend it. Every second you aren't spending it, it grows.
Nice problem to have, lol. Seems like it would be possible to invent as many megaprojects as one wanted in order to get rid of enough money, but maybe it isn't. Maybe the limit is how much attention one person can have. Maybe the balance of trying to start enough to use all your money without bankrupting yourself if one overruns costs and then never finishing them all, would be too hard.
New things happen all the time, even things that had been predicted to happen sooner than they did.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/stella...
Musk switching sides on that seems a good time to re-evaluate who is making the predictions now and why.
But to your point, as the child of someone who parrot's right wing talking points, I am looking forward to see whether their remarks on EV's change over the next few years or not.
Tesla is a meme coin at this point. However there are these pesky shareholders to deal with.
Fading global Tesla sales are consistent with this: it’s what happens when you go all in on one party in one nation, and Musk has always been willing to bet big on his next move. Also, I doubt it’ll last.
Remember also that Trump is about to die and Musk is 53. What fortune is 10x greater than Musk’s current massive wealth and political power? The office of super-President that he’s now suddenly so engaged in helping create “for Trump”.
I suspect he has so many huge loans leveraged on that tesla stock that if Tesla went to zero, he'd be at bankruptcy court...
Sure, Tesla could go to zero and he'd still be a fabulously wealthy man, but with how things are moving - It wouldn't surprise me that he's about the fall down the ranks. Let's see how much power he has once the "richest man in the world" aura fades away.