Your analysis includes many key points, and I quite like it. I don’t think about this sort of thing very often alas, so I’d need to think a bunch more to come to a strong position on this. I’ll record here one quick impression.
I expect there’s something important here about the difficulty of innovation in the current world, which is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy, but also a true fact about how much of the world will behave toward Tesla. Like, this is the kind of engineering innovation that is not happening in most parts of the world, and you might bet on priors that something will also take out Tesla/Musk, like perhaps a major legal obstacle will mess them up really hard, even if you can’t name it in advance.
For example, I think if the SEC had successfully gotten Elon Musk to stop being so open, honest and casual in public like on Twitter or in interviews, this would likely be severely damaging for Tesla’s brand and marketing and sales. Musk is a far more visionary public figure than other impressive founders like Bezos and Zuckerberg, and there is an intense pressure on him to shut up and be quiet, which might just win out sometime.
Relatedly Tesla (and SpaceX) has had to make a lot of massively risky bets to get to this point, almost entirely running out of money many times, and I can imagine seeing many more of those in the future that mean you should assign a solid chance to just losing all of your money investing in them. My model of Tesla is that it’s rarely “just chugging along”, but mostly “trying to go hard on the risk-reward ratio at all times” in a way that looks unsustainable from the outside. Musk is never like “This will be a normal quarter” my impression is he’s normally like “The entire future of the company depends on this quarter, so let’s make sure we give it our all”.
Your analysis includes many key points, and I quite like it. I don’t think about this sort of thing very often alas, so I’d need to think a bunch more to come to a strong position on this. I’ll record here one quick impression.
I expect there’s something important here about the difficulty of innovation in the current world, which is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy, but also a true fact about how much of the world will behave toward Tesla. Like, this is the kind of engineering innovation that is not happening in most parts of the world, and you might bet on priors that something will also take out Tesla/Musk, like perhaps a major legal obstacle will mess them up really hard, even if you can’t name it in advance.
For example, I think if the SEC had successfully gotten Elon Musk to stop being so open, honest and casual in public like on Twitter or in interviews, this would likely be severely damaging for Tesla’s brand and marketing and sales. Musk is a far more visionary public figure than other impressive founders like Bezos and Zuckerberg, and there is an intense pressure on him to shut up and be quiet, which might just win out sometime.
Relatedly Tesla (and SpaceX) has had to make a lot of massively risky bets to get to this point, almost entirely running out of money many times, and I can imagine seeing many more of those in the future that mean you should assign a solid chance to just losing all of your money investing in them. My model of Tesla is that it’s rarely “just chugging along”, but mostly “trying to go hard on the risk-reward ratio at all times” in a way that looks unsustainable from the outside. Musk is never like “This will be a normal quarter” my impression is he’s normally like “The entire future of the company depends on this quarter, so let’s make sure we give it our all”.