Comment by vannevar

Market cap and it's not even close. Turns out financialisation is the classic you-get-what-you-asked-for-not-what-you-wanted of capitalism. We told the optimiser to make number go up, and number has certainly gone up. China's number? Not as up.

I think it could have gone differently if we gave our economic system something to optimise other than itself, but then we wouldn't have centibillionaires, so... swings and roundabouts I guess?

>Maybe capitalism was a failure.

China is hyper-capitalist. They're living proof that capitalism has won.

Or in a more charitable light maybe capitalism just isn’t the only system that’s capable of reaching certain technological development.

Marketing, sales, finance.

Free speech.

LLMs...

You acting like china isn't capitalism

Making good cars. They can make cheap ones, maybe acceptable ones, but not good ones. They are not there yet. Of course, the general populace doesn’t really care, and the vast majority of the market is not driven by this, but still.

> It seems counterintuitive, but this helped Tesla which is why Musk championed it. Basically when that tax credit came out, a bunch of Tesla owners had their cars underwater - loans were more than new cars were selling for and depreciation thru the roof. Plus the tax credit helped their competitors.

This makes sense if your business strategy is to get existing Tesla owners to trade their current Teslas to buy new Teslas, rather than to convert non-Tesla owners to buy new Teslas. The latter market is WAY bigger and the tax credit was a huge carrot enticing them to look at a brand they'd never try otherwise in a market where ICE vehicle prices were skyrocketing.

As it stands, there are a ton of Tesla owners who bought their cars with the tax refund, are underwater on them, bitter about it and/or dislike Elon personally, and will never buy a Tesla again. This is churn and brand destruction without a corresponding top of funnel increase.

In contrast, the supercharger network was significant not just for the convenience factor for Tesla owners, but also for the fact that it was a social signal that Tesla was serious about growing the addressable market of EV owners generally by not just making a decent car but making the "EV lifestyle" seem possible to non-EV owners.

If Tesla actually is happy that the tax credit is going away, that seems like they're acknowledging that they're satisfied taking shrinking share of a shrinking market, which is their prerogative, but it's a bad business.

You lost me, how does making previous owners whole help tesla sell new ones?

Of course, it's 4D chess. This was such a genius move that Tesla profits fell 46% last year and they are ending production of their highest-margin vehicles.

GM wrote down $4B when they reduced their EV production. Despite that, last year GM sold half the number of EVs as Tesla did. If THAT was reduced production by 100%, then Tesla would have been truly fucked had Harris won the election.

Tesla is suffering because Elon Musk was a genius at some point in the past. Then, he got into ketamine and fried his brain.

The cars are expensive, have QC issues, and are facing steep competition from the rest of the world. Tesla's attempt to build an F150 competitor was a disaster, Optimus is years away from being useful for anything, and after 15 years of "We'll totally release FSD this year!" the market seems to finally be realizing that it's not going to happen for a little while.

It really sucks to see a perfectly good company get blown to smithereens, but shareholders did choose to bet on the man.

This seems bizarre. Only reason my family bought a Tesla is thanks to the ev tax credit. Without it there are far better options.

won’t killing the EV market hurt Tesla in the long run?

markets are healthiest when there are many healthy competitors

Unitree delivered 5500 humanoid robots in 2025.

Nobody's buying EVs in the US since the subsidies expired. GM had a record Q4 because it gave up trying to sell EVs and started flogging expensive land yachts again.