misiek08 3 days ago

Maybe I’m just naive enough, because I love cars and progress, but I think you agree that he really showed our whole small world that EV can exist and work. Everyone laughed, no one believed it will work and here he still is rich and we have Teslas everywhere. Driving, not killing more people than other brands.

  • toomuchtodo 3 days ago

    I think China would’ve gotten us to here without Tesla.

  • longitudinal93 3 days ago

    Except that the Model Y accounts for more fatalities than any other car out there.

    • codebolt 3 days ago

      Going to need a citation on this one.

      • ted_dunning 3 days ago

        I don't even think it is correct. Teslas as a whole have twice the fatality rate [1] per billion miles as the industry overall and the model Y has a rate 4x the industry average, but that can't overwhelm the fact that there are too few Teslas on the road to make that 2x or 4x turn into more total fatalities.

        [1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a62919131/tesla-has-highes...

Cthulhu_ 3 days ago

While you're correct on the one hand, Tesla made EVs feasible and mainstream, did the investments and caused a rolling effect of worldwide investments in e.g. batteries and EVs, and government subsidies that also made investing in EVs more attractive to competitors.

Besides EVs, Tesla's long term revenue could very well be in the supercharger network, too. It's not as exciting as self driving cars, but the oil companies have been the most valuable companies / stocks worldwide without being exciting like that. I mean I don't think EV charging will be anywhere near as big as oil because it doesn't involve nearly as much infrastructure or international trade, but it's still big, especially if governments refocus on replacing ICEs with EVs.

(the focus has been let go because the subsidies were too popular and expensive)

  • DennisP 3 days ago

    I agreed on the supercharger network, which made it pretty surprising when Musk fired the entire supercharger team.

jopsen 3 days ago

> The stock is the product.

Musk reeks of scam. But for a stock pump and dumb scheme there sure are a lot of teslas on the road.

  • tw04 3 days ago

    Tesla sold 1.7M cars in 2024. Toyota sold 11.1M cars in 2024.

    Tesla’s current market cap is $1.43T. Toyota’s current market cap is $354B.

    There really aren’t that many teslas on the road, and their sales are declining.

    • wasfgwp 3 days ago

      This kind of maybe made sense for a while their revenue was growing at a very fast pace but now that its stagnant/falling they are no different to any other car company.

      • burningChrome 3 days ago

        I wonder if this coincides with Musk getting into politics? Never a good choice to alienate half your customer base. Michael Jordan famously said he never got into politics because "Republicans buy sneakers, too."

    • tonyhart7 3 days ago

      Tesla stock isn't valued as a car company

      • ben_w 3 days ago

        Which is exactly the problem.

        The stock is priced on expectations of how many humanoid robots they might sell over the next decade.

        Those expectations in turn treat humanoid robotics as if Tesla is the only game in town, when Tesla's Optimus is not yet available for purchase and other companies already ship.

        Then someone brings up the value of Tesla's AI to those robots, and here's my response to that to save re-writing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46799603

totetsu 4 days ago

Has it all really been just one giant grift to steal every Americans social security number.

  • WalterBright 4 days ago

    And what would he do with them?

    • lazide 4 days ago

      The same systems had labor board whistleblower info.

      Why would musk love to identify (or at a minimum, but a huge chilling effect on) labor board whistleblowers? The world may never know.

      • [removed] 4 days ago
        [deleted]
    • toomuchtodo 4 days ago

      Try to impair democracy through election denial groups? Absolute power and all that jazz.

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734078

      The Trump administration admits even more ways DOGE accessed sensitive personal data - https://www.npr.org/2026/01/23/nx-s1-5684185/doge-data-socia... - January 23rd, 2026

      Case No. 1:25-cv-00596-ELH - https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.577...

      > The unnamed employees secretly conferred with a political advocacy group about a request to match Social Security data with state voter rolls to "find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States," the filing said. It remains unclear whether any data actually went to this group.

      “Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.” —- David Frum

      • peyton 3 days ago

        So why the car company? Also I was told there is no voter fraud. Is that just because nobody’s looking?