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this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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I agree but isn't Tesla real and well selling, at least in the US. Wouldn't it be profitable?
Tesla is certainly making a fair bit of money. Though it only got there because of a shitload of government help, both from the US and elsewhere, and indirect government help, like the government pretty much forcing other automakers to purchase EV credits from Tesla to make their fleet average CO2 numbers lower in order to avoid fines.
Which I'm not 100% against, but then again, Musk constantly complains about government subsidies on various things, while receiving a shitload of government help himself. Same level of hypocrisy as his whole "I'm a free speech absolutist" thing.
E: spelling
Eh, a quick Google search said that Tesla wasn't profitable for 17 years and survived due to government subsidies and investor funding. After that they've been making ~$15 billion per year and sold around 1.3 million cars worldwide per year.
In contrast Toyota sold 10.3 million vehicles and made $61 billion in profit.
As with their 17 years of unprofitable business they are currently more proportionally profitable, but a big portion of that is Musk fanboys and limited supply. If they actually started selling more cars they probably wouldn't be as proportionally profitable.
Additionally, Tesla is supposedly becoming less profitable due to several factors including not making a new model in 10 years, reports that they fraudulently marketed features (being sneaky with how range is calculated so that the true range is way less than advertised), and Elon's antics hurting sales. Elon's antics are a big deal, some people who wanted Teslas before don't want them anymore because they don't want to be associated with him (like flying a Gadsden Flag in the mid 2000s vs now).
Elon's antics don't stop there, he's also hurt the investor's opinion as well. A big reason Tesla's stock was so high is because people were buying them and not selling them. This caused their price to stay super high, but when Elon bought Twitter he sold a ton of stock. The price was at an all time high over $400 per share, his selling cratered it to ~$115, and is currently around $165. Investors don't like it when the owner of a company single handedly tanks their investment so the owner can make a bad investment, even more so when the writing on the wall says he'll sell even more of the stock to fund the bad investment.