As a side note, somehow the eternal supporters find this behavior a good thing.
You know Oren, I thought to hear that from GSY and not you.
If you compare the approach of Mercedes to the approach of Tesla, you might find some of what you are saying.
Mercedes has decided that they are going to sell horrendously expensive "luxury" cars with a 20% BEV mix, 25% Hybrid mix, up until 2030 and it is going to insulate themselves from Tesla. At the same time they are going to push out their new BEV platform by cutting Capex and R&D costs.
Tesla, on the other hand, has never sold their vehicles with negative margin from the pure production angle. Tesla has sold vehicles which pay for themselves and for the huge investment they are putting into bringing a totally new high volume vehicle manufacturer to the market. Yes Tesla has borrowed huge sums of money, but not anything like the money it would take to produce cars which make no margin and expand the operations of cars that make no margin. That thinking simply doesn't hold water and I outed GSY on this many times. If you sell vehicles at a negative margin and you sell more vehicles, you make a bigger loss. This might have looked like that with lower volume and truly massive investment, but once volumes hit a certain level, it was obvious that margin was good and a profit was being made and directed to other things.
Tesla has no need of making an actual profit because it has absolutely no intention of paying a dividend. Investors don't expect a dividend and why would they make a profit, only to pay the government taxes on it, when they can funnel that profit back into the business and become a world leader in another area (batteries anyone).
Tesla cuts the cost of their moderately expensive Electric vehicles as their production processes improve and vehicle profits increase.
Tesla is running a hugely capital and cashflow expensive business to grow at a rate which is unprecedented, never seen in the automotive world before.
Tesla is not cutting prices of a fixed cost vehicle to try and grab market share from a massive incumbent. In the EV space Tesla is the incumbent and is running faster than anyone else. It is cutting costs to increase sales to generate more profit in order to grow the business even faster and head off the obvious competition which is, right now, ramping up.
If Tesla does not keep cutting costs and growing sales, Tesla will be rolled up before it achieves the goals it has set. If Tesla fails, Automotive transition to electric will take another decade.
The automotive vehicle market is massively oversupplied with manufacturers. Why should Tesla care if a few of them go belly up? The whole goal of Tesla is to galvanise the market into competing with Tesla and, potentially, overtaking Tesla, which will achieve Tesla's goals faster.
You will note that Musk even stated that they would consider making batteries for the competition. Does this sound like a company wishing to use it's lead to destroy everyone.
By the time Tesla hits 20m vehicles, it will be like Manhattan island, travelling through the air hypersonic, with a gaggle of auto manufacturers in its slipstream. The manufacturers will learn to fly or crash and burn when they land.
The critical need, for Tesla, is that they, as a company, do not lose momentum and allow their market to be hoovered up by the competition before critical mass on EV adoption has happened. As other manufacturers were not competing (Leaf and Bolt were compliance cars and not competition), Tesla had a free hand to push as much of the profit as they could into expansion. As VW and others ramp up volume, Tesla will need to cut prices and use the size of the operation to continue growth at the same unprecedented pace, whilst competing with the other firms.
To go back to Mercedes, their plan is one to maximise profits for investors and minimise fines. It is not anything to do with cutting emissions or transitioning to Electric. If I were to gamble on what Mercedes long term goal is, I would say it is to be acquired by someone who wants their luxury brand name. Much like Jaguar and Rolls Royce.
This is an entirely different picture than the "Tesla is bad" or "Tesla is a scam" viewpoint.
Like or hate Musk, or even neutral (I'm neutral), the challenges of bringing a totally new vehicle company into being, in an area that was thought to be an edge case (EV) and bring it up to being a strong international force for change, fall into the old saying of "The impossible we do right away; miracles take just slightly longer"!
I was 7 years in the UK Army. If you want Asshat attitudes, stupid brain dead statements and idiotic mantra, Musk is a toddler. Musk is a long, long, way from that kind of stupidity. My most favourite of that was someone screaming in my face that something had not changed over the intervening years, it had "evolved". How something evolves without change is a mystery that, apparently, only the Army knows.
So if we want to take a step back, devolve Musk and his tweeting from Tesla and think about it. Just how would you create a brand new vehicle manufacturing company making EV's that, apparently, nobody wants to pay for and turn it into a company that sells 20 million of them a year?
