In a series of posts on X Monday night, Musk said that he would not want to grow Tesla to become a leader in artificial intelligence and robotics without a compensation plan that would give him ownership of around 25% of the company’s stock. That would be about double the roughly 13% stake he currently owns.
Just casually asking for a roughly 80 Billion dollar pay raise. But at this point would Tesla be better off without him?
They value Tesla as a battery manufacturer. I’m not saying that’s right but they’re hoping other manufacturers will end up using their batteries just like every phone uses Samsung’s screens.
I think Tesla has a small lead but is going to be quickly out-developed.
The self driving stuff has always been fluff. The gigafactory not so much.
Which is funny, because Tesla has no chemistry chops at all. Tesla buys Panasonic cells and CATL cells.
Yes, Tesla is technically a battery manufacturer because they take individual cells from CATL and then add electronics to them. (A package of cells is called a “battery” in the Electrical Engineering world). But its not the battery people “care” about when talking about this subject.
The “cell” (aka: the chemical package of size 18650 or 4680 or whatever) is Panasonic or CATL. Almost no Tesla involvement at all. This is what “common people” call the battery pack, not the giant computer system + wires that connect the cells together (which is what Electrical Engineers call the battery).
In effect, Tesla / Elon Musk is taking advantage of investor’s ignorance and its hilarious. Its been like 15 years and the investors still haven’t figured out that Tesla has no “cell manufacturing” and has basically been misleading their investors this whole time.
In Electrical Engineering terms: its a AA cell and a 9V battery (9V requires 6x AAAA cells, so wiring them up together makes a “Battery”, a collection of cells). Since AA is just one cell, its a cell. Similarly, its an 18650 cell or 4680 cell. And cells are made by Panasonic or CATL, not Tesla.
This means that as other EVs come up, Tesla barely has any moat. All Ford or GM has to do is build a battery (aka: buy Panasonic cells and wire them together) and bam, there goes Tesla’s 15 year advantage. That’s all Tesla ever has accomplished. Its a laughably sad moat and is why so many companies can pivot into EVs faster than Tesla ever did.
At this point Tesla is just a brand name. Mercedes is even doing better Level 3 than they are and they’re not even known for that shit.
Tesla’s battery business is also entirely dependent on licenses from Phillips. Tesla’s main value there is in scope of their production, the parts of which could be sold or spun out the way Ford eventually got divested from their gas production/stations. Though, for Ford, it was a long (30+ year) process - that’s a lot of extra buffer to carry Tesla through if history repeats itself.
Which is going to bite them in the ass in 3-5 years when Toyota, VW and a few others roll out the solid state batteries
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