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?
Hang on a sec, its publicly trade company. Its pretty easy to see how its profitable especially compared to other legacy automakers.
Tesla vs Ford numbers:
Disclaimer: the source is from March of 2023 and Tesla has cut prices (which means less profit) since then, but they had a lot of room to do so with so much profit per car.
So one could say that Tesla has been able to charge a premium for a cheaper car, or they’ve been able to reduce manufacturing cost for a moderately priced car. Both result in high margin returns for the company.
They have a direct sales model which is more expensive to operate and exaggerates profit margin. There’s also reason to believe they are wildly understating warranty costs plus ignoring R&D costs. People who look closely have consistently concluded that Tesla cannot really be making money, or have very narrow profit margins at best.
Huge price cuts will compound these problems dramatically.
How would adding a middleman that also has to make profit make the company earn less? Wouldn’t direct sales allow Tesla to sell for a higher price because they can sell at retail instead of a “wholesale” cost normally sold to a dealership?
I’d be interested in reading more on this assertion. Do you have a source you can point me to?
You have to build the entire system out yourself. That costs a lot of money. The dealership model also costs the manufacturer basically zero dollars, because it really profits on used car sales and maintenance works. You don’t make anymore money by having your own dealerships. The whole argument that there’s some secret behind Tesla’s business smacks of gaslighting, not something that actually holds up to reason.
It’s been a long standing issue with Tesla’s accounting. No one can really explain how profits are actually being generated going back years, especially considering everyone in the West is losing money on EVs. It’s also being ran entirely by sycophants and people with minimal qualifications, with zero accountability anywhere. So it just seems, via Occam’s razor, that they’re cooking the books.
The manufacturer also has to pay dealerships for warranty work on vehicles. Company owned services centers wouldn’t.
I’m interested in that source you talked about the “people who looked closely”.
You still have to pay out warranty work either way. Someone has to fix it after all.
There are many people who have made the claim that Tesla doesn’t really make money. You can google it up. Just look for stuff like “tesla profits” or “tesla not profitable” and you see it. Also, the only people who do vigorously insistent that Tesla is profitable are the fanboy investors and some of the least credible analysts out there. It screams gaslighting no matter how you look at all.
Yes, but if you’re paying a dealer, they need to be paid to make it worth their while. Manufacturers using dealers are essentially hiring an outside company for the work. This would contrast very differently with a direct sales company that simply has its own employees doing the work. A direct sales company doesn’t need to “profit” from the effort put into its warranty work.
Again its a public company. You can download the 10-K directly from SEC.gov.
Are you saying Tesla is lying in their public reports? Keep in mind these are also audited by large outside companies. I think Tesla uses PWC.
Then what, Tesla owns their own repair and maintenance service? That also costs money.
Ultimately, you’re going to accept that there’s no way around some of the cost of running a car company. If you won’t accept it, then there’s nothing I can say to change your mind.
Also, most of the numbers can’t be trusted. It’s known as “regulatory capture.” And they’re probably not the only one. Likely many companies have doctored accounting numbers these days. If anything, this is a huge problem in business today.
This is not accurate at all.
Not OP but regarding sources, there’s a group referred to as “TSLAQ” (Q referring to a letter typically added to bankrupt stock symbols, but they’re not entirely free of conspiratorial thinking) that’s been critical of TSLA and others including David Einhorn who have criticized their accounting practices. I’ve not had time to look much into it myself but see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Tesla,_Inc.#Accounting
Here’s the section for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
= In 2017, a lawsuit alleged Tesla made materially false and misleading statements regarding its preparedness to produce Model 3 cars. The U. S. Department of Justice also began an investigation in 2018 into whether Tesla misled investors and misstated production figures about the Model 3. The lawsuit was dismissed in Tesla’s favor in March 2019.
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