Just reading the first few comments.... I really don't get the Tesla hate. Is it hacker-ish contrarianism? Have they done something? What's the deal HN, why are we cheering against the home team?
Overall Musk has been pretty straightforward and explicit with what he's doing.
Tesla (and spacex) set extremely ambitious goals, like none of their competitors do. They take big risks. They're not interested in reducing risk. They're interested in a business plan that leads to a mass migration of icbs to electric (or humans to mars). The nature of ambitious goals is that sometimes you don't hit your marks. The nature of risk taking is that you might fail, and have to do fast paced adjustments to recover.
Riskiness also means (literally) that Tesla comes with some chance of total failure. If they lose two or three big bets in a row, it could be game over. There are no cash cows or guaranteed income streams. Tesla is not Toyota or Microsoft. If you own Tesla, you need to be ok with that risk. Don't like it? Perfectly reasonable. Sell.
Personally (not an investor or customer), I think these companies are awesome. If GM disappeared tomorrow, nothing that I care about changes. If Tesla disappears, this could set back electric cars by 5yrs. If McDonald Douglass rocketry disappears, someone else will launch rockets for the US military. SpaceX... that hurts our chances of landing people on the other worlds anytime soon.
None of this risk profile stuff would even be controversial if Tesla was a fund. A fund manager can be as risky as she likes, provided that's the stated investment goal. Why doesn't Elon get this amount of rope? .. at least on hacker news?
Seriously, what has he done to deserve this negativity?
Overall Musk has been pretty straightforward and explicit with what he's doing.
Tesla (and spacex) set extremely ambitious goals, like none of their competitors do. They take big risks. They're not interested in reducing risk. They're interested in a business plan that leads to a mass migration of icbs to electric (or humans to mars). The nature of ambitious goals is that sometimes you don't hit your marks. The nature of risk taking is that you might fail, and have to do fast paced adjustments to recover.
Riskiness also means (literally) that Tesla comes with some chance of total failure. If they lose two or three big bets in a row, it could be game over. There are no cash cows or guaranteed income streams. Tesla is not Toyota or Microsoft. If you own Tesla, you need to be ok with that risk. Don't like it? Perfectly reasonable. Sell.
Personally (not an investor or customer), I think these companies are awesome. If GM disappeared tomorrow, nothing that I care about changes. If Tesla disappears, this could set back electric cars by 5yrs. If McDonald Douglass rocketry disappears, someone else will launch rockets for the US military. SpaceX... that hurts our chances of landing people on the other worlds anytime soon.
None of this risk profile stuff would even be controversial if Tesla was a fund. A fund manager can be as risky as she likes, provided that's the stated investment goal. Why doesn't Elon get this amount of rope? .. at least on hacker news?
Seriously, what has he done to deserve this negativity?