Chevy Volt a Failure - GM to Layoff 1,300

Wouldn't you think that any self-driving technology is not marketable until it can perform well in a variety of situations, reacting well to just about anything that might come up?

 

Yeah. I am with you. I don't know if it is beyond my lifetime, but I have always guessed logistically, there would be speed bumps in the road (no pun intended).

 

Mercedes introduced its EV SUV yesterday. I posted a while back, how all of the luxury car makers were going to be rolling out their EVs by 2019ish, and then there would be competition, which would be another headwind.

It's wild how these analysts are all jumping off the hype machine at once. Adam Jonas of Morgan Stanley (he put out a report a couple of years ago about revolutionizing the world and some crazy price target on the stock and someone posted a WSJ article about it. and tried to tell me I was crazy for calling it nonsense) recently jumped off the bandwagon too. What is silly is that what they now see. ... they saw clearly back then too. But Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan all wanted the investment banking business. Every time Tesla has needed to do a capital raise, there has been beaucoup dinero to be had by them, so their sell side equity analysts dishonestly hype the stock and put buy ratings on it to keep the company happy to attract the investment banking business. Now that the capital markets look to be starting to reject Tesla, they no longer have any reason to hype the stock.

Between Tesla losing money on everything it sells (this isn't a profitable product), the quality control problems, the inability to scale up. ... and now the increased competition that is going to be rolling out over the next year or so, it should be tough sledding for Tesla.

That wouldn't be that big of a deal, except the valuation on that stock got to a ridiculous place in the monetary-induced asset bubble that we are in. This company never should have survived this long, but it was a perfect confluence of things to create a "survival of the unfittest" scenario: first it had government handouts to the tune of billions of dollars to blow through without accountability, and then it was able to transition from those handouts to debt markets that were having the price discovery mechanism destroyed by central planners So there has been an extreme amount of lending to ridiculous things, as people are desperate for a little bit of yield in a world in which they are being robbed of their risk-free rate of return to create an illusion of false prosperity in the economy. Musk was the perfect con man to milk those two things for billions and billions of dollars. Unfortunately, its not a neutral sort of thing for the rest of us, because that kind of misallocation of capital is disastrous economically. Most people don't realize it, because what you can't see is harder to explain than what you did see. It holds us back from where we could have been if a market was being allowed to work. In the case of doing it via massive amounts of debt creation that go to the Elon Musks of the world, it is also going to lead to a pretty severe debt / default hangover.

 

Business Insider, of all sites, has been absolutely killing him and the company for the last year. Some of it has been pretty well reported. They did an expose yesterday, in which they talked to 42 current and former employees. They hammered all kinds of things from the cult of Musk to the working conditions. I haven't actually read it. This one was behind their paywall, and I don't subscribe. I read a summary here: Massive Tesla Expose Reveals "Chaos" For Workers While Musk Does "Whatever He Wants"

 

According to Charlie Gasparino at Fox Business News, the SEC is seriously investigating, and Musk and the board have gotten some heavyweight securities law lawyers.