Things at Tesla are worse than they appear | CNN Business

This, yeah. Heck, remember the Panama papers?

Maybe 100 years from now people will be watching Chinese movies and using Chinese loan words.

In the West those movies will probably still be in English and mainly from Hollywood. But China will own half the companies making movies there.
Things will change, but somehow they will remain mostly the same.

No doubt there that R&D is being spent differently now, and a lot of it can fail and end up being a waste.

A lot of it is going to their new batteries though which they've stated are now cheaper than all their suppliers. That doesn't mean it's cheaper to produce than others, but they don't have to pay a profit markup, so it ends up being cheaper. The refinery is just going go make those even cheaper, assuming that is successful as well.

That kind or investment will pay off if they keep it up and stay in that position, and long term, is transferable to the energy business which could prop up bad car sales (but that part would be many years away as they don't have it scaled to that yet)

Then yes they're spending many billions on the cybercab, which might be a failure, but the whole new manufacturing process they've created for it is transferable to other vehicles if they have to admit failure on the cab itself due to FSD failure. But the whole new process itself could also be a failure. That would be very bad catastrophic for them as the new process is how they plan to reduce costs moving forward. There's an additional 2 partially designed vehicles using that new process which were put on hold, so as long as the process itself isn't a failure, they could admit failure on the cab and pivot to those sooner than later.

The cybertruck is a flop, but a lot of the tech is transferable.

Optimus is an easier problem to solve than FSD at least for commercial stuff IMO, and it derisks their heavy R&D into AI stuff as now there's 2 things counting on it instead of 1. But yes still a huge risk, and yes both AI things could fail which would now be very bad.

There are a lot of gambles right now on certain things absolutely, but I wouldn't say all the R&D is wasted.

They can only have so many failures / flops though while also going through a dramatic sales slump. If that worsens they'll rearch a point where they have to reassess their goals and plans or it risk becoming a dire situation, but it's not dire yet.

If everything keeps going bad, they'll have to kick Elon out, or he'll have to change course, or it will actually become dire and they'll fail.

I mean we'll have to see how bad things get, but there's a long ways to go from now to sales so low even the energy business can't cover the costs of the facilities and staff even if they stop most of the capital intensive projects, idle the lines, and try to turtle while working on kicking Elon out and reorganizing.

Edit: just to clarify, the commercial energy business isn't going to get hit as hard as the consumer vehicles market. I don't expect to see such a huge slump there compared to the consumer vehicles.

Then they spend 400-500m less on capital expenditures or research and development. It means slower growth and give others an advantage, but it's not the end of the world.

That or they say fuck it and eat into their 35b cash for a bit.

Let em. Make them too expensive for insurers to support.