Their view if they make the connection probably is that he’s brilliant, making bank by having them woke snowflake fools shell out six figures for a lame soyboy EV.
Does this follow, though? Here’s my WAG: part of the reason GM and Ford are down is because they still make a lot of gas powered cars. And given the state of the world at the moment, an electric car might seem like a better bet than a gas powered one - makes sense?
In which case, the collapse in Tesla shares would be all the more remarkable.
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You raise a valid point. Stock markets are supposed to be forward-looking and all that.
Here in the USA, EVs are still a drop in the bucket. That might change in 5 years, certainly in 10. But if the valuations are really based on this quarter’s profitability, GM sells a hell of a lot of ICE vehicles just fine.
I know for sure that I don’t know for sure.
It’s the opposite. The other car manufacturers didn’t fall as much in part because they DO have gas vehicles for sale. It’s the electric vehicles that are getting hammered due to supply chain issues and reliance on Chinese manufacturing that is in disarray.
For example, Tesla has had to shutter its Shanghai plant. Chinese electric car maker NIO is down 67% this year, and has lost 3/4 of its value from its high. Rivian has lost a whopping 82% of its value this year.
The electric car business is now running up against the supply chain issues many of us have said was going to be a real limiter for years to come. There’s not enough cobalt, lithium, and other refined materials to keep up with demand. And the EV supply chain is very tied to China, which is currently a mess with Covid running rampant and all kinds of structural problems in the country. As a result, prices are skyrocketing and delays are mounting. The Ford Lightning Pro, supposedly the ‘affordable’ one, has risen in price 40% since its introduction, and there is a two-year waiting list. Add in the rise in interest rates, and suddenly a $40,000 truck at 1-2% interest is a $60,000 truck financed at 8%.
The Tesla Model S currently has a wait time of 18-24 months. The Model X is the same. The model 3 is 6-12 months. Tesla isn’t suffering from a drop in demand due to Musk - it’s suffering from the inability to meet the demand it has. Sales are being seriously constrained by supply issues, which is why shares in electric car manufacturers are falling faster than traditional car makers. There are supply chain problems with traditional cars as well, but they aren’t as severe.
Battery makers, charge infrastructure makers and other electric vehicle stocks have also been hammered this year.
If you think Tesla’s fall is because of Musk’s antics at Twitter (which I notice is still up and running just fine), note that it had already lost half its value for the year before he bought Twitter, and is now down 69% - less than Rivian, and about the same as NIO. I suspect Musk’s Twitter shenanigans might be responsible for an additional 10%-20% fall in the share price. That will recover when the news cycle moves on. If it weren’t for supply chain issues I’d consider buying some TSLA right now for that reason.
BTW, for people who take stock advice from the internet: The list of electric cars was from an article in StocksToTrade for “The EV stocks to watch in 2022”. Their top 2 picks were Tesla and Nio, when they were both near their peak.
I read something once years ago that has stuck with me, and to my non-expert observation has rung incredibly true:
Any time something new comes along, it is almost never the companies that create the market which go on to dominate the market. In 1903 the infant auto industry was dominated by then-household names that are long gone and forgotten. It was the second generation Fords and GMs (or GM’s constituent makes like Chevrolet) that went on to dominate.
In 1980, if you’d asked who would dominate home computing (avoiding now muddled terms like microcomputer and PC), names like Commodore, Atari, Sinclair, and Apple would have sprung to mind. Today only Apple is still in the game, and it ain’t home computing that is their real trick, and they only exist due to some serious help from Microsoft.
In 1997 we’d be talking about Yahoo!, AoL, Alta Vista, etc. I don’t know that anybody could have predicted what Google would become. An AIUI, MySpace came before Facebook.
Sorry for the hijack, but your comment about investing advice from the internet and Tesla being one to watch made me think of it. In 20 years, I don’t know who will dominate EVs, but I’d place a reasonable wager it won’t be Tesla.
I’m sure someone will come along with exceptions, but that doesn’t mean that as a general rule it isn’t true.
One of the most startling exceptions to me has been Amazon. Everybody predicted they would pave the way for internet retail, then fall by the wayside. Instead they became a verging-on-indispensable monster.
But I do agree they seem more the exception than the rule.
Just want to throw in my wholehearted agreement with you about the impossibility of making these sorts of predictions. On the first point – 1980 and PCs – I thought that Gateway had an outstanding future as an online seller of customized PCs. They even started opening up a bunch of retail stores, which quickly shut down, and then the whole operation was kaput. I also thought that the Xerox Store, selling name-brand PCs and accessories, had a solid future. It didn’t last long. Obviously Dell did something right, and I think it was mostly by heavily focusing on the corporate market.
And as for 1997 and Alta Vista, Yahoo, and Google, yep. Alta Vista was the first really good search engine and was my standard go-to for search. Someone or something I read suggested that Google was superior. I was skeptical. Little did I know …
As for investment advice from the internet or the popular media, the internet didn’t exist as such back in my younger days when I dabbled in stock market speculation. But the popular media did. I used to joke that you could do fairly well as a speculator by reading the recommendations in the popular media, and then doing the exact opposite! It’s a slightly more cynical take on the old adage that a bunch of drunken monkeys could pick winning stocks more accurately than market analysts. I recall one of my stock picks being a big nickel producer, and then later reading the alarming announcement in the media that nickel, copper, and many other such metal prices were going to sink to incredible new lows. I ignored it, and held on. One year later, the stock price had doubled.*
* I rather suspect that one reason this happened is that “professional” investors, well attuned to all the latest predictions, had known of the anticipated fall in metal prices and dumped their stock. So ordinary dudes like myself got it at a discount. The one thing that the stock market always does, despitet the alleged sophistication of investing strategies, is over-react, on both the downside and the upside.
To be fair, Mercedes-Benz (which arguably invented the automobile) are doing fine.
Yeah, cars are a bit of a US centric take. Not only Mercedez-Benz but Peugeot and Fiat are both still kicking and are in the process of merging. Renault is also still around. Those companies were all building cars in the 19th century. Market dominance is probably not in the cards for them anymore, but they’re far from folding.
Even if it would help, Musk seems to have no interest in the news dying down. His actions are what create the news in the first place. And anyone telling him to slow down or back off are told to shut up.
But I don’t buy that even being quiet would get the cork back in the bottle. Musk has shown his weakness in his inability to manage this takeover well. He has alienated investors and advertisers with his antics. He has worked to alienate the very crowd who like Tesla cars–environmentalist and technophiles. It seems that no one doing business with him can trust him to have even decorum.
The trust that people had in the Musk brand is just no longer there.
Could be. I’m not going to predict the long-erm opinions of Americans, other than to point out that we have regular panics in the social media era, and at the time they happen everyone thinks ithey are permanent - then everyone forgets all about it when the next Current Thing comes along. But maybe this time it will stick.
However… I think you all might be in a bubble here. You see a lot of enraged people leaving Twitter and think Twitter is collapsing. What you don’t see, because you don’t follow them, are all the new people coming in. According to Musk, Twitter’s usage is at an all-time high, and Twitter Blue is becoming an important revenue stream.
There is another way this could end - Musk did all the dirty work of cutting people and taking the heat for doing so, but he did in fact say that he’s cut Twitter’s operating costs by about 75%. If that is true, then he only needs to get back half of the revenue Twitter had before to make it more profitable than it ever was. Whether he will or not is an open question, but it’s way too early to predict failure here. Acquisitions are always painful at the beginning, especially when the company being acquired is a structural mess as Twitter apparently was.
I do think this has hurt Tesla, which was as much of a liberal lifestyle brand as any product. His active trolling of liberals on Twitter is bound to hurt Tesla’s sales. But at this moment he may be gambling that since they are supply-limited anyway, a reduction in demand is not the end of the world so long as it is temporary.
A bigger problem is that he has also pissed off governments, who appear to be sharpening their knives. Biden hated him from the beginning because Tesla isn’t unionized, and now there are multiple federal agencis scrutinizing everything Musk does.
Countering that is the government’s utter dependence on SpaceX, which may get Musk a little breathing room.
In the words of Adam Savage, “Well, there’s your problem.” Why in the world would you believe anything a known liar like Musk has to say?
As for first movers losing out in the end, I agree. The best sign of this: Of the original Fortune 500 companies, the only one still standing is GE, and GE is a shadow of its former industrial might.
There are always exceptions. Microsoft and Apple, some aircraft manufacturers like Boeing and Lockheed, both of which date back to pre-WWI.
Maybe. But given that everyone acknowledges that a huge number of staff were fired, it’s not hard to believe. People in this thread were predicting that Twitter would collapse on itself because Musk fired all the people who know how to run it. So I can easily b elieve that he has cut expenses at least in half, and 75% is entirely possible.
…an increasing number of Twitter bugs and annoyances:
The worst was an algorithmic failure that I haven’t seen anyone else get and I haven’t been able to duplicate, so its either just a one-off, or something that is spread so thin that most wouldn’t even notice that it happened. But I did a search for “webflow” (because I do that regularly to keep on top of developments with the platform) and the very first item that popped up in the search (on my Android Twitter app) was a link to an And#ew Tate post. It was the weirdest damn thing. Its the sort of thing that would “accidentally” randomly appear in a Youtube search (typically as a result of algorithm hacking) but its the first time I’ve seen it here.
This bug has been with me all week (on my android phone app, not desktop) : and it theoretically should be an easy fix.
Video playback isn’t stable, I’ve had a few occasions (especially with older videos) where the video would play only half-way through and then just freeze. It didn’t work on my phone, so I hopped over to my desktop and the video failed in exactly the same way. So for those of you that were hoping that Twitter was going to become a Youtube killer, I have some bad news for you.
Speaking of “freezes”: when I’ve followed someone on the Android app, 5 times out of 6 the Twitter app froze for a seconds, crashed then relaunched.
More bugs.
https://twitter.com/Powflip/status/1608135384344723458
https://twitter.com/PootDibou/status/1607363962839961601
Its slow death by a thousand cuts. The problem isn’t the existence of bugs: its that nobody is fixing them.
It’s probably more than 75% since Twitter has stopped paying its bills. The incredulous part is that we would believe that Twitter usage is at an all time high and that Twitter Blue revenue is significant.
And is now in the process of being further chopped into 3 even smaller pieces.
I was a manager within GE. The corporate and cultural rot was indescribable. The best way to get ahead was to do nothing.
You keep saying things like this, and it just seems like you miss the point. None of us are getting our information from enraged people who are quitting Twitter. We’re getting our information from journalists who provide actual evidence of what is happening. We read what the experts on these topic say.
Sure, it would be possible for there to be a bubble, where we’re hearing only from one side. But then you’d be able to bring these articles to our attention, and we could look at them and determine their reliability. Instead, you keep quoting Musk, the one person who cannot be trusted. He has a vested interest in presenting himself as not failing. And he does not back up anything with actual evidence.
It’s not even the number of users that is the problem on Twitter. As JohnT says, it has technical problems, because people aren’t there to deal with it. It has moderation problems because Musk keeps on coming up with petty things to ban people for, like parody or posting public information. His whole thing was that he was going to push freedom speech, but he’s clearly against that.
None of our information is coming from people who are angry and quitting Twitter. This is the SDMB. We get our information from reputable sources.
Why are those reposts not showing the stupid “how many times this tweet has been seen” link?
Imagine that - a feature nobody asked for that was thrown together in a day or two because the world’s most divorced man wasn’t getting enough likes on his tweets isn’t functioning properly.