[dragontamer]

Were you around during the 2008 financial recession?

Major US banks were literally going bankrupt, credit dried up. There was almost no opportunity to borrow money, the stock market was crashing, no opportunity to IPO or perform a secondary offering.

Tesla is operating under one of the greatest, and longest, bull markets the US has ever seen. The great 2011 to 2018 (maybe longer??) boom. Tesla has been able to either secondary-offering, or borrow, roughly billion+ each year, every year, since its IPO.

During recent years, its borrowed or otherwise raised over $2 billion / year.

[trisomy21]

I was. And all that might even be relevant if you weren't comparing Tesla to Apple.

The iPhone actually launched in 2007, the same year in which Apple generated over $24B in revenue and was sitting on $15B in cash at the end of the fiscal year. In 2008, they did $37B in revenue and ended the fiscal year sitting on about $25B in cash.

The claim that Apple's financial challenges with launching a smartphone were "exponentially" greater than Tesla's, is laughable.

[dragontamer]

> And all that might even be relevant if you weren't comparing Tesla to Apple.

I'm not comparing Apple to Tesla. The parent article is. And I'm trying to point out how utterly silly the comparison is.

Quote the first paragraph:

> When Nokia people looked at the first iPhone, they saw a not-great phone with some cool features that they were going to build too, being produced at a small fraction of the volumes they were selling. They shrugged. “No 3G, and just look at the camera!”

> When many car company people look at a Tesla, they see a not-great car with some cool features that they’re going to build too, being produced at a small fraction of the volumes they’re selling. “Look at the fit and finish, and the panel gaps, and the tent!”

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This comparison is fundamentally insane, and shouldn't be the starting point of any serious discussion.

[trisomy21]

You said: “The political, environmental, and financial headwinds Apple faced during its time to create the iPhone were exponentially more difficult than Tesla's.“

I brought attention to this and showed how ridiculous of an assertion it was.

And now you're saying: "I'm not comparing Apple to Tesla. The parent article is. And I'm trying to point out how utterly silly the comparison is."

The other quotes you've added are all irrelevant. You're all over the place. Give it a rest and come back when you have a properly thought out point to make with some evidence to support it.

[slededit]

You did say it was ridiculous, but never proved it. Apple may have had money in the bank but selling a luxury product in the middle of a financial crisis was an up hill battle.

Consumer confidence was at all time lows and disposable income saw the biggest drop since the great depression. People were more concerned about whether they'd still have a job and savings rates upticked dramatically while salaries fell.

[trisomy21]

Have you looked at Apple's performance during that time period? As I pointed out in my previous post, Apple was sitting on $25B in cash in 2008. Additionally, their annual revenue nearly tripled and their profit quadrupled from 2007-2010. That's not an up hill battle.

All your talk about the economic environment during the recession is irrelevant because Apple had $25B cash in the bank and the iPhone was a hit, even though it was a luxury item being sold during the recession. The massive scale of their business and their overall success insulated them from the larger ramifications of the economic downturn. Tesla is operating in the opposite economic environment today, but they are not as financially surefooted as Apple was during the launch of the iPhone. So, to get back to the point, to claim that the financial challenges Apple faced bringing the iPhone to market were exponentially more difficult than Tesla's, just isn't true.

[slededit]

Yes and making the iPhone a hit is a lot harder when your customers don't have any money to spend.

Nobody is saying Apple couldn't afford the R&D to build the physical phones.

[Latteland]

come on, apple was never suffering under financial constraints like tesla has been. That is just a sill comparison.

[dragontamer]

"Suffering" ???

Tesla has received $1+ BILLION a year over the past few years from the stock market, and roughly $3.8 Billion from the debt / bond market so far.

A lot of companies would be able to survive if the market magically came up with $2 Billion / year for that company to spend every year.

You might say that its Musk's advantage that he's cultivated the cult of personality. And you'd be correct about that. But I wouldn't call Tesla's financial situation to be "suffering", not by a long shot.

The correct description is "wasted". Musk WASTED the tons, and tons, and tons of money he received from investors. He's not cash flow positive, even after all of these billions of dollars have come in.

$0.813 Billion in 2013: https://www.thestreet.com/story/11924981/1/elon-musk-invests...

$2 Billion in 2014: https://www.ft.com/content/2f2387a0-a00a-11e3-9c65-00144feab...

$0.738 Billion in 2015: http://fortune.com/2015/08/20/tesla-stock-sale-cash/

$1.45 Billion in 2016: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/20/tesla-raises-146b-in-stock-s...

$262 Million Stocks + $850 Million Bonds in 2017: https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-market-thinks-about-t...

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Etc. Etc. The financial markets have been very, very kind to Tesla. Any failures on Tesla is 100% Musk's fault at this point. No other company raises billions of dollars every year under normal situations (where "normal" is defined as, any period outside of the 2011 to 2018 bull-run of the current market)