[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.

[trisomy21]

It's not harder when you have $25B in cash to spend on fancy marketing, advertising, promotion etc. Do you not understand how massive of an advantage that is? It effectively makes you recession proof. Additionally, you can look at Apple's financials to see that they had no problem selling millions of iPhones through the recession. In fact Q4 of 2009 was their most profitable quarter ever (up until that point) which was the tail end of the recession. It was a radically successful launch by all metrics.

Any way you look at it, launching the iPhone, given Apple's cash, marketing muscle, and hw/sw expertise, wasn't as challenging (even in a recession)as bringing an electric vehicle to market and it by no means was "exponentially more difficult" – in the words of the OP.

I don't have anything more to add to this discussion. I think it's clear that the OP's claim is incredibly uninformed and wildly inaccurate.

[dragontamer]

> It's not harder when you have $25B in cash to spend on fancy marketing, advertising, promotion etc. Do you not understand how massive of an advantage that is?

Come on. Its Mr. Musk's decision to make a company take advantage of debt markets instead of waiting for a few years for the Roadster or Model S to make some profits. Tesla's current financial situation is 100% the decision of Musk.

Musk chose debt and stock offerings because he wanted to take advantage of bull market conditions. He's received something on the order of ~$10 Billion from investors, either from the debt market or the stock market (IPOs or Secondary offerings).

If Tesla were to try its strategy of "IPO to get a ton of money each year, every year" during any other time in US history, it would have literally come across a recession and run out of money.

The Gigafactory was literally built on top of debt and stock offerings. Tesla never had that money to begin with.