[GW150914]

Tesla is facing the prospect of needing to sell a honking load of stock at a discount to deal with their debt, and to do that they need a high stock price. While Musk appears to be a liability in many areas, he is the focus for a cult of personality that has made Tesla what it is, and has shown incredible talent for inflating the price of Tesla’s stock on that basis.

So while Tesla as a healthy company without crushing impending debt would almost certainly be better off without him, Tesla as it is only really exits because of his presence. Long term they have to actually make a lot of money and stop hemorrhaging money, and get out of their death spiral. Short term the only way to do that is sell expensive stock, and that stock is expensive because of the cult of Musk.

[geezerjay]

> he is the focus for a cult of personality that has made Tesla what it is

I disagree. What made Tesla what it is was the ability to design and bring to the market an electric car that people wanted to buy and actually prefered over equivalent ICE offerings, and pulling this off while competing against one of the most competitive and entrenched global industries.

They promised and they delivered. That's what made Tesla what it is.

Everything else is just self-promotion and actually erodes Tesla's accomplishments and goodwill.

[BoorishBears]

I don't believe that personally.

I am a huge Apple fan so this is not meant to be an insult, but to me Tesla is the Apple of EVs.

They made a product that people view above the sum of it's parts.

The fact is the Model S, and the Model 3, are cars that make people stretch beyond their means because they're held in a higher regard simply for coming from the brands they come from, the way the iPhone is, or a MacBook does.

It's what annoys some detractors of both "Why get a Model S, it's insulting to call it a luxury car next to an S Class that costs as much (which is true in my opinion)" "Why get an iPhone when an Android phone has 4x the RAM and a trick display and more apps! (which might be true)".

If another incumbent only did as much as either, they'd fail. GM couldn't make a Model 3 even if they made a Model 3. Reviewers wouldn't be charitable and say the tablet is "Forward facing". They'd call it what is honestly is, cost cutting.

They wouldn't argue Autopilot is improving, they'd be appalled an incumbent made a driving assistant willing to merge into lane shoulders and released it with nothing more than a "keep your hands on that wheel!"

Tesla has charisma, and that charisma imbues anything they make with a halo. That's why they can ask for 1k for a car coming out in 2+ years (or in even more years for the 35k version). That's why they can release AP without more safety guards than Super Cruise for example and not get skewered. Just like Apple can release a phone with a poor antenna and tell you you're holding it wrong, or a keyboard that gets clogged with normal use and tell you to pull out the compressed air.

And that charisma affects investors too. You can tell a TSLA investor from miles away just by how they speak. It's always about "the ride". It's almost always "Elon is saving humanity". It's why the CEO can call people pedos and not be removed, it's why shorting TSLA is probably the worst idea ever, but I digress...

[slivym]

A key part of that though, is that Tesla took 5 years before it even produced it's first car, 9 years before it's actually successful model S. Over that time they burned an enormous amount of money and they're 'disrupting' an industry that has 5-6% margins not the silicon valley style 30-40% with 0 marginal cost on inventory. Arguably the differentiating factor for Tesla was the ability to get financing in the region of Billions of dollars for close to a decade in order to break into this incredibly competitive market.

You talk about 'they promised and they delivered' yet Tesla has been a lesson in how a company can continually over promise, under-deliver without incurring any consequences. Just because Tesla eventually became successful doesn't paper over the cracks in it's early days.

Even now, if you're looking at valuing Tesla on what they delivered, well that's fine- but it's not reality. Tesla's current valuation makes them more valuable today than Ford. Which is pretty surprising when the idea of Tesla having the market share and profitability of Ford would be a very optimistic scenario.