[martindbp]

It is. Let's check by two measures:

1. 160k people have bought and recieved FSD Beta at somewhere between $5 and $15k (today's price). Let's say an average of $8k, that means $1.28 billion. More have bought it but are waiting to get access.

2. FSD take rate is estimated as of now to be around 7% of vehicles sold world-wide. At the current price of $15k and the estimated 1.4 million vehicles sold this year, that amounts to $1.47 billion.

Numbers are rough estimates, 50% of revenue is held in reserve until FSD is out of beta, and many haven't received the beta yet, still by any measure they are making and will make billions. What you personally think of the product, or if you think Elon is a "snake oil salesman" is not really relevant.

To strong arm any counter argument, it's possible that all these buyers will realize it actually sucks/doesn't work, sue the company and the whole thing falls apart, but I don't see any indication of it. There are plenty of unhappy and happy customers with FSD, but they've clearly found something that people are willing to pay a lot for and many are happy with it. Clearly it needs to improve much further in order to sell this to the wider public beyond people who think it's fun to babysit an AI.

[Veserv]

The product Tesla has sold for money is incomplete with no credible projected date of completion as the general problem of L4/L5 driving has never been solved before. Any profit from pre-selling a solution to a never-before-solved problem which requires an unknown amount of future work to make work as advertised absolutely does not count as “making billions”.

[benj111]

technically that's still not billions.

It's still crazy to me that people are paying all this money now for a product that still isn't delivering the promises of 5 years ago though.

[onethought]

Because it costs the same amount as the “auto-park” feature on a Volkswagen - and it auto parks as well. So think of it as “auto-park feature at market rate, that might self drive in the future, for free” - no brainer

The criticism of Tesla is always devoid of context of the rest of the car industry.

[fzeroracer]

Are you including the amount they're losing by having to recall those vehicles with FSD? Or the fact that there are lawsuits over how FSD doesn't work? Or any number of accidents caused by FSD being clearly buggy?

Like ignoring how poor your breakdown is over it making 'billions' they've been hit by wave after wave of bad PR. Like the various videos and lawsuits over how poor their quality control is and how many lies they've peddled over FSD.

[martindbp]

> Are you including the amount they're losing by having to recall those vehicles with FSD?

There has been one "recall" of FSD, which was for including the option to do a rolling stop at stop signs. They fixed this with an OTA update at the request of NHTSA. Total cost: a few dollars

> Or the fact that there are lawsuits over how FSD doesn't work?

Show me the lawsuits that have been lost and how much the damages were

> Or any number of accidents caused by FSD being clearly buggy?

FSD requires supervision, as such accidents are currently the responsibility of the driver. Even so, besides minor accidents there haven't been any confirmed crashes or anyone being hurt yet. With 160k cars on the road you'd expect worse. And again, this doesn't affect how much money they've made in selling the software.

> Like the various videos and lawsuits over how poor their quality control

You mean the video created by Dan O'Dowd of Green Hill Software, a competitor in automated car software?

Your hate doesn't change the numbers. Maybe you're right and everything comes crashing down, who knows. But this is the current reality.