[breck]

> What could have they possibly shown to the investors to get that kind of cash thrown at them?

Their founder has a track record of making his investors a lot of money while solving really hard, important problems.

Current valuations:

- Tesla $570B

- SpaceX $180B

- Neuralink $5B

- Boring $5.6B

[tarsinge]

The capacity of continuing the real world problem solving is very blurry. Boring is a joke. For Tesla he is not a founder, and they are mostly relying on a 10 year old product (new product is a joke) that'll only maybe saved with tariffs. It's mostly a meme stock company by now. SpaceX is a great success but his job was only providing money through government contracts and having the luck of finding Gwynne Shotwell, seems hard to replicate consistently. Add an ongoing mental breakdown and full on lies (FSD, humans on Mars, Hyperloop, ...) and it doesn't look that good (AI is a bit complex, hard to imagine someone in his state still having the intellectual capacity to really handle this). But yeah a new meme stock can still be a good bet for investors.

[ben_w]

> For Tesla he is not a founder, and they are mostly relying on a 10 year old product (new product is a joke) that'll only maybe saved with tariffs.

This is both true and irrelevant. When Musk took over, the Tesla Death Watch was running strong because it had made 100-and-something individual vehicles in total and relied entirely on finding more investors to not go bankrupt.

What Tesla needed is exactly what Musk is: a salesman who can sell a dream to both investors and customers.

> Add an ongoing mental breakdown and full on lies (FSD, humans on Mars

Humans on Mars shouldn't be on that list, even if he's wrong about every specific — it's the point of everything else he does.

[MrSkelter]

Tesla is still entirely supported by investors, government subsidies and hype. Nothing has changed. Without credits and customer subsidies they wouldn’t ever have made anything.

[ben_w]

You forgot the 6010172 vehicles they sold — Musk is respons for at least 6010025 of those, his predecessors for at most 147.

This is a pretty big thing to overlook, regardless of subsidies, as it's at least in the low hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue.

Hype, sure, that's the lighting every company wishes it could bottle for their product launches. Even the metaphorical launches rather than Musk's more literal use of the word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk%27s_Tesla_Roadster

Is "hype" a dirty word for you? Because my point is, that brought in actual sales, which they didn't meaningfully have before.

> Without credits and customer subsidies they wouldn’t ever have made anything

And? The sole purpose of those things is to convince the private sector to get something done. You're complaining that they worked.

[hcarvalhoalves]

I wouldn't be surprised if they have insider information on upcoming government contract.

[riku_iki]

Tesla and SpaceX are undeniable successes of peak Mask at his core expertise.

Boring and Neiralink are just valuations with unknown revenue base and future which may be not justified, and weak proof to justify another valuation.