[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.