Tesla's dirty little secret: Its net profit doesn't come from selling cars - eviltoast
  • daojones@lemmy.ml
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    4 years ago

    If criticisms of capitalism want to be taken seriously, they need to expand beyond Tesla and Amazon.

    Chevron, Exxon, and Blackwater love that you focus all your ire on an…electric car company.

    • TeethOrCoat@lemmygrad.ml
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      4 years ago

      How exactly will focusing on those companies instead ensure that criticisms of capitalism are taken seriously?

    • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      People ALSO focus on those. Even arch-neolib BIDEN calling out Exxon, however disingenuous that might be in his case.

      Demanding that all of them are mentioned in every post or some sort of deranged forced parity of criticism on a post rightly criticizing one of them is worse than worthless. It’s a harmful distraction and a whataboutism.

      .

    • test113@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Bro, what? Let’s say you’re a baker with a storefront where you sell baked goods, and in the back, you make your products. However, if you look at your books, you realize that you’re actually making money not from the bread you make and sell, but from selling something entirely different. Now, what happens if this thing that you’re selling to make money becomes unavailable, and other bakers who are actually making money from their products outperform you over time? Yeah, Tesla is screwed. They no longer make the best bread, and their main source of income is gone once regulations change. Other bakeries will surpass them with time. Tesla is an interesting concept, but it’s not just a car manufacturing company; it’s a tech company that is lagging behind in innovation and has run out of profitable ideas to sell. Tesla stock is traded as a tech company that is supposed to have groundbreaking technology that makes them more valuable than other car manufacturers. The problem is they don’t possess such technology, so it’s a massively overvalued car company. My prediction is that within five years, other car manufacturers will completely surpass Tesla, and within another five years, Tesla will become mostly irrelevant. This is assuming nothing changes, as they have nothing in their pipeline that gives me confidence they can turn this situation around. Elon Musk is great at selling “fake” visions that, when scrutinized, do not hold up.

    • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yes and no: super old article, but afaik selling green credits is still their main source of income and the only thing keeping them in the black.