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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to know how these numbers compare to Amazon's early years. Amazon also took forever before it made a profit. As the article points out, Tesla has been expanding enormously. As long as there is demand for their cars (and it seems there is), I don't see why it would start making a profit once the company focuses on profit rather than expansion.

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There's a difference in not having a profit due to (a) reinvestment; (b) poor unit economics.

(a) is much less worrying for an investor, e.g. Amazon (b) suggests a bad business model, e.g. Uber/Lyft, Tesla

Is it possible that Tesla is driving down the cost curve faster than any other electric vehicle manufacturer, and once they hit a tipping point, they will disrupt the entire automotive industry and be worth 10x their current price? I may not believe Musk’s self driving car vision is attainable in the gritty real world in under 10 years, so I’ll discount that... but driving down battery cost, while making a better electric vehicle than Audi/Mercedes/Porsche.. that’s exciting.

But Tesla is reinvesting a lot. And it's growing the market for electric cars, setting up infrastructure, etc. He might be selling at a loss initially in order to create the volume that will eventually drive down the cost so he can generate a profit. From what I understand, the big reason he keeps losing money on selling cars is that by the time the previous car starts making a profit, he's already already started selling the next one at greater volume, creating new loss that drowns the fresh profit from that previous car.

That was true with model S but not with model 3. The latter is the main product, bread and butter, whose purpose is not funding other future products.

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