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Comment by xoxoy | Hacker News Reader

Are people actually reading this at face value in a non ironic way...?

Tesla is Tesla because of an army of lawyers and financial engineering.

What the hell are you talking about? Tesla is Tesla because of their incredible engineering talent. The rest they do to amplify their car building efforts. If you offered Elon 100 incredible engineers/lawyers/financiers, he'll take the engineers every time.

How many car startups that achieve wide distribution has America had in the past 100 years?

Elon’s 2 most important people at Tesla is his CFO and General Counsel. If you think otherwise pay closer attention to his earnings calls.

Why focus on earning calls and not, says, meetings with Chinese partners for his Shanghai Gigafactory? CFO and legal counsels, or similar roles, are pretty much always present in calls with investors for any public companies.

Also, what makes Tesla being Tesla is something invented centuries ago. The battery.

That is really quite crazy that a legally required event to discuss finances would prominently feature Tesla legal & finance. I think you might be onto something.

What's special about their engineering?

You can easily point to ford and Toyota's major innovations that changed not only the car industry, but manufacturing on the whole.

The Prius also stands out as the big success on moving drivers off of fossil fuels. What's Tesla got?

At a surface view, I'd say their engineering is worse than their competitors. Poorly engineered products and manufacturing processes make for slow production -- a problem that Tesla is pretty famous for o think?

My understanding is that they design overly complex parts and use overly complex mechanisms to build their cars.

K I think you've spammed this thread enough. People know your opinion (which is obviously very biased) and don't need you to keep repeating what you think of Elon Musk at this point.

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