Wow, what an incredible bunch of nonsense.
SpaceX and Tesla were mostly funded by him because he couldn't find investors. Literally nobody wanted to touch electric cars or rockets. Pretty strange for a guy who is supposedly some mastermind investor whisperer.
They had massive amounts of funding issues and went almost bankrupt because there were so few people willing to invest.
> He's grabbed $20+ Billion for Tesla.
Tesla went threw multiple founding rounds and they have like $17 billion in cash on hand and have retired almost all debt.
So what exactly is your problem? Their automotive margin and operating margin are industry leading and the company has positive cashflow.
Go and compare Tesla funding with other EV companies like Lucid or Rivian. Tesla actually research starved, not over-funded.
> Pretty much every time I've seen him go back to the market (be it 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020...) to ask for more money, he convinces the banks, the stock traders, everyone to give him more money over-and-over-and-over again.
They literally grew a manufacturing company from nothing to a serious global player. Look at their growth rate in deliveries over the years you mentioned.
And the later rounds were popular, guess what, because the company successfully executed with the last investment and fulfilled what investors wanted. That is literally exactly what the whole point of investing is.
Look at the growth of his companies. Claiming its all because of raising money is just so incredibly idiotic. Its the other way around, he can raise money because his company show growth rate and they use the invest money well. There were competitors companies who raised far more, many of them are now gone.
Literally ask anybody who has invested in SpaceX or Tesla in the last 10 years (other then traders) if they think their investment was worth it.
> Which btw: happens to be the skill Edison had over Tesla. But Edison made a lasting company (General Electric) for over a century, while Tesla died dirt poor with only his patents in his name.
Edison was a better business men but he was also a smart guy. This idiotic binary thinking of Tesla smart <-> Edison evil business men is overplayed nonsense. Tesla died poor mostly because his visionary ideas didn't actually work in practice and his attempts at independent business failed because of his technical misunderstandings.
Yes, Tesla invented some brilliant things, but he also had ideas that didn't make any sense at all.
> Many others try to do what Elon Musk does. But they all fail. Elon Musk is the king of raising money.
Yes, they fail because they can raise money and then don't execute, and that's why people wont give them more money.
SpaceX managed to build the first orbital rocket at comparable budget to companies that did it 10 years later (and most have not even flown), when the political and technological environment for doing so was much easier.
Virgin Orbit raised 500M for a much smaller rocket. RocketLab also raised 100M but built a much smaller rocket. Relativity has raised almost 1 billion before they even launched their first rocket. Firefly aerospace had 100M+ and went bankrupt and has since been revived and has raised another few 100M, and they only now are about to launch for the first time.
And all of these companies faces a much, much friendly investor base and much friendly government.
Do the same and compare how much money Tesla raised to get to 100000 cars, and then compare it to how much EV companies now have raised before even delivered a single car. You can even go back and compare it to all other automotive startups in the US history, go ahead and honestly evaluate it. Fact is, Tesla was capital efficient and still are.
The story that his companies constantly make mistakes and fail to execute and this is simply papered over with more money raising is simply factually incorrect. It simply doesn't hold up.
To make the argument that SpaceX was successful because they raised so much more money then the competition is the height of idiocy. If you look at how much access to capital the competition had, SpaceX was basically made fun of for a decade because nobody thought such a small and insignificantly funded company they could build a rocket that could compete internationally and on complex military contracts. If it was about money, and how much you can raise the competition would have crushed them.