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Comment by nixarn | Hacker News Reader

> Furthermore, if you have been following closely, you would have seen the huge and humiliating mess ups he had with Tesla where he literally flushed billions and billions of dollars down the toilet.

I have been following it closely since 2012. Not sure where he flushed the money down the toilet? And with that he still grew the company well. Without Elon Tesla would never have become the 666B company that is today.

> Since Musk, another 4 private companies have reached orbit, or will reach orbit this year (Firefly, Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, and Virgin Orbit)

Rocket Lab was founded in 2006 and reached orbit in 2018 (and failed in 2020)?

Virgin Orbit's vehicle LauncherOne was started in 2007 (under Virgin Galactic) began operations in 2021.

And we'll see how Firefly and Relativity Space succeeds with their launches.

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>I have been following it closely since 2012. Not sure where he flushed the money down the toilet?

You have been following for that long and don't know the company continues to burn cash? That they said they'd never raise money again, and then raised money about 6 times? That if it wasn't for subsidies and funky accounting there is no profit?

Tesla has had their fair share of hard times. And some mornings have been horrible after having read some Elon tweets xD

When it comes to raising cash, things change, I remember once cash raise happened immediately after their value had increased much in a short interval, so it made sense to raise. And looking back, with the company being worth 666B now, they've done a lot of right calls, but of course some wrong ones as well.

And it's a myth that Tesla doesn't do any profit. For example last quarter Tesla got around 354M in regulatory credits (this is what the anti-tesla crowd likes to point out) but the net income was 1.14B. And besides the regulatory credit should be counted, not like the oil industry hasn't had it's insane amount of subsides over the years.

>so it made sense to raise

It totally makes sense, I agree. Just seems odd to say we won't, and then do, repeatedly.

>And it's a myth that Tesla doesn't do any profit. For example last quarter Tesla got around 354M in regulatory credits (this is what the anti-tesla crowd likes to point out) but the net income was 1.14B.

It's only a myth if you don't actually examine the underlying accounting. Regulatory credits, realizing deferred revenue on FSD (which doesn't exist), expanding the accounts payable, cutting R&D, bitcoin speculation...

All of these things affect the income statement in a way that pumps income that may or may not even be sustainable. All so people will say "look, profits!"

Are they marginally profitable now? Maybe, but that's nothing to brag about at a market cap of over half a trillion dollars.

>not like the oil industry hasn't had it's insane amount of subsides over the years.

So, what's your point here? Did I say oil companies deserve subsidies? Am I looking at the financials of Exxon? Being as how Tesla vehicles have tires, plastics, a supply chain...they also benefit from oil subsidies. What does this have to do with anything?

> Are they marginally profitable now? Maybe, but that's nothing to brag about at a market cap of over half a trillion dollars.

Decent to do more than a billion in profit and they are a growth company with Giga Austin and Giga Berlin opening soon. When amazon had a similar market cap they did around 800m in profit. It's ofcourse easy in retrospect to say that amazon was a winner, but of course it was an unknown to investors and everyone placed their bets back then.

And my point with subsidies is that they affect the outcome, as they exist they have an effect on the business, and should be valued as such.

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