Because higher interest rates make everything more difficult. It incentivizes people to save instead of buy expensive cars. It makes it more expensive to finance expensive cars. It makes it more expensive to raise financing to pay for factories and workers. It can very well bring about a recession where unemployment rises and your TAM shrinks.

Tesla is still trying to convince people it is in hyper growth mode constrained only by its ability to supply cars with robots, self driving cars, semis and compact cars all in the pipeline.

Let’s see how that plays out with fed funds at 5.5% for a few more months.