China and other competitors have other ideas, even if you're not aware of them.
When your whole pitch is that you're commoditising a technology, don't be surprised when you get a commoditised market.
When your whole pitch is that you're commoditising a technology, don't be surprised when you get a commoditised market.
SpaceX and NVIDIA share this trait. They out-innovate, and know only one speed: the speed of light. The tortoise can only beat the hare if the hare takes a nap, and nobody is napping at SpaceX.
I’m not a fanboy. I have criticisms of SpaceX. But you are pattern matching to the common story of startups getting complacent and being surpassed by up-comers in China and elsewhere. But the innovators dilemma only applies if the innovator stops innovating. Two decades on, SoaceX is still innovating as much as they always have.
That was a believable pitch up to around 2020 or so.
In 2018 they announced they were going to send a private crewed mission around the moon in 2023. Now we have the benefit of hindsight, it's 2026 and the vessel they were going to use has not yet had one circularised orbit.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but at this point Starship development is currently going slower than both the historical analogs, the Saturn V and the Space Shuttle.
Throwing cheap rockets into the air until they don't explode worked fine for Falcon; but given how long it's taking, I'm not sure it's working okay for Starship, and I'm now completely convinced that this is a *terrible* way to make something that's supposed to land on Mars, refuel, and return.
Turned out not, and also that handling re-entry was much much harder than the Space Shuttle (and Buran) had made it seem.
Is this category of launch vehicle just that hard, or did Musk aggravate just enough of the competent engineers and lose just enough talent to grab defeat from the jaws of victory? Timeline's about right for the latter, but I could easily believe the former.
On re-entry, Buran re-entered once. You can’t read much into that. The shuttle did about a hundred times, but exploded doing it once and had a number of near misses. One reason it was killed off was that making re-entry safe was considered to be impossible. I think it’d be fair to say that re-entry for large objects remains an unsolved problem.
China is going to eat them, just like they ate Teslas insurmountable lead in a few short years.
The best selling EV brand in the world is BYD: https://cleantechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03...
The best selling EV model in the world is the Model Y.
Saying "Oh but the Model Y" is like how when the original iMac came out, Apple turned out to be selling the single most popular model of retail PC in the US despite Apple also having 3% of the world market. Putting a lot of wood behind few arrows does make those arrows look bigger.
I can say that about Tesla. Like, 1/3rd of their total lifetime net profit has been subsidies of one kind or another, mostly government-created regulatory credit programs.
> What is Tesla's Market Cap vs these companies?
Irrelevant, especially as the narrative being used to prop up the market cap this year is "we're not a car company, we're an AI company".
> then you should be shorting Tesla with all you might.
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
What I have done is sell all my Tesla shares and put them into other things where I see realistic growth opportunity.
That way I don't need to time things perfectly for a relatively small reward (100% if they go bankrupt, vs several times better than that just by simply buying NVIDIA and watching line go up) that comes with successful shorting.
What’s the number of Teslas sold per year? Declining year over year as others have grown significantly. Profit margin sans regulatory issues? Peaked 2021, declining since then. Same in about every company wide metric.
BYD? Most all such metrics over the same period doubled to quadrupled. They outsell Tesla. They have better tech than Tesla. They’re clearly out innovating and outselling Tesla.
And, as the other poster made clear, your moving-the-goalposts let’s-ignore-the-rest claim doesn’t even stand slight scrutiny. Try harder indeed.
Could be relevant if that whole "robot army" happens.
(There were a few of them. Fortunately it did not really survive as a concept)
But of course this is all dwarfed by AI stuff financially so its basically irrelevant. SpaceX could stop all launch sales tomorrow with zero impact on its financials.