It is strange, because to many of us - and I am a former direct TSLA shareholder through merger, and indirect one through unmanaged funds - that the Cybertruck was going to be a commercial failure. This is my feeling about the Roadster, too. It's the wrong car for the wrong time. I don't think the free marketing and any production tech improvements were justified by the cost of money and focus.

BYD is beating them international and I fear Slate will beat them domestically.

My biggest grip with the CEO is he lacks discipline and focus to deal with sustained competition. He'd rather pivot on something that doesn't require attention to detail. There is plenty of money to be made in EVs and the Model Y is doing well, so it is possible. They can and should lean into charger tech based on NACS which they've won.

Solar was a loser and was always going to be a loser, there is no moat to make it high margin and he has shown no talent for boring things like scaling low margin businesses. Storage tech looks good now, but I think it will end similarly.

He has screwed up self-driving and auto-taxi so far with his self imposed constraint of no-LIDAR. He did this to force improvements in his AI endeavors and I could make a strong case it has killed Tesla owners. Whether or not the self driving system is safer than human drivers - and I think it generally is safer - is irrelevant, the basis for the comparison is what they were capable of versus what they delivered. Most FSD and autopilot fatalities are from object detection failures.

He is a modern Howard Hughes and this ride will end as such. He seems to want to colonize Mars and will burn all his shareholders to do so. Everything else is TWA and Mars is his Spruce Goose.