> Capital that is going going to be harder to raise
Tesla has over $10 billions in cash and adding few billions every quarter. They don't need to raise ever again.
> They had early-adopter success
Yes. Also, they became the largest EV company in the world with 2x margin of other car companies.
> when they had the field to themselves
Nissan Leaf and Bolt EV launched before Model 3.
Jaguar i-Pace, Audi eTron, BMW i5, VW ID.3 and ID.4, few models from Hyundai and quite a few more.
Model 3 and Model Y had plenty of competition for several years.
That competition didn't sell many cars and Tesla did.
> But now every major car company ... are coming for them
More like desperately trying to catch up. Tesla is still ahead of everyone in things that matter, like securing raw materials for batteries, building battery cells, securing battery cells from suppliers, manufacturing (gigacasting, spending less time and money to build a car), building more factories (ramping up 2, soon announcing 2 or more), Tesla Semi with best specs by far, still the best motors, the most efficient cars, the safest cars, building insurance business, shipping more software updates than anyone. This is not a complete list.
The question for the future is not: will Toyota or Honda kill Tesla.
It's: will Toyota and Honda keep up enough to not go bankrupt.
Having $10 billion in cash sounds like a lot. But that's against the $500 billion car companies will be investing this decade: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/exclus...
It's also not much compared to the $130 billion Tesla's top 10 investors have lost on Telsa since the Twitter takeover started: https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/tesla-stock...
And Tesla is coming under pressure to spend their cash not on investments, but on stock buybacks: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/tesla-stock-...
As to the future, we'll see, but it's perfectly possible that Tesla will end up in the bucket with Groupon: promising early start, but in retrospect only of historical interest.