zlacker

Umm, pretty sure most of the value of Tesla (his main source of wealth) comes from all their cars, tech, and manufacturing capacity.

>>fastba+(OP)
it is not entirely private enterprise - government emissions credits are lucrative

>>fastba+(OP)
Tesla got carried over the chasm by hundreds of millions of dollars in DOE-backed loans, their product is subsidized by state and federal price supports, and all of their profits are due to air pollution swaps, another government subsidy. Good for Tesla for being aligned with the government, I guess.

This is to say nothing of Elon's small-potatoes stealing from local governments via Boring.

>>fastba+(OP)
A lot of (early?) Tesla revenue was other auto makers forced to buy credits from them

>>fastba+(OP)
Most of the value comes from the ponzi scheme that is their stock. Nothing they have in assets, physical or otherwise, ever justified the price of the stock even at half of what it is today.

>>fastba+(OP)
I don't have a recent article backing this up, but this has been false as recently as last year: https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a36266393/tesla-mad...

I guess a definition of "value" as "the intangibles that allow it to keep functioning" would make your statement correct, but a definition that relies on "how it generates revenue" would probably not.

>>scubbo+w3
5% of Tesla 2021 Q1 revenue was generated from selling emission credits, 1% from trading Bitcoin, for a total of 6% generated from not selling cars / energy products / etc.

So yes, the vast majority of revenue generators (and therefore value generators) for Tesla (at least in Q1 2021, as per the article you linked) are the things I listed in my first comment.

You were seemingly thinking about what was generating profit, which is generally not how value is calculated, otherwise my (profitable) two-man company would be more valuable than Twitter. But given that you explicitly said "how it generates revenue" at the end of your comment I'm actually a bit confused as to your position.

>>lokar+c2
Ok, but the vast majority of revenue was not generated from selling credits over the entire lifetime of the company, which is what matters when we are talking about Tesla's present-day value (and therefore the source of Musk's wealth).

>>dexter+H2
I bow to your wisdom. I haven't made much money in the stock market myself, but I assume you have since apparently you are smarter than the market.

>>fastba+3J
I am smarter than the market and you probably are as well. That doesn't help making money though since money is made by luck mouth-breathers.

>>fastba+cI
> Emissions credits accounted for $518 million in revenue in a quarter that saw a pretax income of $533 million and a net income of $438 million on a GAAP basis. Needless to say, the credits account for almost the entirety of Tesla's profit for this quarter

518/533 ~= 97%, not 5%. I must be misunderstanding something somewhere. Explicitly, I'm saying that (per my understanding of that article) Tesla derived more income from selling emissions credits than from selling cars in that particular quarter (and, I think it's reasonable to assume, other quarters, given how overwhelmingly that seems to be their business model).

>>scubbo+q4d
You are conflating "net income" (profit) with revenue. I do not disagree that the vast majority of profit was generated by selling credits, but revenue is how most people measure value for corps (this is how Amazon could be an amazingly valuable company while not turning a profit for years). Re-read the last para in my other comment for another example of why you don't use profit to benchmark "value".

Even the emission credits being "pure profit" is misleading, given that the only reason Tesla can sell those is because of the cars/batteries/etc they are producing, so realistically the cost of producing those things should be deducted against the revenue generated by selling the credits.