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0 pointscompcoffee8y ago0 comments

>Can you expand on that?

Are you seroius? Someone says the market cap of Tesla is "somewhat" bounded, and you ask how? Is it totally unbounded? Is what they are doing unprecedented beyond comparison?

Do you think the market cap of Tesla is infinity? It's already multiples of companies that produce a magnitude more cars and infinite more profit. Not good enough for you? What is it that you think Tesla does so well that justifies an unlimited market cap?

This is insane. Wish HackerNews existed during the DotCom bubble. It was bad enough being accused of sexism during the Theranos bubble.

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Geee8y ago· 3 in thread

They produce the most batteries in the world and have the most extensive global charging network and the most advanced solar panel tech. They're the number one horse in the race to dominate the post-oil world.

vkou8y ago

Panasonic builds their batteries.

Their solar business is a rock around their necks, that is hemorrhaging money, and laying off employees.

Their charger network's nice, but in a post oil world, every gas station will have chargers. And for some reason, Ford doesn't feel the need to own Exxon-Mobil - probably because energy is an interchangeable commodity... And they are not in the commodity business. They are in the business of building cars.

tokipin8y ago

The cells and the packs are different things. The packs aren't just a bunch of cells glued together. See this[1] fun teardown discussion. Another company building battery packs would have different costs even if they were buying the same exact cells from Panasonic, and it's likely Tesla had a hand in designing the cells so I don't know if that's particularly possible.

The reason for the Gigafactory is to compress supply chains, but more importantly because there isn't enough global demand/supply for batteries to support the volumes Tesla wants. Without building their own factory, the global supply would be a constraining factor for Tesla's plans. The Gigafactory is a long-term bet that they will need that much supply in the future. This is not a problem that other carmakers have where they would want to "vertically integrate" oil refineries and gas stations, because availability of gasoline is not a problem.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpCrkO1x-Qo&t=29m30s

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Geee8y ago

Gigafactories (second one coming soon) are a joint effort with Panasonic and Tesla enjoys the economies of scale from them. They just recently started delivering their solar tiles. Solar -> batteries -> chargers -> cars. This level of integration makes them potentially 10 times more valuable than other car companies.

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4 comments · 1 top-level

Geee8y ago· 3 in thread

vkou8y ago

Panasonic builds their batteries.

Their solar business is a rock around their necks, that is hemorrhaging money, and laying off employees.

tokipin8y ago

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpCrkO1x-Qo&t=29m30s

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Geee8y ago

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