Tesla Lays Off Hundreds of Autopilot Workers in Latest Staff Cut (opens in new tab)

FWIW, I get the impression that their primary problem right now is production capacity / supply, not pre-orders / demand: they are pretty constantly increasing the price, are moving the delivery date of existing orders forward, have occasionally hinted they might should simply stop taking orders at all as they are so far behind, and supposedly have tons of cars sitting around at Tesla locations waiting for one or two more parts to come in before they can be handed to customers.

That doesn't even make any sense. Tesla doesn't even sell any CyberTrucks right now, so even if they lost all their pre orders it wouldn't affect revenue now. Ford and Rivian aren't even making vehicles in any sort of volume to be even a minor rival.

And why do you think that orders are falling off of a cliff exactly?

Tesla has grown incredibly fast, they have 100k employees, they have a terrific balance sheet and are at no risk of bankruptcy.

For the last 10 years people seem to always lay out this awful scenario for Tesla, meanwhile they are growing in sales incredibly quickly, literally the quickest ever.

There is a 6-9 month waiting period to receive a Model Y. More likely is that Musk is desperately focusing on factory output because demand is overwhelming supply.

> because you're seeing orders fall off a cliff

Any evidence or are you just making up things? Because that is literally the opposite of pretty much everything we know about Tesla orders.

> Cybertruck pre-orders given that Ford and Rivian have beaten them to market and both those products are drawing rave reviews.

That makes no sense. Cybertruck pre-orders going away (if that is case, and I question that) would not impact its current financials.

This is Musk. It totally could be he's making these cuts because he has a bad feeling. This isn't Volkswagen were everything is decided by committee.

If inflation is going up, like you suggest, now is the time to buy the stuff that you want - before the price goes up

The Fed can't easily raise rates all the way up to 8%. The higher rates affect the government just as much as you buying a new home or taking out a loan, and the government has a shitload of debt it has to keep refinancing.

"But with help from the Treasury and from Social Security’s actuaries, I’ve come up with a reasonable estimate of that added interest cost. By my math, the Fed’s higher rates will increase the federal government’s interest costs by about $128 billion a year."

That may not sound like much, given the trillions of dollars of investment wealth that have been vaporized by the Fed’s higher rates. Or given the $1.4 trillion deficit President Biden’s proposed budget projects for this year.

But $128 billion is in the vicinity of the $133 billion total that the Biden budget is seeking for the Energy, Homeland Security and Agriculture Departments.

Or is just $2 billion below the total that the Biden budget proposes to spend for the Interior Department, the Labor Department, the Commerce Department, the Treasury, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, the Social Security Administration and the Corps of Engineers. Combined."[1]

"Already, the federal government spends $330 billion per year, or $2,207 per taxpayer, on interest payments – more than on food stamps and disability insurance combined. And two-thirds of our debt is slated to roll over in the next five years, likely into higher interest rate bonds.

For every 1 percentage point increase in interest rates above projections, deficits grow by $2 trillion over a decade; that’s on top of the nearly $13 trillion in projected borrowing over the next decade."[2]

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/27/fed-rate-...

[2]: https://www.crfb.org/press-releases/feds-interest-rate-hike-...

Comparing Tesla to Ford is just comical. Tesla has a completely different technology they work on, and has a massive lead on Ford in EV's.

You don't even know what you are saying about Tesla. Take on more debt? Why would they do that? They have 17 billion dollars in cash on hand, and paid off a lot of their pre existing debt.

Even if they want to build a new gigafactory they don't need any more funding. They smartly sold more shares when the stock was insanely high and got a huge infusion.

The Tesla bull will say that Tesla’s ML has gotten so good that these top-shelf human curators are now unnecessary, and can be outsourced or dispensed with entirely. The Tesla bear will counter that this is merely to keep up appearances; it looks a hell of a lot better to fire data curators over machine learning engineers, even if the former are still just as (if not more!) necessary as the latter.