Tesla - A Ponzi Scheme?

[Dcr26]

All the shorts, naysayers and legacy auto investors/supports fear Tesla and do whatever they can to will, wish and hope for Tesla failure. Ponzi Scheme is a label often used. This feedback from seeking alpha is great in pushing back these hopeless fanatics of the old car world:


Randy Carlson, Contributor
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Characterizing Tesla as a Ponzi scheme - that is as an enterprise operated with the goal of extracting money from investors rather than creating real products, real services and real value is disingenuous at best....Moderator-truncated from the article's illegal full length.

 

[mmd]

All the shorts, naysayers and legacy auto investors/supports fear Tesla and do whatever they can to will, wish and hope for Tesla failure. Ponzi Scheme is a label often used.

Elon himself has said, that Daimler and (Toyota?) helped Tesla survive during the 2008 recession, more than the DOE loan Tesla received. GM, Ford and Chrysler had their own survival battles (well, 2 went belly up), so they couldn't have helped. If legacy automakers really wanted to kill Tesla, they could have done it right then.

Your accusations against them seems baseless, considering Elon himself has said otherwise.
People shouldn't become paranoids, thinking anyone throwing in a dose of reality is trying to kill Tesla or EVs. These automakers are selling millions of cars; and GM's market actually has very little overlap with Tesla's. I don't think they care that much about Tesla stealing a few thousand sales. They have much bigger rivals to worry about.

 

[AMPd]

I'm driving a real car.
I've gotten it serviced for real, it actually happened, I didn't dream it.

So they who say tesla is not building real products or delivering real service, can, with all due respect, **** off.

 

[Dcr26]

Elon himself has said, that Daimler and (Toyota?) helped Tesla survive during the 2008 recession, more than the DOE loan Tesla received. GM, Ford and Chrysler had their own survival battles (well, 2 went belly up), so they couldn't have helped. If legacy automakers really wanted to kill Tesla, they could have done it right then.

Your accusations against them seems baseless, considering Elon himself has said otherwise.
People shouldn't become paranoids, thinking anyone throwing in a dose of reality is trying to kill Tesla or EVs. These automakers are selling millions of cars; and GM's market actually has very little overlap with Tesla's. I don't think they care that much about Tesla stealing a few thousand sales. They have much bigger rivals to worry about.

Um not my accusation. There are tons of interviews, interweb posts etc. that claim tesla is a ponzi scheme. btw post your proof or did you just make up your *sugar*?

 

[bonnie]

Um not my accusation. There are tons of interviews, interweb posts etc. that claim tesla is a ponzi scheme. btw post your proof or did you just make up your *sugar*?

And there are thousands of tons of articles/reports by reputable analysts that say Tesla is not. You're free, of course, to believe whatever you want. As am I.

 

[Reciprocity]

I've seen a Ponzi scheme close up. They don't make products and garner 400,000+ reservations for physical products.

Companies that grow as fast and require such high capex to do so, require a lot of negative cash flow. Amazon is an excellent example, and Amazon wouldn't have survived if it wasn't really a tech company like Tesla.

Old fashioned investors just don't get it and label it over valued. Auto alone has legit potential for 100 billion plus on validation and doesn't include any of the energy and solar business. Most likely this company has a near term value closer to 150 billion and sure it could be worth 0 if everything they are trying to do fails. In my view they have shown the ability to execute at a level required to meet the 150 billion or more market cap in the near future.

Currently over valued, sure. They do only make 100k luxury cars a year. But they have shown they can adapt and improve quickly. From nothing to nearly the best cars on the roads with everyone claiming they will fail at any moment.

You can bet against them, I choose to bet on them to succeed.

 

[AudubonB]

MODERATOR NOTE:

Ugh.

TMC is a de facto, if not de jure, Tesla fan club site and as such, the huge preponderance of thread viewers are going to have a certain bias in their opinions of such questions as to whether Tesla is a Ponzi scheme.

Therefore:

1. Creating such a thread is in itself inflammatory. Not fatal off the bat....but when the thread also is given such a title as the one this received, it is up to the thread creator to prove - instantly - that it was not click bait.

2. Hard-and-fast TMC policy is that articles may be cited only as per copyright law. Full articles: never.*

3. Decorum rules that a new thread be created only when a reasonable effort fails to locate a suitable extant thread into which one's post belongs.

4. Any post....and especially any thread...that makes a Moderator's life more difficult.....well, it's probably not a good idea to create them on a day whose name ends in the letter "y".


This thread fails on all four counts. It is now closed.
And the cited-in-full article has been shrunk to its descriptive first paragraph. *Iff the thread-creator can adequately demonstrate that s/he is the SA's article author, this will be re-visited.