alt Hacker NewsTesla is also retreating from the being a car company, at least they don't see being a company that sells electric cars to consumers being a great business to be in long term.
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It's on the way to be merged with SpaceX.
It is a great business to be in, they just aren't run by a sane person who is good at business. If it weren't for massive conflicts of interest their CEO would have been fired years ago.
They're getting leapfrogged by Chinese companies despite being extremely early to the Chinese market along with a factory in China.
They've somehow squandered their technology lead despite being profitable and scaled unlike some of the companies leapfrogging them.
They botched the Cybertruck so badly. Imagine an American company failing to make a popular pickup truck. They could have been selling pickup trucks at F-150-like volume and profitability.
Their brand image of tech futurism is outdated and they're squandering the most profitable segments of the automotive market. Just look at stuff that's succeeding and pulling in big money like the Bronco and Toyota TRD lineup.
Tesla is retreating to robots because their CEO gets bored of running scaled companies that aren't startups, and they're also doing a whole bunch of financial manipulation to prevent Tesla stock from crashing due to its fundamentals. Without a future moonshot business, the valuation of the stock makes no sense, and would naturally decline to that of a normal automobile company otherwise. That event would destroy Elon's net worth and probably make him default on a bunch of personal loans. By combining other moonshots like xAI and robotics, it lessens the impact of the reality of the automotive business: a profitable but generally low-margin high-maturity type of business.
There are a couple good reasons for Tesla to do that, which don't apply to most carmakers.
One is that their stock is priced for extreme growth, so they need to be in businesses that can justify that. Cars are not that kind of business. They were for a while when Tesla was much smaller and the only decent EV maker, but not anymore. For any carmaker with a typical carmaker PE, cars can be a fine business.
Tesla's other problem is that Elon did serious damage to their brand, and they're not even getting the growth that other EV makers are getting.