I’m writing this as I watch the stream, and as usual, the start of the stream is late. From having covered a number of these events, that seems like a pretty standard Tesla thing. And since I’m watching on YouTube right now and the numbers have only gone up since the time the stream was supposed to have started until now, maybe they’re on to something.
A large segment of Tesla fans and market pundits are obsessed with hearing about every detail of how Tesla is doing what they are doing, but instead of feeding into that and potentially making statements that are difficult to follow through on, the Model Y announcement was a simple presentation walking people through the history of the company, and explaining what the next step was.
Tonight, Tesla revealed the Model Y, and thanks to the reveal of the Tesla Roadster as part of the Tesla Semi announcement, we were expecting some surprises.
The goal of this series is to examine current topics being written about Tesla [TSLA] that appear to be stirring up “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt” (or FUD). The plan is to try to provide reasonable analysis about the validity of the claims. I generally do not link to the articles that “inspire” me to write this, as I do not wish to reward analysis I feel is poor with increased traffic. However, I will freely admit that my analysis may contain incorrect assumptions, and will do my best to acknowledge them in future articles.
It’s been a couple months since I last wrote an article, and a ton of stuff has happened in that time, but there haven’t been a lot of changes with regards to the Tesla story. The company was generally trucking along, shipping Model 3s, and doing what everyone was expecting it to do.
If you somehow missed it, Tesla just announced Q4 deliveries totaling 90,700 vehicles, and that the company was dropping the price of its vehicles by $2,000 in response to the phaseout of the federal EV tax credit. The stock price responded by dropping almost 7% on the day.
I just published an article examining the FUD around Elon Musk supposedly terminating employees “on a whim” and what that may mean. This, however, isn’t the only recent FUD-based narrative that I feel is worth exploring at the moment.
I’m going to examine the narrative that Elon Musk terminates employees on a whim and what that might mean. This came back up after a Wired article that described “production hell” and how it felt to work at the factory during that time, and then was regurgitated into other articles by other authors.
When I saw the news yesterday that GM is closing five plants and laying off nearly 15,000 employees, I was surprised. Not because it was happening, but because this could be an extremely forward looking move by the company.
I’m sure that you clicked on this article hoping for a strategy that you can use over the Thanksgiving table to help someone in your family or friend circle start to get on board with a problem that you feel is one of the most important things that humans can and should be addressing today.
