If criticisms of capitalism want to be taken seriously, they need to expand beyond Tesla and Amazon.
Chevron, Exxon, and Blackwater love that you focus all your ire on an…electric car company.
How exactly will focusing on those companies instead ensure that criticisms of capitalism are taken seriously?
Because then we’d actually be doing something useful.
Everyone knows oil and private military companies are evil.
Tesla gets less shit because of its ‘environment friendliness’.
I don’t think anyone even knows other bad companies exist, based on the amount of attention we spend on Tesla and Amazon.
Old money loves that you focus on hating new money. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are more your friend than say, Alan Greenspan or the board of Halliburton. But we don’t even know what those people are up to because we are distracted by stupid shit like this.
People ALSO focus on those. Even arch-neolib BIDEN is calling out Exxon, however disingenuous that might be in his case.
Demanding that all of them are mentioned in every post or some sort of deranged forced parity of criticism on a post rightly criticizing one of them is worse than worthless. It’s a harmful distraction and a whataboutism.
This article is over 2.5 years old and (I think) no longer relevant…
It was posted 2 years ago. Idk why it’s showing up in the feed
Bro, what? Let’s say you’re a baker with a storefront where you sell baked goods, and in the back, you make your products. However, if you look at your books, you realize that you’re actually making money not from the bread you make and sell, but from selling something entirely different. Now, what happens if this thing that you’re selling to make money becomes unavailable, and other bakers who are actually making money from their products outperform you over time? Yeah, Tesla is screwed. They no longer make the best bread, and their main source of income is gone once regulations change. Other bakeries will surpass them with time. Tesla is an interesting concept, but it’s not just a car manufacturing company; it’s a tech company that is lagging behind in innovation and has run out of profitable ideas to sell. Tesla stock is traded as a tech company that is supposed to have groundbreaking technology that makes them more valuable than other car manufacturers. The problem is they don’t possess such technology, so it’s a massively overvalued car company. My prediction is that within five years, other car manufacturers will completely surpass Tesla, and within another five years, Tesla will become mostly irrelevant. This is assuming nothing changes, as they have nothing in their pipeline that gives me confidence they can turn this situation around. Elon Musk is great at selling “fake” visions that, when scrutinized, do not hold up.
Yes and no: super old article, but afaik selling green credits is still their main source of income and the only thing keeping them in the black.
I actually really don’t like tesla as a company or elon as a ceo or person, but I’m pretty sure that’s not true.
It is. Here’s an article about their Q1 2023 revenue showing the same thing.
Edit: so they had one report of car sales AND energy projects outpacing the lowest amount of carbon credit income I’ve seen them get? Not really convincing me there…
Interesting. So the carbon credit business is growing and/or the car business is shrinking to the point that without the credits they aren’t profitable again.
Tesla would be in the red were it not for carbon credits – something that hasn’t happened in the last two years.
Ok, so I misread that as being in the red hadn’t happened for them in two years. Either way, they’re a carbon credit and battery company that sometimes make shoddily built cars, not the other way around.
No disagreement there.
Wait so could I create a shell company, manufacture exactly 1 car and sell it to myself, and then sell regulatory credits forever? Essentially making money with 0 expenses.
What does regulatory credit mean here? What exactly is Tesla doing here? I don’t understand finance capital much.
A regulatory credit is essentially “points” you get for emitting low or no pollution. The more of these credits you have, the more pollution you’re allowed to make without facing trouble, I think (someone correct me if I’m wrong). Tesla has been getting these credits for free from the government because their whole schtick is making “environmentally clean electric cars”. So since they’re getting them for free, they’ve just been selling them to other manufacturers. Instead of making a profit from creating cars, they’re getting most of it from selling credits they got for free, essentially making money for no reason.
according to the article:
Eleven states require automakers sell a certain percentage of zero-emissions vehicles by 2025. If they can’t, the automakers have to buy regulatory credits from another automaker that meets those requirements – such as Tesla, which exclusively sells electric cars.
Tesla has so many of these credits because the cars are electric. Now if the manufacturing process as well as the source of the energy were taken into account…
Thanks very much.
They gamed the system; that’s the only way to win.
I think you get a certain number of credits for each car sold, so you would still have to produce and sell a lot of cars.
Hm. Next question: can we somehow pass off bicycles as cars, legally speaking :thinking face:?
ThNk you for using the archive link!!!
I hate running into paywall crap
Puts on the author.
