Ford is sitting on almost $16 billion cash. Tesla, like Amazon, burns through cash as fast as they can turn it into scalable future stuff. Whether you consider

Ford is sitting on almost $16 billion cash. Tesla, like Amazon, burns through cash as fast as they can turn it into scalable future stuff. Whether you consider this good or bad depends on your future outlook: Being long Ford is making a bet that the future will look pretty much the same. Being long Tesla is making a bet that the future will look different. (Plus the risks of believing that they can do what they say they can, and that their vision is more correct than not) If you are a Ford investor and want Ford to be investing in the future, you should be ashamed of them for being either too scared or too stupid to know what to do with their piles of money. Then again, the largest carmakers in the US (incl. Ford) were making a loss just a few years ago, and unlike Tesla, they were making that loss while doing ZERO to invest for the future. So maybe Ford should be scared. Or maybe they should be pivoting faster so they don't return to not-making-a-profit, because unlike Tesla, they still aren't spending very much on the future, are they? We can argue about whether or not Tesla has a good plan or a bad plan, but Ford has shown before that they more or less have "No plan." Their reliance of SUV profits almost killed them in the mid 2000's (and did mortally wound GM, only to be resurrected). Will Ford's reliance on the F-150 (or on ICE expertise while outsourcing most other things) do the same thing in the future? ~~~ I've been holding Tesla for a long time. Currently I'm more optimistic about the company than when I bought it, which seemed fairly risky. I think the room for growth and market expansion (Important Electric Things and energy future) is very large. I think trying to compute how the math will get there is a mistake, short of making sure that they are not going to run out of money. Being long technology stocks is a strange game. If you're long IBM or AAPL right now, you're more or less betting that the future is going to look pretty much the same, just like with Ford. It's almost a misnomer to call them technology stocks. There are only a handful of public companies you can bet on (Tesla and Amazon are probably the most obvious) that are really betting big on the future. The dividends of these will be unknown. (This was part of a previous small discussion about the price of TSLA last night: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14018954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14018954)