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But the point of tesla is they are making investments long term. Yes, they definitely need to produce those new products that justify all that money (like the m

But the point of tesla is they are making investments long term. Yes, they definitely need to produce those new products that justify all that money (like the model 3). They don't have dozens of different car products where they can trade off their current cash flow against future development costs - they have had just the S & X. How can you evaluate any company if you can't think about these separately - how much profit they make on one widget, and how much they spend on developing infrastructure and the next things, how much value will that have.

dragontamer 8y ago
> But the point of tesla is they are making investments long term. What definition of "long term" do we have here? How many years did it take for Apple to become profitable from the iPod? The iPad? The iPhone? It was profitable throughout all of those years. That's the very point of technology gadgets: they don't require huge upfront costs like Tesla. Apple does have innovations (see their custom ARM chip, which is consistently superior to Snapdragon in benchmarks every year). But even with the billions of dollars needed to custom-make an uncore from scratch, Apple remains profitable. https://www.statista.com/statistics/267728/apples-net-income-since-2005/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/267728/apples-net-income... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/net-inc... Since 2005 (and maybe earlier), Apple has made a profit every quarter. Since 2009 (before Tesla's IPO), Tesla has NEVER made a profit. Its completely insane to compare these two companies. They're run completely differently, aside from both being California based.