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car making, EV charging and selling of home batteries are all terrible businesses: Highly competitive and capital intense, unit economics are disheartening (fee
by mxschumacher 5y ago
car making, EV charging and selling of home batteries are all terrible businesses: Highly competitive and capital intense, unit economics are disheartening (feel free to look into the financial statements of public pure-play companies in these sectors) - for cars you have a century of empirical data.
Are Tesla's manufacturing capabilities really superior to Toyota? The latter is making 20x as many cars (2020), makes money while doing so and is worth about a third of Tesla.
- acdha 5y agoAgain, I'm not saying they're perfect — only that there's a real business unlike a cryptocurrency. It might not be printing money like Google/Facebook ads but it's highly unlikely that the business could not turn a profit, albeit a tighter one due to competition. Contrast with a cryptocurrency: there's no value other than marketing and nobody needs to use it at all, much less any particular cryptocurrency over an alternative. That puts your floor value at zero: unlike cars, nobody needs random hashes and certainly nobody needs to buy your hashes over equivalent hashes available somewhere else.
- mxschumacher 5y agoYes, not trying to defend crypto here. Have been watching the space for 6 years and never used a product or service that was built on a blockchain. Cumulative value is hundreds of billions of dollars. I wonder whether I'll wake up in a few years thinking how could I be so blind to all this awesome innovation or whether the hype dies down. Quick note on Tesla: I'm not saying they cannot make money, just that the current trillion dollar market cap is absolutely astronomical given the business performance.