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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2691 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 2, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Why isn’t Tesla stock crashing? The intersection between the set of people who care enough about the environment to buy an electric car, and the set of people who don’t hate Elon’s guts doesn’t provide much room for growth.

  1. Much of their revenue and until recently all of their profit is based off of various government regulatory schemes for selling pollution credits to other automakers. Elon seems... Unlikely... To remove those particular government boondoggles.

  2. They are genuinely amazing, class leading, genre destroying pieces of machinery.

  3. People just think of it as investing in Musk. His stock is up, I'd imagine.

I hate to do this but can you provide a source for claim #1? “Much” of their revenue seems like a stretch. I’ll define much as >20% but I’ll accept 10%.

https://www.axios.com/2025/01/09/tesla-clean-credits-trump

It's less of their revenue than I thought, only around 5% anymore, but still makes up 43% of their profits for 2024, which is much higher than I'd think. We're talking about $2bn in 2024 and ~$10bn to date. It's not a small amount of money.

ETA: Probably the sentence would be more accurate as "derives much revenue" than "derives much of their revenue"

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