Why I love Tesla (Patreon)

Many of you do not have Bloomberg so I post the articles that I find interesting.  

Tesla is A company that does not need to advertise what it makes

Tesla is A company that has insane loyalty

Tesla is A company can turn on pricing power when it needs it most.

Beast Mode Tesla

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-06/tesla-pulled-levers-on-pricing-and-cost-during-a-tough-quarter

As battery material costs soared and its most productive plant shut down for weeks amid Shanghai’s Covid outbreak, Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk took several steps to buoy revenue and rein in expenses: raising prices, pausing hiring and cutting jobs.

Tesla was unable to “pull a rabbit out of a hat,” as Musk put it during the last earnings call in April. While he suggested then there was a chance output would snap back from the disruption in Shanghai and the company might come close to its first-quarter production total, Tesla came up short by almost 47,000 vehicles.

The question now is just how effective Musk and his master of coin, CFO Zachary Kirkhorn, were in limiting the damage to earnings. The company has been crafty in the past with its end-of-quarter pushes, pulling all sorts of levers to get cars to customers and shore up results. While Musk reportedly predicted this one would be “nutty,” he’s seen worse. The risks to Tesla were existential when it struggled to ramp up production of the Model 3 in 2018.

Tesla’s challenges now aren’t life-or-death, but in squaring its pricing changes and belt-tightening with Musk’s priorities and ambitions.

While its mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, Teslas are increasingly unattainable for mainstream consumers.

And while Musk told a fan club during the quarter that solving self-driving is the difference between Tesla being worth a lot and “ basically zero,” it’s dismissed roughly 200 employees who annotated data for its Autopilot team and closed their office in San Mateo, California.

In fairness, Tesla is far from the only automaker dealing with more demand for its vehicles than it’s able to produce as well as rising commodity prices and energy costs, leaving manufacturers with little choice but to charge customers more. Tesla also is trying to automate more of its annotation work and has been expanding its data-labeling team in Buffalo, New York.