Here is a philosophical question. Is Elon's Tesla a Ponzi scheme?

A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investing scam which generates returns for earlier investors with money taken from later investors. And no plans to actually make a profit.

Elon is the initial investor. His exit strategy is the monster of a CEO package he negotiated earlier. Everything he has been doing is to hit to crazy targets in order to get paid, regardless of customer satisfaction or safety or worker condition.

All the 'hyped' future products is a way for him to attractive new investors, either via purchasing Tesla's stocks, or putting down deposits, or simply just buying a car. 

Building out factories after factories is another way to attract later investors to pump money into his company. 

Emission credits is considered another 'investor', basically government artificially pumping money into Tesla to keep it afloat, and Elon has been siphoning those credits via his pay package. 

The key to being a Ponzi scheme is that there is no plan to actually make a real profit, 'profit' only comes from later investors' money. So does Tesla have plan to profitability? Do Elon actually have a plan to make Tesla turn a profit the regular way, like not counting government subsidies as 'profit'? Almost 10 years now, and they haven't proof they can actually make a profit selling cars. 

All their cash flow is borrowed money, not their own. 'assets' all have loans attached to them. Even the sale of FSD can be considered a loan from customers as they haven't still delivered the actual working product. 

Some people swear it isn't a Ponzi scheme, as it is delivering cars everyday to customers. Madoff's clients also swears he wasn't running a Ponzi scheme either as they got real regular investment profit from him too. Look what happened when the ballon popped. 

Interesting angle to look at things. 


 

 


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