Really? Then what should the profits at GM and Ford be? Also, when digesting the media war against Tesla, the fire bombings at dealerships, and the individual destruction of Tesla owners’ cars by perps, I’m actually surprised Tesla is doing as well as it is.
And unlike GM and Ford, Tesla only makes EVs. So the sales numbers and profictability to date, have been pretty impressive.
The trailing twelve-month (TTM) gross profit margins show that Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) continues to lead major traditional US automakers in factory-level profitability, despite recent sector-wide pricing pressures
.
Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA): 18.85%
Tesla maintains the highest gross margin among the group.
However, its margins have faced downward pressure over the past year due to price adjustments and shifting delivery volume toward more affordable vehicle trims.
General Motors Co (NYSE:GM): 10.18%
GM takes second place, benefiting from resilient demand for high-margin internal combustion trucks and SUVs, though EV infrastructure scaling continues to dilute overall production efficiency.
Ford Motor Co (NYSE:F): 7.06%
Ford tracks with the lowest gross profit margin of the three.
Factory profitability has been heavily impacted by persistent unprofitability and pricing headwinds within its “Model e” electric vehicle business segment.
I see these business opportunities as very different. Moats in particular. With space, barrier for entry will remain exceptionally high. With AI I think we’re heading towards a world of ubiquity. Will the frontier models be slightly better probably. But not enough to justify the obscene enterprise rates they are currently charging. And for a while the data center moat will exist but the compute problem will be solved technologically. Cuban has been screaming this recently. AI compute needs are going to be massive and yet we are still going to end up having massively overbuilt the back end as technological advancement and synergies ease the resource burden. And with AI advancement the easing will only advance in its speed.
But the rocket world is a physical world rather than a digital one. Therefore those efficiencies will be slow and the amount of players will be few.
Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 alongside Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and others. So, once again, he was at the forefront of a specific tech.
”xAI (officially rebranded as SpaceXAI in July 2026) is an artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk in March 2023.
Musk created the venture as an alternative to companies like OpenAI and Google, with the stated mission to “understand the true nature of the universe.”
Key aspects of the company include:
Flagship Product: Its primary consumer product is Grok, a generative AI chatbot integrated into the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) and Tesla vehicles.
Corporate Reorganization: In February 2026, xAI was acquired by Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX, in a massive all-stock merger.
In July 2026, xAI was officially dissolved as a standalone entity and rolled directly into SpaceX as its dedicated AI division under the SpaceXAI banner.
The Vision: Musk consolidated the companies under the premise that the massive electrical power and cooling demands of future artificial general intelligence (AGI) cannot be sustained on Earth long-term, positioning space-based data centers as the ultimate solution for AI scaling.”
That was not a business decision as a project to make money out of the gate. Short-term, it was a financial loser. Long term, it may be a wash or even a positive. The Data streams from X user data to train xAI models are valuable.
“X (formerly Twitter) generates substantial annual revenue, though its overall financial performance has significantly shifted since Elon Musk’s takeover.
According to financial data revealed in SpaceX’s May 2026 S-1 filing, the platform’s financial performance highlights include:
Annual Revenue: X’s AI and platform segment generated $3.2 billion in revenue for FY2025, up from $2.62 billion in 2024.
Net Losses: Despite the top-line revenue, the segment recorded a heavy $6.4 billion operating loss for FY2025,
driven by massive operational costs, infrastructure restructuring, and interest payments on its $12 billion acquisition debt.
Revenue Streams: While global advertising revenue continues to recover at an estimated $1.8 billion to $2.26 billion,
X has structuralized new revenue streams. These include 6.3 million paid subscribers (across X Premium and Grok), data licensing, and internal cash injections from providing user data streams to train xAI models.”
Ford and GM aren’t selling at nearly 300x earnings, right? People were sold huge profits and profit margins once all these factories ramped up and the moat would be the cost of production. They aren’t selling vehicles like they hoped. Sales are declining the last three years. Last quarter looked better, but I’ll need to see a couple more quarters to call it a trend up. And he alienated half, probably more than half of his customer base with shenanigans. Sales in Europe are off like 35%.
One of the best markers of profitability is operating margin. Tesla has a smaller operating margin than GM or Ford and way smaller than Toyota or Hyundai. Like 1% ish. That’s not even healthy. And yeah, I’m sure some of that is because of R&D commitments, but then consider GM spent 2 billion more than Tesla on R&D and still had a bigger operating margins.
I just don’t think the other businesses lines like energy storage or robots, even AI is enough of a sure thing to invest in a stock that is selling so high over current earnings. But people are doing it…he has defied gravity for like a decade…
I think you make the bull case here. I agree, heck, at one point I was buying in.
Robotaxis, if they win vs Waymo, is a game changer and Musk has a bad habit of overpromising but eventually delivering. But then there is CyberTruck etc to consider.
Personally, I think EV adoption is happening at a decent rate like 25% increase. EV deliveries are increasing. Its just with other brands, not Tesla. Tesla has lost ground.. That doesn’t bode well
Overall, the main problem I have with the stock is everything they are banking on has to be right to justify the stock price. Even when companies are making money hand over fist like Nvidia they aren’t trading like this. I just don’t see the story the same anymore. I also don’t see Musk the same. Overexposure has completely broke the mirage of his competence.
I seemingly talk about this all the time on this board across different subjects but I think it applies again here which is; lose the battle to win the war.
What other social media platform was going to come available for sale, and I guess I shouldn’t say come available but be in a spot to be bought? At least one that mattered? The answer is none..that one was it the rest would be more expensive and even harder to buy. Now were they going to willingly sell it to Musk? Based on the trove of t-shirts found after the clear out and the general political leanings of the people inside that business the answer is obviously a gigantic no. So what do you got to do to force their hand? There is such thing as fiduciary duty laws and they are serious and they do have consequences. So is it playing 4D chess to overpay by 20 billion dollars? I mean not really but kind of yes-no? The board had to okay the deal because they had a public fiduciary duty to the shareholders. Musk knew this and he’s been playing with the casino’s money for a very long time and can pull a couple of 10 billion dollar bills out of his ass anytime he wants to, so I’m sure the conversation went a little bit like this inside his head" oh woe is me I’ve actually overpaid whoppingly and people are going to make fun of me what a stupid business person I am I am sure the media is going to have fun with this one blah blah blah whatever. Box checked with no other way to possibly check it now or in the future. Still winning.’
And as we know from the deal the amount of risk capital from him wasn’t the full 53 billion or whatever it was some of it was debt and some of it was investors so there was an awful lot to gain not much to lose and the only way to solve the puzzle was to drown it in cash.
And now we get back to the main thrust line of most of the conversation about this guy which is that kind of thing, whatever thing he’s doing, happens in business all the damn time every damn day. Companies throw money at problems, conglomerates overpay for additions to their conglomeration( unless they are Berkshire) because that’s the only way to get the job done. But let’s definitely have the biggest most public Hairy Canary possible about this one, oh and the next one that this guy does, oh and the next one this guy does, because what else would we have to make you tune in to our b******* news station?
I will readily admit that the Cyber truck looks like complete ass. I don’t like it I haven’t liked it I won’t like it in the future. In fact on one surveillance, out in the middle of nowhere actually I had one drive by me and then maybe 10 minutes later a 1970s massive RV turn down the same road, and there ain’t no traffic on these roads and they are dirt roads.
I’m going to post a picture of each of those vehicles but what I figured out was that somebody was trying to mate them and recreate Ark Ii.
Jake Paul and Ming-Na Wen find a mobile time machine, trvel back to 1975 to adopt a young Jimmy Smits and Bonzo, and traverse the nuclear wasteland of post-apocalyptic LA in search of those damn dirty apes who popped off that nuke. Extra Mystery-SuperDave’s jetpack was in it when they found it.
The only answer is the Chinese and the Europeans and Canadians are going to quickly find out how letting the Chinese flood their markets is going to work out for their workforces and security. Let alone the continued shift politically in Europe away from those who hate Musk to those who don’t care and just want their country back the way it was 30 years ago, which may or may not be possible for any of us given the advance of Technology let alone any societal change.
Both Europe and Canada are shifting strategically away from the US, and we know why. The true cost to the US of all the reorganizing of trade and investment away from America won’t be known for a while yet. But it could be staggering. The Chinese EV concession by Canada is a direct result of the latter seeking more entry into the Chinese market. Canada is scouring the globe looking to diversify trade, and scores of other countries are doing the same.
It’s almost like people believe that nothing he does works, when in reality everything works. People get tired of the PT Barnum Act but it warps their little realities in their brains.
PayPal is ubiquitous. The supercharger network is everywhere. Tesla cars dominate The Western World EV population. The Boring company’s holes are holes with things going through them now. SpaceX has 90 plus percent of the Up Mass into orbit of the Entire Planet. Starlink keeps adding subscribers by the millions. Neuralink actually let’s paralyzed people control computers to play Call of Duty online with other paralyzed people, and is starting to let people blind from birth see. Optimus robots have last I checked five production lines ramping up in gigantic factories that nearly no other business in the world has created. Ditto Robo taxis. Oh did we mention that the actual energy storage business works and has been working and continues to work and grows? Ditto the expansion of Grok and xAI to the point where they’re leasing compute out to the other hyperscalers, and now actually building their own chip plants (read that one again because it gets nowhere near the impactful resonance it should). Not as well publicized is that Musk has either bought out or invested in a large number of small to medium-sized tier 3 and tier two Auto suppliers throughout different states many in Michigan over and above the ones that simply have contracts to provide parts for him.
Every single thing of these exists. Now. And operates. And generates revenue and for the most part profit.
Mirage of competency? Maybe I’m reading that the wrong way and I know you’re a smart guy but that is just about the craziest thing I’ve read in months. But that kind of stuff sure gets clicks and likes because MDS is real dude.
Now if you’re talking about timelines, sure great but that’s a different question than competency and one that’s already been discussed. If someone else has met any of these projects on any timeline please come shake my hand and show me let alone all of them generally concurrently, and generally on a time frame that is somewhere between unbelievable and yeah it’s late but it’s here.
It’s literally mountains and mountains of evidence versus I don’t like his personality. Craziness
Shifting away is a biased oversimplification and mostly incorrect. Rebalancing sure but also none of it’s driven by anything other than emotionalism. That stuff is temporary. Losing your Market or your population or your national identity because of emotionalism is a lot more closer to permanent.
And in a trade-off battle where Canada gets access to Chinese markets in China gets access to Canadian markets, we all know who’s going to lose that. I’m sure at some point China will start to come ask for all of the foreign exchange that’s been snuck out of their country and dumped into Vancouver in Toronto real estate over the last 20 years
That’s silly. It’s based on realism. The US is not a reliable trading partner anymore. And won’t be for the foreseeable future. This is about putting bread on the table, not emotionalism.
Oh I get what you’re saying I just completely disagree. I can understand why people think that but the decisioning around it’s not based on long-term economic reality but on short-term emotional thinking. The Europeans would be a lot better off if they would simply plow vast amounts of money that they have and can redirect into developing their own societies and economies internally. But there’s no such thing as a European work ethic anymore and there hasn’t been for a long time, ditto entrepreneurialism, ditto ease of starting a business and growing a business ditto ditto ditto ditto. They have boxed themselves into where they’re at, and some countries are doing some things to try to work their way out of it way in some ways but they are a slow and sclerotic culture from a business standpoint and the slowest wildebeest is the one that gets picked off
Funny thing is the US got uber rich with the long term rational economic thinking that came along with free trade and an open society. Today Washington is throwing Smoot-Hawley at Canada, lol.
Then came the emotional thinking of the current leadership that threatens to throw the baby out with the bathwater and might well just succeed.
There is also an unheard of level of crony capitalism and a seemingly inexorable trend towards oligarchy in the US, and the young people right now are chomping at the bit to do things differently, and quite possibly overcorrect in the process.
Not wrong. People and societies tend to repeat mistakes or epochs and it seemed to me long ago like at least a decade that the lesson of crony capitalism creating a counterweight of socialism was one that was learned. Maybe it was maybe they just don’t care
I’m more related post-moving back towards the topic my apologies, I did watch the liftoff and all the way through to Second Stage separation and deployment of the 20 test satellites the new version Starship in the first run of the new version starlink satellites. I hope I never get Jaden about space flight to find that kind of thing routine. I just missed the actual Splashdown of Starship but did see the feed of it floating before they ended their coverage
