Tesla and Energiewende (1) — Selling Devotional Objects

Image credit. The citizens of Schilda collecting light to brighten up their somber townhall. Die Schildbügrer beim Einsammeln von Licht, mit dem sie ihr düsteres Rathhaus aufhellen wollen.

German summary below / Deutsche Zusammenfassung unten

Writes Warren Meyer,

I would argue that Elon Musk is the only one in the world who can run a company with so many spectacular failures to meet commitments and still have investors and customers coming back and begging for more.  A relatively large percentage of Teslas get delivered with manufacturing defects and their customers sing their praises (even while circulating delivery defect checklists).  Tesla keeps publishing Model 3 production hockey sticks (apparently with a straight face) and consistently miss (each quarter pushing back the forecast one quarter) and investors line up to buy more stock.  Tesla runs one of the least transparent major public companies in this country (so much so that people like Bloomberg have to spend enormous efforts just to estimate what is going on there) and no one is fazed.  Competitors like Volvo and Volkswagon and Toyota and even GM have started to push their EV technology past Tesla and actually sell more EV's than does Tesla (with the gap widening) and investors still treat Tesla like it has a 10-year unassailable lead on competition.

All because Elon Musk can stand up at a venue like SXSW, wave his hands, spin big visions, and the stock goes up $3 billion the next day.   Exxon-Mobil has a long history of meeting promises, reveals its capital spending plans in great detail, but misses on earnings by a few cents and loses $40 billion in market cap.  GE lost over half its market value when investors got uncomfortable with their lack of transparency and their failures to meet commitments. Not so at Tesla, in large part because Elon Musk is PT Barnum reincarnated, or given the SpaceX business, he is Delos D. Harriman made real.

My comment on Meyer's blog:

He has a captured audience — a religious crowd, an irrational lot who do not look too carefully at the facts, not even cross-comparisonwise. Nothing out of the ordinary. Here in Germany, the entire population is into the Energiewende, a project whereby energy output has been increased from 120 % of needed capacity to over 250 % (with renewables needing permanent backup by "unclean" energy) just to give the religious crowd the illusion that the country is run on "clean" energy. The Tesla crowd does not understand that the car is running on coal, just like the Germans do not realise their grid is running on fossile fuels, it could not operate for a day without that backup.

Deutsche Zusammenfassung

Als Investment wie als Produkt schneidet Tesla miserabel ab. Dennoch wird Tesla von Investoren und Kunden offenbar alles verziehen. Warum? Meine Erklärung: Es handelt sich um einen religiösen Kultus, dem Menschen zuströmen, die sich nicht sonderlich um Tatsachen scheren. Wer einem religiösen Wahn verfallen ist, kümmert sich nicht um Wirtschaftlichkeit. Das lehren uns nicht zuletzt die Deutschen, die den Energieausstoß ihres Elektrizitätsnetzes von 120 % auf 250 % mehr als verdoppelt haben, um sich der Fantasie hinzugeben, Deutschlands Stromverbrauch beruhe auf „sauberem“ Strom. Tatsächlich benötigt das Potemkinsche Dorf der erneuerbaren Energie fossile Energieträger, ohne die die verblödungsdemagogische Fassade vom grünen Strom nicht einen einzigen Tag aufrechterhalten werden könnte.