Nina's Blog - Thursday 29th January 2026

@Boeing I don't dislike Tesla the company (most of the time at least) and I'm very fond of my car but Elon Musk has reached the point where he has outlived his usefulness to the company and is just flailing around trying things.

He was the right person at the right time at the beginning of Tesla and he pushed them into creating EVs that people actually wanted to buy and that in turn kicked the other car makers into the EV business. But now he is in the position that a lot of us find ourselves in: he had one good idea and the ability to push it through and this has convinced him that it was only his ability that made it happen rather than the confluence of people and circumstances, so he behaves as though all his ideas will be equally successful.

And of course the man is a neo-Nazi who should not be allowed anywhere near politics.

I'm not fond of really large companies at all, I think they have a distorting effect on society. However, some companies need to be big or they simply cannot operate efficiently enough to be useful and to continue to improve but in some cases this means they get so much power that they lose the direction and ethics that made them useful to the world.

I worked for most of my career in a multinational engineering company. It has about 120 000 employees around the world and is a major player in the markets it operates in; but it has a number of equally large competitors who make products serving those same markets so it has to be efficient, competitive, and forward thinking. Luckily it is also not in the business of selling mass market products to the general public so it is not so subject to changing fashions, many of the products it made over fifty years ago are still in use and are still maintainable and maintained. This is the kind of company that I think one can be at least pleased to work for, perhaps a little proud, and actually believe that one's job increases the sum of human happiness.

@ninalanyon I wonder how much Tesla is losing simply by competition, as the number of EV makers increases, and relatively low-cost cars become more widely available.

I think his 'Cybertruck' an expensive mistake because its practical use is limited, and it is not road-legal in many of the countries where the Tesla saloons do sell.

@ArishMell It depends on what you mean by losing. It isn't losing money, it's just not making as much as the stock market speculators want it to. It is losing market share to companies like VW and BYD. Some will say that this is because VW and BYD make smaller cheaper EVs that people can afford to buy but while this is true most of their European sales in similar sized vehicles to the Tesla Model 3, the VW ID.4 is VW's best selling EV I think.

@ninalanyon Yes, of course it applies to all other car companies. VW is valued at around EU57.5 billion with profits around EU3. Billion. Now even that is around 20 times annual profit. These company values seem to resemble South Sea Bubbles.

@22Michelle Tesla's stock market valuation has been absurd almost from the beginning. Personally I think it has less to do with Tesla itself than the times we live in. It's much easier to talk up the value of a company that is dealing in something that has not been done before than in one that has been doing essentially the same thing for a hundred years. And as you mentioned perhaps it just functions as a place to park the billionaires' ill gotten gains; so long as they can convince others to join in then perhaps when it all goes south they might be able to divest themselves of the stocks fast enough to even make a slight profit. And while continues going up the big players can simply slowly sell off shares at a profit and at the expense of the smaller latecomers.

I wonder if the early railway companies in the US experienced anything similar?

@ninalanyon Yes, whatever the car, rocket, robot, etc being produced just don't invest in it, unless you can accept losses in hundreds of millions, possibly billions.