Tesla Is Not A Car Company — Kyle Samani

Tesla may be a car company today, but Tesla won’t be a car company in 15 years. Rather, Tesla will be a full stack, vertically integrated clean energy company. They may still produce cars, but cars will represent a fraction of total profits.

A hundred years from now, we’ll all look back and think “duh.” Obviously scale was key. Tesla is catalyzing and capitalizing on what will be the largest economic and technology shift of our lifetimes. This is bigger than IT, tech, AI, the Internet, blockchains, or any other buzzword. Everything runs on electricity, and Tesla is going to radically a... See more

Tesla’s vision is simply batteries everywhere, for everything, all the time. And that means Tesla is going to need to produce a lot of batteries.

Tesla doesn’t want to limit the scale of battery manufacturing to the number of cars it can produce. So Tesla is selling its batteries to other car manufacturers. This is pretty astonishing. Tesla has developed a material technology advantage over its direct competitors. Rather than using that to differentiate its product, Tesla is selling that tec... See more

In Tesla’s 2016 annual shareholders meeting, Musk said:“We realized that the true problem, the true difficulty, and where the greatest potential is — is building the machine that makes the machine. In other words, it’s building the factory. I’m really thinking of the factory like a product.”

The underlying theme across all 8 of these bullets, except perhaps the last, is that each drives scale of battery production.