Jason Badeaux

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.

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

Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers.

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... See more

Our research suggests that travelers in western markets place a value on their work-related travel miles close to their hourly wage, and value their non-work-related travel miles at close to half their hourly wage. In low income countries and at $0.50 per mile, we assume another long tail of demand priced similarly to today’s ride-hail options.... See more

Importantly, autonomous transport should save consumers both time and costs. The average car owner in the US spends more than 420 hours per year driving—more than 10 work weeks.

This is a very new technology. It could be decades before it is developed enough to be put into a car. The high levels of cobalt could also be a huge issue. Not only is cobalt more than twice as expensive as any other battery metal, but its mining is environmentally and humanely dubious. Many companies, including Tesla, want to have cobalt-free... See more