Jason Badeaux

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

In order to build efficient, combustion-based generators, we needed to build them at economies of scale and extensive transmission and distribution networks to transport power along with them. Those wires are vulnerable to being knocked out by storms (or even squirrels), leading to blackouts, or supply shortages leading to cascading failure. That w... See more

Tesla has an in-house construction unit building out its factories. This enables a radically new and optimized manufacturing process. Historical analogy: Amazon built its own distribution centers to reinvent e -commerce logistics.

Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.

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. Tak... See more

A peak predator of capitalism is a system which produces some useful output at the lowest possible marginal cost.

I found something else surprising about previous energy transitions. Each one later enabled new modes of transport and new materials which were very hard to conceive of during its early phases. In each of the past transitions, the energy source unlocked new distribution technologies and materials that helped drive more adoption for the energy sourc... See more

Few investors understand the enormous difficulty involved in switching from manufacturing ICE vehicles to EVs. Tesla has widely automated their vehicle manufacturing facilities, which has resulted in substantially higher operating profitability than its larger ICE vehicle competitors.

He also uses what we call “impression amplifiers” to get stakeholders on board. For example, when Musk stands on stage and reveals the Cybertruck, he doesn’t just talk about the new idea, he materializes it, putting it into physical form to convince skeptics (he also did this when he parked a Space X rocket in front of the National Air and Space Mu... See more