Jason Badeaux

Our multi-year research effort into Tesla’s manufacturing capabilities andsupply chain integrations suggest that Tesla is more than 6 years ahead of anycompetitor. This lead is expanding.

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... See more

As I noted in Understanding Token Velocity, the V in the equation of exchange is a huge problem for basically all proprietary payment currencies. Proprietary payment currencies are, generally speaking, susceptible to the velocity problem, which will exert perpetual downwards price pressure.

Adjusted for inflation, the cost of owning and operating a new vehicle hasn’t budged since the Model T rolled off the first assembly line in 1934: $0.70 per mile.

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.

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.”