The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 60 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Asparouhov: ServiceTitan is closer to LVMH than Tesla
“Service Titan is actually closer to LVMH than it is to Tesla. And that's fine. People should, you know, sort of invest in, you know, sort of brands that have, you know, sort of great distribution. Clearly returns can be made there, but let's, you know, sort of…”
Peter Thiel Called Tesla a Bankrupt Idea Before Model S Shipped
“So like Tesla, I remember famously Peter Thiel's are saying it's a bankrupt idea. The battery technology will never scale. Batteries will never improve. UVs will never work. And I was like, wow, that was just before the Model S. I mean, literally a week before…”
Waymo and Tesla Will Eventually Have to Partner With Uber
“I think ultimately it's in both of their interests to put their vehicles on our network, even if they have their own robo taxi apps or their own one P apps, even if they work with our competitors on the rideshare side or on the delivery side. I think everyone …”
O'Driscoll: Musk's death would cut Tesla 80%, Altman's cuts OpenAI 25%
“Tesla trades at a trillion today. I think if Elon died tomorrow, they traded two hundred billion. OpenAI trades at eight hundred billion today. I think if Sam Altman died tomorrow morning, we traded six hundred billion.”
Lemkin: Tesla is months away from allowing owners to profit off robotaxis
“As soon as this really works, and maybe it's only single digit months away, he has millions of people who could be paid more than their lease price to allow the car into the fleet. And when he said this a decade ago, it sounded effing insane. He said that your…”
O'Driscoll: Waymo at $110B is cheap compared to Tesla's $500B autonomous valuation
“Tesla trades at 1.2 trillion plus or minus. It's got a hundred million dollar flat car business with declining profitability. Let's value that at two X revenues. That's two hundred billion. So that leaves you a trillion left, right? Trillion from the 1.2 trill…”
O'Driscoll: 80% of Tesla and SpaceX value is the Elon Musk premium
“My mental model is on SpaceX and Tesla. About 80% of the value is the Elon premium and 20% of the value is the actual business is worth.”
Kant: Tesla will inevitably build the most capable full self-driving AI
“And so to me, Elon has one full self-driving. I think it's inevitable that, that the most capable AI for full self-driving is coming out of Tesla because they've been gathering and building up this data set.”
Peter Wagner: VCs Funding Capital-Intensive Sectors Are Repeating Bubble Mistakes
“Yes. And you know, and you can get away with it sometimes, just like I got away with it, with that early deal. If you can find, you know, other people's money on advantageous terms to sort of fund you through you know, the valley of death there you know, like,…”
Meir in 2019: Tesla will become a $1 trillion company
“I believe that Tesla will be a trillion dollar company.”
Macdonald: Waymo, Tesla, and Multiple Other AV Players Will Win Globally
“I think there's going to be more than two winners. Do I think Waymo and Tesla will ultimately be winners? Yes, I do. I don't know who, who's going to bet against either of those, but I think there will be more winners.”
Arora: Enterprises building AI capabilities must adopt Tesla's iterative approach over AI-washing
“My view right now is you have to have the Tesla approach if you're an enterprise that is building AI infused capability, but you can't have the approach of traditional car manufacturers, which are trying to Take a little bit of AI and sort of AI washing their …”
O'Driscoll: Waymo is burdened by high LiDAR and remote driver costs
“Waymo works, and the problem is cost structure. The Tesla product doesn't quite work yet, but if it does, the cost structure will be lower, right? Waymo has the physical costs of the more expensive cars. It has, obviously, including the LiDAR cost, and then le…”
Calacanis: SpaceX will go public at a valuation of $1T or more
“Tesla had to IPO. Now it was a different time. It really barely had any revenue, but same guy running them. It IPO'd at 1.7 billion, which seemed very expensive. 1.7 billion. The sister company will IPO at 1.7 trillion or one trillion.”
O'Driscoll: Musk's Tesla Deal Will Be a High-Water Mark for CEO Pay
“Elon's case. I don't think that's the norm. I think that that will be the high water mark Not the norm, but I definitely think like all high watermarks, it will push up other people's demands and aspirations.”
O'Driscoll: 75% of Tesla's Valuation Is Elon Musk's Brand Premium
“If you are valued as a car company, you'd be a valued at around 25% of where you are now. Maybe this is a car company where 25% of our current market cap, and then Elon's special sauce, which is the other 75.”
Deeter: Tesla wouldn't have survived without DOE loan
“Without the, you know, the DOE bailout loan and things, Tesla wouldn't have existed, but what I missed was that Elon's a force of nature, a generational entrepreneur, and he put that company on his back and powered through so many subsequent layers that the ne…”
O'Driscoll: Tesla is Elon Musk's most politically vulnerable business
“I think if any, it's Tesla only because the truth is electronic vehicle, electric vehicles have a whole bunch of specific subsidies, both around purchase and around, you know, the ability to resell emissions credits to people like GM, right? And all those thin…”
O'Driscoll: SpaceX customers must use it even if they hate it
“The truth is, SpaceX, it's just Such an amazing achievement that even if one of your biggest customers doesn't much like you, they still got to do business with you. That's not quite as true for Tesla.”
Lemkin: Elon Musk has a 50% chance of stepping down as Tesla CEO
“Can he in the next 18 months find someone better than him for the job? I say actually more than 32%. Yeah, exactly. I'll go 50%.”
Gupta: Early startups should avoid brand spend until they reach scale
“So if you're in the early zero to one stage or one plus stage, I would say spend very little on brand. You don't have to because your product is your brand, user is your brand. Invest all the money you have to bring people in. But once you've scaled, if you're…”
Wilk: Tesla's Trillion-Dollar Valuation Would Be Impossible if Private
“Like Tesla, I'd argue would not be a trillion dollar private company, but because of sort of the cult generation they've developed, the Tesla owners that buy the stock, they're the ones that have pushed it above and beyond any reasonable Sort of EBITDA multipl…”
Defense primes risk a Tesla-style disruption if they ignore software
“The thing that we have to avoid is the Tesla moment for the defense sector. If we collectively, including the primes, don't understand that and don't adapt, the same thing is going to happen to defense, As happened to the car industry.”
Software-first modular design enables 2-3 year defense hardware cycles
“I think a two, three year cycle is extremely believable, especially if you architect your products to be pretty modular. If you architect your products to be upgrade friendly, if you upgrade your you design your products around a software kind of mentality whe…”
Asparouhov: Lean startup methodology fails for category-defining tech companies
“It works in the world of like small SaaS businesses where you're trying to make a marginal improvement on a, you know Small, you know, industry, if you're doing workflow software for plumbers, I'm sure that is a, like, reasonable approach. I don't think that E…”
Wood: Tesla stock does not price in its massive autonomous opportunity
“Because we believe the autonomous opportunity is massive and is not priced at all in Tesla stock we would still put Tesla near the top or at the top of the pack.”
Basu Trivedi: Elon Musk predicted fully self-driving Teslas by late 2017
“Elon Musk said in In December, 2015 that Tesla is two years away from a self-driving car. So, you know, now we're in 2016 and he said that the Tesla will get there in late 2017.”
Floyd in 2015: BMW and Audi will catch up to Tesla
“I think what you're going to wind up having is companies like BMW and Audi are going to catch up. Tesla has kind of that one to two Your lead, and, I mean, you see it with companies, with a car like the i-eight coming out. I mean, other car companies are going…”
O'Driscoll: Tesla is the only other credible competitor to Waymo
“They're the only other competitor to Waymo.
With credibility.”
Katz: Tesla ingests one billion events per second into ClickHouse
“Tesla, for example, is ingesting a billion events per second into ClickHouse.”
Frankel: Tesla received massive non-dilutive government funding under Biden
“Is the non-dilutive government funding that Musk got for Tesla from the Biden administration was huge.”
Deeter: Passed on Tesla Over Roadster Unit Economics
“One of the most famous and most painful for me was Tesla early on. It's on my anti-portfolio. If you go to the Bessemer website, we have a page dedicated to our screw ups, and that's one of mine. And it was because I couldn't fundamentally see how the unit eco…”
O'Driscoll: Musk will run X without CEO title to appease Tesla
“It's an other person who's really Elon, but won't take the title because it will just irk the people at Tesla too much in current dynamics. But yes, he will be in charge.”
Green: Crypto resembles the tulip craze due to a lack of commercial utility
“Not bearish on crypto, but, like, I think it reminds me a little bit of the tulip craze that you can't actually use crypto to go buy, like, when you could, if I could go buy a Tesla with crypto, it'd be amazing. If I could go to Amazon and use Bitcoin, it'd be…”
Osika: Tesla is my 10-year public stock buy-and-hold pick
“Some talent play. What comes to mind is Tesla. They're also interestingly positioned outside of software.”
Franceschetti: Hardware works if you want to build trillion-dollar companies
“So if you want to build trillion dollar businesses, hardware works.”
Empowered engineers are foundational to top tech companies like Tesla and Apple
“There is nothing more than, more important than empowered engineers. And if you look, you know, if you look at companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Google, Amazon, Stripe, Apple, that's the foundation of every one of those companies, empowered engineers.”
Most Value in Tesla and SpaceX Was Created After Year 10
“At the 10 year mark was some of the greatest gains. If you look at, okay, at the 10 year mark, where it was Tesla, where it was SpaceX. And there were many, many billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars of value creation still to come.”
Helmer: Tesla's success had a near-zero probability ten years ago
“So if you asked me 10 years ago, could these three things all be true? Fully electric cars would become what every automobile company in the world thought was going to be the future. That another firm would actually join the ranks of world-scale automobile com…”
Bessemer passed on Tesla after failing to foresee its financial viability
“Tesla is the one that is front and center for me. I'm a car geek at hard. I love hardware products, and spent a lot of time with them early on, and just couldn't see the path to viability of the high-end car in a tough automotive time, so I bought the first ca…”
DFJ succeeded in Tesla and SpaceX by staging early capital
“And that's why, you know, we were able to be successful with entities like Tesla or SpaceX. Companies that most people would find as not working well for venture, but the way that we thought about it and how we, you know, got involved in the companies at early…”
Automobiles will increasingly be sold direct-to-consumer, following Tesla's model
“We think cars will be sold direct to consumer the way Tesla is doing it.”
Hyatt: Cruise Built Tesla-Style Autopilot Long Before Tesla Did
“So the kind of autopilot that we now see in Tesla, only they had produced it, you know long before Tesla had produced it.”
Tim Draper: We funded Tesla before Elon Musk took over
“And it was actually true of Martin Eberhard when we funded Tesla before Elon Musk came in and refund, refinanced it and took it over.”
Tesla's $35,000 car in 2016 will make it a mainstream brand
“And that they, the announcements or the buzz is that there's, they're going to be releasing a much cheaper model in late 2016, a 35,000 dollar price point car. I think that has the opportunity to make them a household brand and not just something that's access…”
Randle: Prediction markets show 70% odds of Tesla-SpaceX merger in two years
“If you look at the poly market Calci odds on a Tesla SpaceX merger, again, you know, not, not that those markets are so big that they're that indicative, but I think the probability that they have on there is something like 70% in the next two years or somethi…”
Tenev: Retail investors lack sub-trillion AI stock investment opportunities
“You've got Tesla, where AI is maybe I don't know, 10, 20% of the story there. So you don't have too many opportunities at sub trillion valuations. So when CoreWeave comes along, that's like AI exposure at a lower level, and people are interested in that.”
SolarCity paid Freshworks $1M annually across 13 separate team accounts
“बेशक, यह एक enterprise व्यापक सौधा नहीं था, लेकिन यह बड़े enterprise की एक team के लिए था, जैसे अगर आपको याद हो, Tesla ने जिस company को खरीदा था, वो दूसरी Elon Musk company Solar City थी, तो हमने तेरह अलग-अलग टीमें इसका उप्योग कर रही थी, वे हमें लगभग एक मिलिय…”