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 48 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Horowitz: GM is vulnerable to Tesla because it only assembles cars
“GM is totally vulnerable to Tesla and BYD. This is why, you know, HP ended up being totally vulnerable to Apple because Apple was still building computers and HP was assembling computers and GM is assembling cars and Elon completely kind of re-engineered how y…”
Andreessen: Tesla deploys live autonomous software without federal testing, improving safety
“Tesla has been climbing the ladder on self-driving car functionality capability. They do new software releases, push live to car at night anytime they want. Those new releases are not being tested by any federal, the federal, you know, it's a, whatever it's no…”
Fei-Fei Li: I would never put my kids in early Tesla Autopilot
“So when Tesla's autopilot came out, I watched some of the YouTube videos. As a mom, I would never want to put my kids or myself into those cars.”
Chen: Most AV Experts Require LiDAR, With Tesla as Key Outlier
“Most people that I talk to think definitely LiDAR. There's a couple of big outliers. I think Tesla is trying a system without LiDAR, but we'll see.”
Baker: Global robotics market will be Tesla versus China
“Yeah, very real, and it's gonna be Tesla versus the Chinese in the same way it's Tesla versus the Chinese in, in cars.”
Andreessen: Full-stack tech disruptors can become larger than the legacy industries they replace
“Those companies, good news, those companies can get to be gigantic, right? Because if you crack the mother load, like, you know, Netflix has, for example, entertainment, you know, you could, or like Tesla has in cars, you can build a company that's maybe multi…”
Yudis: Tesla and Waymo autonomous vehicle approaches will technically converge
“And so the next kind of 10 years is, and I think what you'll ultimately see is, like, somewhat of a very technical convergence, because the Tesla system is a very sensor light system. It's basically just a camera system. And the Waymo system is very sensor hea…”
Elon Musk, SpaceX, and Tesla trained a cohort of hardware-software engineers
“There's definitely a spectrum, and I would frankly really credit Elon Musk, both from the SpaceX and Tesla perspective, with a lot for really training up engineers that have fluency in hardware and software.”
Horowitz: Tesla's Optimus humanoid robot hasn't worked yet
“The Optimus Prime thing that, that Tesla's building hasn't really worked actually yet.”
Sinofsky: EV adoption is an industry-wide secular shift, not single-company disruption
“Instead of looking at this as disruption, another way to look at this is to use an old phrase that existed before disruption and just refer to it as a secular shift, and that this is a shift. There's just a shift. We're going to all be in electric cars and ele…”
Evans: Battery costs of $200/kWh explain why Tesla loses money
“Or is it because batteries are still 200 dollars per kilowatt hour? And that's not cost competitive with gasoline, which incidentally is also a big reason why Tesla is still losing money.”
Qasar Younis: Autonomous vehicles will cause a bloodbath among Tier 1 suppliers
“I think the real bloodbath in this ecosystem is not going to be at the manufacturer's level because consumers have some affiliation to, like, a Tesla vehicle or, like, a Mercedes-Benz, etc. It happens at the tier ones, but where there's that destruction, there…”
Evans: Tesla is outselling all other premium car manufacturers in US
“In fact, Tesla is now out selling the other premium car manufacturers in the USA.”
Caldwell: Musk's aggressive deadlines force teams to prioritize critical paths
“When Elon sets, like, super aggressive targets, the goal is actually to get the team to think really deliberately. There's a thousand things that have to happen, but a hundred of them cannot be done in six months, so we have to go attack those hundred things.”
Horowitz: Many Tesla manufacturing workers became millionaires from stock
“There's a fair number of, like, manufacturer workers at Tesla are millionaires now as a consequence of the stock.”
Carlson-Wee: Homomorphic encryption enables machine learning on private, encrypted user data
“One interesting intersection is homomorphic encryption, which allows you to train a machine learning system based on data that you actually don't know the plain text, so you only see the encrypted version. It allows people to say, okay, I'm going to share the …”
Evans: Electric Porsches will drive much better than Teslas
“That said, of course, a Porsche still drive, well, electric Porsche will drive an awful lot better than an electric Tesla, because just because it goes fast in a straight line, there's more to being a good car than that.”
Evans: Tesla competes in autonomy against Silicon Valley and China, not Detroit
“It's not Silicon Valley software company versus dumb Detroit guys. It's Silicon Valley software company versus 20 other Silicon Valley software companies plus China.”
Evans: The cheapest GM EV will match Tesla acceleration within 10 years
“You do understand in 10 years, The crappiest GM car you can buy will have the same acceleration.”
Rigetti: Despite incumbent efforts, Tesla is the only electric car company
“General Motors is building an electric car, and still, there's got to be a Tesla, and eventually electric cars and hybrids are going to kind of be a technology that is adopted across the industry, but there's one electric car company. There's one that matters.”
Beshara: Tesla used customer pre-orders to secure $2 billion in debt
“Yes. You could sell today directly to your customers, get the demand before you put an ounce of production to work and use that to Tesla since use that, I believe for debt financing of two billion dollars. So be able to use that to verify the demand and securi…”
Evans: B2B fleet purchasing of autonomous cars neutralizes Apple's consumer advantage
“So and so that becomes interesting for Apple and potentially for Tesla, because it means that, you know, if the drivers, if the people riding around are not the people choosing these things, then maybe Apple's strengths don't really get to come into play becau…”
Thiel: Tesla and SpaceX's real breakthrough was complex system coordination
“Both Tesla and SpaceX were stories that involved complex coordination, where you needed to get a lot of different pieces to fit together in just the right way. And so if you ask, you know, what was the real breakthrough with Tesla, or the real breakthrough wit…”
Andreessen: Elon Musk saving Tesla and SpaceX in 2008 was spectacular
“So to start, think about this, to start a new electric car company... Simultaneously to start the first new private rocketry company in the United States in probably 40 years... And then to go through the 2008 crash... And have both come out the other side, li…”
Tesla Generated $14B in Model 3 Pre-Orders Without Mass Media Ads
“Tesla recently launched a pre-order for their Model Three, and in one week, they got to reserve demand for 300,000 cars, starting at 35,000 dollars per car. That represents demand of at least fourteen billion dollars. What is more interesting on that is they d…”
Chen: Tesla Gigafactory will surpass pre-2013 global battery output by 2020
“When it's in full production in 2020, this Gigafactory will produce more batteries each year than were produced in the entire world cumulatively through 2013.”
Baglino: Existential urgency drove Tesla's peak team performance
“Many times in Tesla's history, You know, the company's future success, really, like, whether or not the paycheck will clear, you know, was bet on the team within the company executing well. And that is a very, like, focusing reality. And it drives people to do…”
Caldwell: Tesla requires eight to ten interview conversations for engineering hires
“The, like the key part of the hiring process at, you know, Tesla at least, and I'm sure it's SpaceX is the like technical evaluation, it goes quite deep. And so there, you know, you're going to talk to six engineers. If you're applying for an engineering role,…”
AI assistants will evolve into full autonomy like self-driving cars
“Yeah, I mean, it's a moving target, obviously, is gonna get increasingly more capable, and our view is it's like self-driving cars, where it's not self-driving overnight, it's you drive the Tesla at first, And then there's assisted steering and braking, and th…”
Caldwell: Tesla vertically integrated early because no subcomponent market existed
“Tesla had to vertically integrate early because people just weren't making the parts that were needed. Like that was a, it was a do or die, There was no incentive. There was no market for people to build the kind of like sub components that were required. And …”
Shortal: Veteran founders should first observe execution at top tech companies
“I think it's, it helps to go to somewhere and see what right looks like. For me, personally, you know, especially at Android, Palantir, you know, I could go to SpaceX, You know, and then Tesla, just some companies that are producing these founders. I think it …”
Yudis: Software quality depends on the CEO's proximity to software expertise
“In the companies, and you can literally measure from the CEO, how many levels do you have to go to where they really know software? Those companies are, you take a Tesla in this example, Elon knows software. So you're right at the CEO level and therefore the p…”
Casey predicts increasing performance dispersion among Magnificent Seven tech stocks
“Now I feel like we're in much more of a stock pickers kind of market where The Magnificent Seven aren't all magnificent this year. One's down a ton, Tesla. One's down a little, Apple. You know, I think there's going to be more separation in the market in gener…”
Arc Boats brings Tesla and SpaceX manufacturing principles to maritime
“Arc boats has done a great job of encapsulating what the future of maritime looks like in that, you know, from a process and team perspective, Mitch and Ryan delivered the Tesla and SpaceX vision and mission to maritime. They're not just creating Consumer boat…”
Horowitz: Non-founder manufacturing giants lack agility to execute major shifts
“Many of the kind of big manufacturers these days, you know, with the exception of, you know, companies like Tesla are not at all run by their founders and to kind of change from anything they're doing, I think would be quite the challenge.”
Schimpf: DoD spends far less on software than commercial tech firms
“When you look at, like, how these things play out in terms of, like, what do modern technology companies spend? Take a Tesla, take any of these companies that are building, you know, kind of modern hardware, software enabled systems. You know, what's the perce…”
Evans: Most components inside Tesla vehicles come from standard automotive suppliers
“Tesla, a lot of the bits of it inside a Tesla were bought from the car supply chain. Like, most of the bits inside a Tesla come from it.”
Beshara: Tesla generated $14 billion in Model 3 pre-orders in days
“In about three or four days, they sold 200,000 cars. I mean, this is a car manufacturer. I think they've sold essentially about fourteen billion dollars worth of their new model. And they're expecting, you know, 30% to drop off, but still 70% of that would be …”
Horowitz: Tesla and WhatsApp require fundamentally different employee option plans
“Tesla's option plan cannot be the same as WhatsApp's, or it probably should not be.”
Cooper: Tesla grants smaller initial equity, favoring larger performance refreshers later
“And one of the things that Tesla does is, instead of the typical practice, which is most people get a very significant grant, you know, the day they join the company, and then over time, they might get some refresher grants, but those refresher grants are ofte…”
Chen: Full EV transition requires 14 to 27 Tesla-sized Gigafactories
“UBS ran the numbers, and they think that depending on how quickly adoption happens, anywhere between sort of 14 and 27 of the Tesla-sized gigafactories would be enough to produce batteries for all of the world's electric vehicles. In aggregate, this would be s…”
Chen: EVs have up to 100 times fewer moving parts than gas cars
“If you look at a Tesla or a Leaf in an electric car and compare it to an equivalent internal combustion engine car, the number of moving parts in electric cars is anywhere between one and two orders of magnitude fewer moving parts.”
Rampell: Internet-connected cars like Teslas will sell personalized insurance directly
“One of the really cool things about the new cars like the Teslas that have built in, ah, three G antennas because they're internet connected, is you could actually imagine your next car selling you insurance, because all the information that you need is actual…”
Blankfein: Goldman Sachs took Tesla public before profitability was optional
“We took Tesla public before, at a time when, and this sounds like a quaint time, when companies didn't go public until they made money.”
Veterans from SpaceX, Tesla, and Anduril are moving into maritime tech
“We're seeing people from a lot of the other American dynamism companies like SpaceX, Tesla, and Andrel, they're taking their learnings and experiences and bringing them over to the ocean.”
Azhar: Tesla vehicles learn from roads and share intelligence fleet-wide
“What's happening with Tesla and the Tesla cars that learn from the road, but they all learn from each other.”
Evans: Tesla built its full-stack strategy incrementally using off-the-shelf components
“It's even beyond that because they, you know, they started the first car. They didn't make half the components. So there's been a steady road. You know, they start with like, well, let's do a roadster and we'll buy in half the bits. And then you kind of step s…”