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 58 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
Elon Musk scrapped Tesla's Model 2 on the spot for the robotaxi
“When he saw the robotaxi, he was so bowled over by whatever it was he saw in it, right, that he remarked to his to his team, wow, you know, this looks great. Let's just do this. He scrapped the Model Two on the spot, and he said, let's do the robotaxi. We're d…”
Niedermeyer: Tesla's self-driving pitch works by matching consumer mental models
“And the reason Tesla's been successful at that is not because it's technically plausible at all. It's because it fits exactly what's in the mental model of the American consumer when they hear the word self-driving cars. And Tesla's the only company that's sel…”
Elon Musk canceled Tesla's affordable car to pursue a $10T AI pivot
“He's decided, I'm not a car company, I'm an AI and robotics company, and I'm about creating a 10 trillion dollar company that is based on first robotaxi, but then these humanoid robots, and he canceled, you know, the family car, the affordable car, the one tha…”
Firing the Supercharger team to bet on autonomous tech is irrational
“You get rid of the team responsible for your most valuable asset, and
You put all the bets of your company, you bet the company on a technology that isn't anywhere near ready for the market.
All of these things together, they're not rational.
They are not rati…”
Tesla insiders doubt the robotaxi is ready to operate without pedals
“No one outside the company and no one inside the company who I spoke to anyway believes that the robotaxi is ready to be without a steering wheel, without pedals, and even if it were ready, that is ready for regulators are ready to say, yeah, go.”
Hurlbut: EV market would not exist without DOE loan to Tesla
“You know, we invested in Tesla, and that spurred the entire electrical vehicle market, and that wouldn't have happened without that government capital at a cheap rate.”
Wesoff: SolarCity would have gone bankrupt without Tesla's $2.6B acquisition
“If Tesla had not purchased SolarCity for 2.6 billion dollars plus the assumption of a couple of billion dollars worth of debt, SolarCity would for sure have gone bankrupt within a couple of months.”
Elon Musk targeted a late 2025 launch for Tesla's robotaxi
“So suddenly, he doesn't, not only wants the robo-taxi, but he wants it at the same time that the Model Two would have come out, which is the second half of next year.”
Elon Musk laid off Tesla's entire Supercharger team to prioritize robotaxis
“Musk also laid off the entire supercharger team, and now he's putting all his attention on an autonomous robo-taxi.”
Delayed affordable cars and unready robotaxis create a crisis for Tesla
“I think it is a crisis. If you don't have the Model Two, and you don't have new affordable vehicles to bring out by the first quarter of next year like you promised, and you can't do the robo-taxi on time, what do you have? What are you going to say next year?…”
Tesla Roadster engineers learned of Musk's revised acceleration specs on Twitter
“He decided to Himself without, without telling anyone else that that it's gonna go twice as fast as I said before, so instead of going from zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds, which is very fast, like, think in your mind how long Okay, that was about two seconds, like …”
Tesla's hardware teams lack confidence in Elon Musk's leadership
“That's, that has made the team dismayed, unhappy, and lacking confidence in Musk's leadership.”
Pfund: Tesla Could Not Go Public in Today's Market
“When Tesla went public in, you know, the Model S didn't come out until, I mean, there were no real cars there. That, that wouldn't happen today.”
Pfund: DBL passed on all hydrogen deals to invest in Tesla
“We didn't do any. We decided to go for batteries in electric vehicles, so we invested in Tesla.”
Lacey: Tesla faced a DOJ criminal probe for inflating Autopilot capabilities
“Tesla was facing a criminal probe from the Department of Justice for inflating autopilot capabilities, and a handful of startups were facing cash flow crunches.”
Musk expects Tesla to hit 20 million annual vehicles with 50% growth
“And Elon Musk's expectations for Tesla are for 50% growth, growth per year. Soon selling twenty million vehicles per year, which necessarily means taking market share away from those other vehicles.”
Wesoff: Despite Musk's lies, Tesla catalyzed the global energy transition
“They are forcing the curve on EVs. They're forcing the price structure of batteries. It's hard not to see them as one of the greatest forces of the last decade in catalyzing the energy transition. For all of the lying and prevaricating and questionable busines…”
Wesoff: Tesla likely would not exist today without $465M DOE loan guarantee
“Without that diving save of getting that venture capital, and without the half a billion dollars in loan guarantee, it's quite likely that the Tesla of today would not exist.”
Wesoff: Tesla had barely installed 1,000 solar roofs total by 2021
“Despite ridiculous promises about spooling up to 1000 roofs per week, I would say that he's barely installed a thousand roofs with the product, and it went through four different revisions over the course of the first few years.”
Baglino: Tesla prioritized vehicles over energy products during COVID chip shortages
“The same thing happened, by the way, in the COVID crisis where, you know, there were semiconductor shortages. It was kind of like, hey, vehicles, the breadwinner energy, you know, you're going to have to get the scraps and figure it out. And I don't, I think t…”
Baglino: Tesla Optimus Progress Leverages Automotive Simulation and AI Stack
“When you look at, like, Optimus as an example, which is the robot program at Tesla, like, why is Optimus going quickly at Tesla? It's because, you know, hey, we're, there's a lot of reuse of platform technologies, whether it's, like, how do you opt, like, a si…”
Baglino: Panasonic supply bottlenecks forced Tesla to cut Powerwall production in 2017-2018
“Especially as we got into the 2017 and 2018, there was a cell sort of pinch. Panasonic was having a hard time ramping, and we didn't have enough cells to go around between vehicles and energy, and so we had to kind of, like, pare back on the Powerwall build pl…”
Baglino: Tesla Energy Relied on Auto Business Before Reaching Standalone Profitability
“The energy business was heavily supported by the vehicle business through many years, to be frank, but finally kind of got out of that bird's nest and was able to fly on its own and generate serious profits and bring cash back to the Tesla broader company, and…”
Chinese EVs and battery supply chains rival Tesla and Lucid
“China sells more EVs than any, than by far than any country in the world, and it's state of the art. Chinese batteries, the whole supply chain, and Chinese EVs can compete with anyone's EVs around the world, including Tesla, including Lucid.”
Gurman: Apple considered acquiring Tesla and met with Musk before passing
“Initially, the first part of the car project was examining what it would take to acquire Tesla, integrate Tesla, and take Tesla to a new level under Apple ownership. And so they spent a lot of time exploring the possibility of acquiring Tesla. Apple's head of …”
Gurman: Elon Musk would have quickly left if Apple acquired Tesla
“I quite frankly don't think Elon Musk would have lasted long at Apple, right, with Tesla. I think Elon Musk would have wanted control. I think Elon Musk would have wanted to run, you know, probably the whole company, obviously a very ambitious guy, and certain…”
Ramanathan: BYD overtook Tesla as the world's top EV seller in 2023
“They became at the end of last year, the leading seller of EVs. They edged out Tesla last year for that title”
Spector: Home battery pack supply constraints have effectively ended
“It's just kind of a whole new world where instead of having that whole market dependent on, like, how many units Tesla feels like shipping this quarter there's now seemingly not going to be any real constraint on the supply of battery packs to homes.”
Clayton: Open energy systems drive more innovation than Tesla's model
“Well, open because it drives more innovation, and I think that's, you know, in direct contrast to Tesla's value proposition. It gives customers choice with interoperability of technologies.”
Musk financed Twitter deal with $12.5B in Tesla stock collateral
“Because this deal is being financed by 12 and a half billion dollars of Tesla stock, the banks are holding that stock as collateral for the Twitter deal, and if his shares continue to fall, he has to sell those shares, and if he continues to sell those shares,…”
Musk called California lockdowns fascist but stayed silent on Shanghai closures
“Famously, when his California factory was locked down, he called the officials who imposed that fascists and really publicly bristled against it. But there's been a similar lockdown going on in Shanghai at his factory, and he hasn't Pushed back against it at a…”
Wesoff: Tesla Solar Roof will never be profitable outside ultra-high-end
“Every job is a custom job, and there's no way that this is ever going to be profitable except for super, super, super high-end applications.”
Wesoff: EV competition with Tesla will even up by 2024
“I think things are going to be evened up in a couple of years.”
Lacey: Tesla received nearly $1B in NY subsidies for idle factory
“Tesla's solar production factory in Buffalo, New York sat mostly idle for years. A factory, by the way, that Tesla got nearly a billion dollars from the New York government to build.”
Wesoff: Legacy automakers would never launch major EVs without Tesla
“Toyota is launching 16 EVs in the coming years. That would never have happened without Tesla, and I think that's applicable to Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and the rest of the automakers.”
Baglino: LG's Tesla Energy bet unlocked vehicle cell deals in China
“Ultimately, you know, they took a bet on Tesla on our team on the energy side and it ended up paying off for them when they ended up getting an opportunity to participate with the vehicle business in China and vehicle business in other places.”
Baglino: Tesla Energy Scaled Due to Musk Pushing for Large Projects
“Hands down, the energy business of Tesla could not have gotten to where it got to without Elon's input both as a major advocate in the early days and as a strong force for acceleration on doing big projects like the Hornsdale project, going big or going home, …”
Financing unproven battery tech without a Tesla-level balance sheet is nearly impossible
“If we were using an unproven technology or a company that didn't have much of a balance sheet or a track record, I think that would have made this much more difficult, if not impossible.”
Tesla is investing $10 billion annually across AI, Dojo, and robotics
“You're investing ten billion dollars a year. That's what he's investing in. Dojo, the chip, and Optimus The humanoid robot and robo taxi.”
Tesla and BYD are the only high-volume EV makers globally
“It's only two companies that are selling their cars in the high hundreds of thousands and millions. It's Tesla, we already said, and China's BYD.”
Gurman: Apple would have absorbed Tesla rather than run it as subsidiary
“Buying Tesla would have been the basis of their own car project. I don't think it would have operated necessarily as its own subsidiary. I think it would have been the beginnings of, you know, an Apple vehicle.”
Jaramillo: Tesla stationary storage was a short engineering putt repurposing auto modules
“We took essentially automotive designed modules and put them into the right enclosures and put them into the right, you know, control systems and, you know, thermal systems and that kind of thing. But relatively speaking, it was a pretty short engineering putt…”
Lacey: Tesla, GM, Lyft, Uber, and Waymo promised robotaxis by 2020
“Tesla, General Motors, Lyft, Uber, Google's Waymo, they were all promising large fleets of robo-taxis with fully autonomous vehicles by the turn of the decade.”
Wesoff: Tesla is an EV company with a clean energy hobby
“However, the automotive leg is 95% of the company, and the energy storage and the solar are only five percent of the company. So his initial vision, Tesla is an EV company with a hobbyist Business in solar and energy storage.”
Lacey: Musk's ventures received over $5 billion in government support
“And to support his ventures, he's taken well over five billion dollars in government funding, including hundreds of millions of dollars every quarter from credits created by states to support electric cars.”
Baglino: Tesla lacked residential distribution and inverters for early Powerwall
“Tesla at the time didn't have, like, a channel to the end customer in the residential space necessarily. We didn't have the time to develop a grid interactive inverter that could back up a house. Like, we didn't have the team initially. The energy engineering …”
Baglino: Tesla chose cylindrical cells because only they had high manufacturing volume
“One of the reasons why We went with cylindrical cells in the first place was because they were the only batteries built in, in high volume”
Baglino: Gigafactory Nevada was an unprecedented risk for Panasonic
“The gig factory in Reno was a huge risk taken by Panasonic to build a single factory bigger than all other factories combined in a new country where they had never done battery manufacturing before in a state with no manufacturing base, Nevada, you know, with …”