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Comment by toomuchtodo

21 hours ago

TSLA exposure is a call option on Musk succeeding (with success criteria being "TSLA price go up") regardless of reality. SpaceX is buying up Cybertrucks; is it illegal? Will anyone do anything about it? That sort of success (quasi fraud). The product is the stock and the hope there is a greater fool who will buy it eventually.

SpaceX Buys over 1000 Cybertrucks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45228566 - September 2025 (3 comments)

9 comments

toomuchtodo

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coliveira  21 hours ago

The "new economy" is full of self-dealing. That's the result of loose (or non-existing) regulations on monopolies. It all starts with Wall Street controlling stocks on thousands of large companies that are ultimately owned by small groups of the same shareholders. Now it's evolving to large sectors owned by fewer and fewer people.

  • stocksinsmocks  19 hours ago

    I don’t think self-dealing is new. Although it was eye-opening, when I learned that BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity all own 5-10% of every company and competition between the companies they hold is not meaningful. Everyone just has to have nice steady predictable returns and nobody is allowed to innovate too far ahead of anyone else for fear of devaluing the real bosses’ other assets.

    I don’t even know what to call the kind of system we have.

    • coliveira  19 hours ago

      As I said, BlackRock and their friends were just the beginning. NVdia is trying to own a huge chunk of the AI space using their profits. Other tech companies are using a similar playbook. And of course they're all owned by Wall Street. The competition is highly controlled so the winners are all part of the same club.

SoftTalker  20 hours ago

All BEV sales, not just Tesla, are tanking, at least in the USA. Ford and and others have retreated on their plans as well. Tesla may be worse off because of Musk's extracurricular antics but BEVs are not selling well.

  • toomuchtodo  20 hours ago

    In the US, which is due to policy, which is temporary. The rest of the world remains very hungry for affordable electric vehicles [1], which only China seems interested in producing at scale. Once that manufacturing capacity and distribution systems are spun up (BYD has its own car carrier for exports, the BYD Shenzhen, for example [2]), it will remain in production. "Can Tesla survive until regime change?" is an important question for those with economic exposure to it. Ironically, its peril is entirely self inflicted.

    > BYD announced in 2022 its plans to launch a fleet of car carriers to build what it calls a “maritime bridge” to support its global sales growth and supply chain. The company said it would invest about $687 million to develop a fleet of eight car carriers. The first of the vessels, BYD Explorer No. 1 was delivered in January 2024 followed by BYD Changzhou in December 2024, and BYD Hefei, which was the company’s first owned PCTC. Each of the first three vessels has a capacity of 7,000 units. [My note: current BYD vertical integration marine fleet capacity is ~30k units when including the Shenzhen vessel mentioned above, but does not include capacity through third party charters]

    [1] China EV Exports Worldwide Rise 87% Year over Year to 199,836 in November [2025] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-29/china-ev-... | https://archive.today/Q80Zs - December 29, 2025

    [2] Chinese EV Manufacturer BYD Takes Delivery of [World's] Largest Capacity Car Carrier - https://maritime-executive.com/article/chinese-ev-manufactur... - April 24th, 2025

    (think in systems; US light vehicle TAM is ~18M units/year, global TAM is ~90M units/year; Tesla US sales will finalize at ~600k units for 2025)

    • SoftTalker  11 hours ago

      I'd consider an affordable BEV. There are none sold in the US, and nobody seems interested in making one. Closest thing might be a used Nissan Leaf.