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Tesla: Mass-Market or Niche? Both.

Should Tesla focus on the high-end of the market now and seek an immediate profit and a potentially sustainable long-term niche?  Or should it go all-out to do nothing less than become the major player in the entire worldwide automotive market, taking advantage of its high valuation to raise billions of capital to fund years of cash burn?  These are super interesting questions that I will not address today.  Tesla’s apparent choice in this question is … neither.  It has clearly gone all in, at least in rhetoric, on dominating the automotive market and Elon Musk has announced (at least on Twitter) future new products in nearly every automotive niche.  But at the same time Tesla has refused to leverage its high stock price to raise capital and actually has been cutting back on capital spending and slow-rolling expansion plans.

(emphasis mine)

Source: Coyote Blog

Like Coyote (Warren Meyer), I suspect that not all is right in the land of Tesla. While I’ve praised Elon for publicly laying out a clear strategy for Tesla in the past, launching a “semi, pickup, new coupe, 10K a week m3 [Model 3] production, china factory, Europe homologation, expanded service network, in house body shops, car carrier production, solar shingle, gen 2 supercharger” is far from focused.. or even aligned.

Too many product? Too many markets? Too many balls in the air? Not enough investment? Only time will tell with this one…