> - And after each one of these, there is a huge bump in stock price. 200% is hyperbole.

Its not hyperbool is literally just false.

The stock price in 2018 was essentially flat.

The stock price in 2016 is flat.

You made an argument about 200% and at best its like a few %, meaning your argument is total nonsense. Literally made up with nothing to back it up.

And even if the stock went up a bit based on announcement, that doesn't even remotely prove that that stock raised 'saved' the company.

> These are feats of marketing, not feats of engineering.

No what are actually feats of engineering, and actually had impact on the stock price is when Tesla from 2017 to 2018 made the first EV that was produced over 5000 times a weak and had significantly possessive margin. And when they turned a mud field in China in to a working factory in about a year.

That is when the stock ACTUALLY started to go up. When Tesla proved they could produce cars at very high volume and good margin.

So you are just flat out factually wrong on this and I don't know why you are trying to hold on to your take. The data is right their anybody can look up the data and instantly know that you are wrong about this.

> It is undeniable that Tesla is successful in large part because of the cult of personality that Musk has built, largely on Twitter.

That is just total nonsense. Tesla successful brought the first modern Li-Ion EV to market before Musk was famous. Even when the Model S came out Musk was not very well known. Actually releasing the Model S successfully and getting car of the year is part of why Musk did get more famous.

So Tesla already had like 5 years of growth before Musk got all that well known. Also, you vastly overrated, twitter, far fewer user, use it then you might think.

People were attacked to Tesla because they made actual real EV that you could buy, that had a charging network. Tesla had a message about EV saving the environment and that message reached 100x wider then Musk twitter. People don't spend 50k+ on items because of a guy on twitter.

> That has bought his company the good grace to do preorders with ridiculous turnaround times and to lose money year over year on the stock market while keeping an astronomical valuation.

Well turns out they very actually undervalued not overvalued. And they didn't actually lose that much money, and didn't raise that much money.

They showed they were profitable with the Model S and they were a sustainable company. Then they went into Model 3 and everybody knew this was capital intensive and they guided for loses for a few years.

Do yourself a favor and compare how much money Tesla raised and what their evaluation is compared to companies that are in this space now, Rivian, Lucid and so on.

Tesla actually operated handled their cash very well and did a lot with not that much money.

> The rest of Tesla-the actual car making thing-is something that an organization of several thousand engineers could have certainly done without Elon Musk given the amount of cash they had, and probably could have done better without Elon Musk. They just needed Elon Musk to raise the cash.

And who heirs the engineers? Who defines strategy? Who decides what people should have leadership positions and so on. Tesla was not a company with 1000s of engineers when Tesla became CEO, its was a company about to go bust who had not delivered a single car.

This is HN, building a company from tiny to gigantic is a huge achievement that doesn't just 'happen'.

There were Tesla competitors many had just as much or more cash then Tesla, but they failed. Why? I thought if company just had money they would magically start mass produce cars.

> He is exactly like Steve Jobs: a briliant marketer with a cult of personality, who people think of as an "inventor" because he likes to spend time doing that.

That you think they are the same just proves that you have not really been paying attention beyond surface level. They are very different in their approach. And with both its not actually marketing.