> It's entirely unclear to me whether or not Tesla's battery manufacturing is bearing any fruit in practice.

Tesla has issues manufacturing its own cells with its own chemistries and its own production equipment. At the same time its competitors all have issues with manufacturing even while depending on battery partners that take most of the profits (look at GM if you want an up to date example).

And the article even suggest that they will solve this and that there are very real serious saving that Tesla can achieve. Even the most negative talking point only suggest that the potential savings are lost, well ok, so in the worst case they are still as well of as their competitors.

Quite basically every other car company would kill to be in Tesla position. Its as simple as that.

> This sounds exactly like Elon Musk's usual MO: 1) acquire a company and then take credit for their inventions in order to paint himself as a visionary,

First of all, Musk or Tesla never took credit for inventing dry-coating manufacturing, this is just something you made up because it seems you have some personal issues with Musk. Dry coating is a good idea has been known for a while, making it practical for real large scale production has always been the issue. Musk even talked about Maxwell in some of the presentation on the topic.

And if you actually start to look into this whole topic, its quite clear that for Maxwell they initially developed some small prove of concept, then engaged partners to work with them to get this technology to a scale where its viability could be assets, Tesla was their major partner in this. At that point the promise of the technology was so large that Tesla decided to simply acquire the company rather then to continue as a partnership.

When Tesla bought Maxwell the technology was nowhere near ready for prime time. Tesla had to still do a huge amount of work, with many, many more iterations on the technology and major effort at scaling. Tesla is building its own coating huge scale machine to achieve this.

Its a complete misunderstanding of how large scale battery manufacturing works to claim that they simple bought a company and that's why they don't actually didn't do anything or don't deserve any credit.

Dry coating is just one of many things Tesla had to do to become a battery manufacturer. There are many, many other things that I don't have time for in this comment. Tesla bought a number of companies other then Maxwell as well, Hiber is another example. There are more.

There are very few new companies that turn into battery manufacturing companies. And most of them are just that, manufacturing companies. They license most of their technology and buy standard construction equipment. Tesla of course does some of these things to, but they also did a huge amount of the technology on both the cell and the manufacturing equipment.

But Tesla turning itself into a battery company is clearly a major achievement and was incredibly forward looking when they started and is still way ahead of everybody. Tesla was literally doing advanced research in battery manufacturing while the Ford CEO was still walking around talking about how 'batteries are not an issue and can easily be bought on the open market'.

Of course that CEO was fired and now Ford is doing what Tesla did in 2014.

> 2) overpromise and underdeliver, counting on his legions of blind faithful to keep stock prices irrationally high in the process, and

Ok, this is another one of these Anti-Musk truism that sound smart but are actually stupid.

If you underdeliver on making your company into a the a large battery manufacturer, that is still a huge success that literally every other car company would kill to have.

He under-delivered vis-a-vis his own predictions. His own predictions aren't relevant. Many of the actual stock analysts actually assumed there would be delay. And the major institutions who actually buy most Tesla stock knew that. The idea that Tesla stock is only owned by some legion of brain-dead individual investors is just false.

And as you can see from their delivery numbers, issues with their own production has not crashed the company, because guess what, Tesla planned ahead because they knew that scaling a totally new battery manufacturing was incredibly difficult.

And anyway, Tesla hasn't even raised any cash during most of that time. You seem to be stuck in pre-2018 way of thinking with regards to Tesla.

They have not raised money for years and the last couple times they did raise money they didn't actually spend it. The have retired some debt but mostly their cash balance has been growing. So any claim that Tesla has been doing stuff to manipulate the stock price only so they could raise more money to fuel their sinking company is just blatantly false. Its not actually a defensible position, Tesla is public, go look at the financials.

The anti-musk conspiracy theory logic that literally anything he does is some 6D galaxy brain move to convince people in the short term to boost stock value is just not real, it doesn't even make sense as a strategy. Tesla has been working on cell chemistry and cell manufacturing for well over 10 years and has been serious about become a sell manufacture for at least 7 years. They have early on made strategic choice that battery manufacturing is a major core competency and have pursued it. During that time stock has gone up and down and up and down, legislation regarding to EV and batteries have been changing all over the world in many way. But the strategy from Tesla has been consistent.

So the idea that this is about short term stock manipulation is just so bad that I can't even wrap my had around how somebody could believe it. The only reason I can think of that somebody would actually believe such an insane argument is if they just have deep personal hate for Musk that overwrites any logical thinking skills and any anti-Musk argument has to be true. Musk is easy to hate, but really it shouldn't overwrite basic logical reasoning.

3) base all profitability on the availability of government handouts, in this case the tax incentives for US-sourced batteries.

First of all, please give an actual links to the exact intensives you are talking about. As far as I know before the Biden IRA no such thing existed and I have not heard of details of what was introduced.

Second, this claim is mostly nonsense in general. Tesla profited from general mechanism, mainly EV credits and ZEV credits, both system were available to all car companies. So why are other car companies not as successful profitable. Clearly you suggest this is easy, just take handouts make profits, and yet, seem to only work for Tesla. During the time frame you 'analyze' Tesla has gone from making little money to more money then Ford and GM combined. Yet Ford and GM combined had 2x as much access to those same intensives.

And anyway, Tesla was already building batteries in the US in Nevada since 2015 and that what matters for any intensives in regards to battery manufacturing. They located in the US long before battery manufacturing was considered strategic. And the actual resources for these cells, will not come from the US whether Tesla or Panasonic builds the cells.

So really non of your points hold up.