All About Tesla
No matter which way I turn these days, I am running into Tesla. TO start with, as I have reported, I own a Tesla X that is now five years old and has a whopping 11,000 miles on the odometer. I have full autonomous functionality on the car and have used it only a half dozen times to show friends how it works. Quite frankly, I’m not a fan of autonomous driving, at least not for my purposes. Maybe for truck drivers or regular daily commuters it is more useful. I’m sure the next generation of drivers that grow up with autonomous driving will get more comfortable. But Tesla seems to be all around me almost every direction I turn to in my life.
My regular activities, as most of you know, are to teach finance (currently Advanced Corporate Finance at University of San Diego), to do expert witness work on finance litigation, the do projects and garden around my hilltop and to write stories like this one. I can now say that Tesla has managed to permeate each and every one of those activities whether I like it or not. I will review all. Of that in a minute, but for now let me explain my personal interaction with Tesla through its products. As I have written, I find the range anxiety of traveling long distances in the Tesla to be too consuming to bother using the car for anything but local daily driving. For that it is very easy and I recharge the car every night to make sure I have a full charge so that I don’t need to waste any psychic energy on whether I will run out of juice in the middle of nowhere. That and the fact that three of the five years I have owned the car I was an absentee owner only driving it occasionally have led to the low odometer reading to date. If you use the past 21 months as a guide, I am still only driving an average of 313 miles/month, or about one third as much as the average car driver in the United States.
I very much enjoy driving the Tesla and find the acceleration and power to be exciting and fun. I will also add that there is still a cool factor in driving the car even though there are Teslas all over the road here in San Diego these days. Opening the gull-wing doors in the back still bring a smile to people’s faces. I will also say that I find the general cargo capacity of the car quite functional and I have used it for many transportation chores, including trips to the nursery and the rock store. It’s nice not to have to go to the gas station, but it’s even nicer not to have to go to the shop almost ever. I’ve been to the Tesla shop once, but the car is not technically due for service until it hits 125,000 miles on the odometer. As I have mentioned, I will need new tires and windshield wipers well before that, but otherwise might not have any other servicing needs.
I have also used the car once for a point-to-point trip that was further (in round-trip terms) than the charge would go. That was to Pasadena to meet my half-sister for lunch. On that occasion I found it easy to find a nearby charger to juice up during lunch to make the drive home simple enough. I’m sure that if I used it for distance travel more, I would adapt to the recharging protocol and might not have as much range anxiety as I had on my one day-trip to Las Vegas.
But Tesla is also now a part of my home project and gardening thinking. As I have mentioned, I have put in an order ($100 deposit) for a Tesla double-motor Cybertruck. I have decided that getting one on a trade in for the much costlier X should allow me to get a new one as an even-money swap, That will allow me to have what it seems everyone out here has, which is a pick-up truck to go to the nursery, Home Depot and rock stores and load up without concern about any mess or Hegyt capacity constraints. I can even then do catch and release on rattlesnakes and not worry about them wriggling out of the bucket while I’m driving. When I learned via a rouge website that I have 1.25 million people in front of me on the order queue and that I would have to expect delivery no sooner than 2025, I was driven to look at and put a deposit down on the Ford F-150 Lightning in hopes that It becomes available sooner. I do suspect I will find a way to acquire a Cybertruck in the grey market sooner than 2025, but a $100 hedge of my EV truck needs seems appropriate. So Tesla has a central role in my home project life.
Also, let’s not forget that my big energy expenditure last year was the installation of my two Tesla wall batteries as part of my home energy system. My 9.7 KW solar system on the roof feeds my two 12.7 KW Tesla wall batteries so that if and when the grid does down, I can continue to operate the house (strangely enough the only thing I cannot use will be my Tesla X, which draws too much power for its own batteries to feed). The Tesla batteries also shift usage off the peak times so that I can lower my electric bill and make the whole process optimally efficient from an economical standpoint.
Several months ago I was retained on an expert witness case about a cause of action being taken by an investor against its brokerage house over the fact that they were put into some large Tesla short sale trades in 2020 that managed to catch Tesla just before its price surged in the market. This all rendered the investor with massive losses for which they did not feel well apprised. This trade reduced this investor’s net worth by 25% or so and is arguably an example of an unsuitable investment for which the broker should bear some responsibility, at least according to the investor and their lawyers. The circumstances are such that I agree with that assessment since shorting is a highly risky activity that is hard enough for professional investors to sustain, witness the recent GameStop debacle. So Tesla is now a part of my expert witness portfolio, so to speak.
In my Advanced Corporate Finance course we are discussing the advantages and disadvantages of public versus private financing markets. We are specifically talking about Special Purpose Acquisition Corporations (SPACs) this week and the trends in Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). It is almost impossible to discuss the subject without a conversation about Tesla. It went public in an IPO in 2010 and since then the SPAC phenomenon has given many other start-up EV manufacturers the opportunity to access the public markets early in their development. The fact that Tesla has, as of today, become the first car company to hit $1 Trillion dollars in market capitalization is sure to become a topic of conversation in class this week. Thus, Tesla is now an unavoidable part of my teaching program.
Even my general interest is infected with Tesla and Elon Musk as the most recent space race to commercialize space travel features Musk’s SpaceX against Blue Origin (Bezos) and Virgin Galactic (Branson). No matter which way I turn these days, life as we know it seems to be all about Tesla.