Tesla Motors reported its 13th straight quarterly loss as a rise in sales of its Model S and Model X electric cars failed to make up for the huge cost of ramping up production.
Tesla, run by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Elon Musk, said its net loss widened to $293.2 million, or $2.09 per share, in the second quarter, from $184.2 million, or $1.45 per share, a year earlier.
Why hasn`t Musk gone broke?How his tricks works.
Eric Peter Alt-market.com 31.1.17
Musk, who has considerable political pull (partially a function of his having considerable funds, but chiefly because he is a Green Celebrity) gets a state – California, for example – to pass a fatwa requiring any company selling cars within the state to sell “x” number of “zero emissions” cars each year in order to be allowed to sell any cars at all. Most car companies don’t have many “zero emissions” cars to sell.
Elon does. It is all he sells. If you want to use that word. Which is editorial abuse, or should be so regarded. Elon gives away cars – heavily subsidized – to affluent fools and tools, who like to preen “green” while hemorrhaging it. Unless you think that spending $70,000 (the least expensive Tesla available) to “save gas” makes economic sense.
Anyhow. . .
Under these laws – which Elon helped along – “zero emissions” is defined as electric – notwithstanding that electric cars generate emissions, too.
Just elsewhere.
Well, Elon has lots of electric cars to “sell.” But not many are buying . . . .
So a car company that doesn’t have enough electric cars but is trying to sell real cars buys carbon credits from Elon to offset the insufficiency of “zero emissions” electric cars they build/sell. After having paid off Elon, they are allowed to sell their non-electric cars.
Elon gets rich – taxpayers get poor. Cars (non electric ones) become more expensive to buy (in order to offset the money sent to Elon).
It’s nice work – if you can cage it.
But it’s not enough for Elon. He wants Trump to hit everyone with carbon taxes – which would be taxes applied to the use of energy sourced from other than Elon-approved (and heavily invested in) energy sources. That is, anything not electric and “green” (that is, electricity produced by other than coal/oil/nuclear generation). In order to further advantage not only his electric car con but other cons, like Solar City – his boondoggle solar panel company that is a financial sinkhole of Enron-esque proportions.
Musk recently had to get Tesla to buy Solar City for $2.6 billion, to keep it gimping along. Which is to say, he shifted funds from one con to another, but the same people always end up paying for all of it (that’s us… again).
The carbon tax, though, is Musk’s stinky trump card.
Such a tax – if high enough – would “even the playing field,” as the advocates of such things style it. That is, by making inexpensive forms of energy (and transport) artificially expensive, you make economically untenable things like Tesla electric cars and Solar City panels seem like viable alternatives.
The problem – it should be obvious – is that not everyone is a billionaire or even a hundred thousandaire. Making all cars cost as much as a Tesla electric car means fewer people will be able to afford a car at all.
“Zero emissions” or otherwise.
