In the last two years there has been so much bickering about politics, and anger and fear about the effect on Tesla's business and stock price.
- Elon spouting off on earnings call about "fascist" stay-at-home order and tells California authorities to "give people back their goddamn freedom", getting into fights with local politicians, and moving headquarters and his residency to Texas.
- National controversy surrounding a certain abortion law enacted in Texas last September
- Tesla being conspicuously excluded from White House EV Summit
- Biden Admin awkwardly avoiding even uttering the word "Tesla"
- Elon arguing with prominent members of the more left portion Democratic Party
- Biden "You led and it matters" praise of Mary Barra's heroic charge for electrification of "the entire auto industry"
- NHTSA Missy Cummings appointment, NHTSA probes into Tesla self-driving development, concerns about Biden Administration banning FSD Beta or hampering progress
- Union favoritism in Build Back Better bill proposal for EV tax incentives
- Twitter acquisition drama, free speech debates, speculation and outrage about Elon allegedly trying to allow Trump to return to the platform
I complained about the complaining and I predicted none of this would have much net impact. Shockingly, this seems to have come true. In the time since, we've seen:
- Tesla's car market share in California has risen to 11%, second only to Toyota (for now), and Model Y and 3 have become the #1 and #2 top-selling vehicles of any kind in the state. Model 3 in 1H22 beat the third-place Toyota RAV4 by 23%!
- Texas has not a had mass exodus of suitable workforce and as such, Tesla, SpaceX and Boring development deep in the heart of Texas is seemingly progressing at warp speed with no problems.
- Americans and people all over the world are still ordering Tesla cars and energy products, prices keep rising and barely any progress is being made keeping up with order backlogs.
- Starlink played a critical role in saving Ukraine from communications catastrophe, earning well-deserved international praise for Elon Musk and SpaceX.
- NHTSA has continued to allow unfettered development of FSD Beta, save for the ongoing industry-wide requirement to report accidents involving advanced driver assistance systems. The FAA and FCC haven't really interfered unfairly with SpaceX either.
- The version of US clean vehicle tax credit that was actually enacted benefits Tesla massively, and the union favoritism was deleted. The previous version had a limit of 200k vehicles per company after which the credit started to phase out. This time, the government decided to eliminate the cap despite the fact that Tesla sells twice as many clean vehicles in America than all other companies put together and would thus claim the majority of the credit benefit.
I'm not injecting my opinions about these things in this post, just pointing out that despite all that stuff that people were worried about, ultimately Tesla has posted great results in the last two years including record profits that have continued to surprise Wall Street analysts over and over again, and also the Biden Admin hasn't actually done much to hurt Tesla in terms of what matters most: legislation and regulation by federal agencies. Starting especially in Q3 and Q4 of this year, the explosive earnings growth will speak for itself and I don't think there's much that can keep the stock price tamped down, not even media headlines. Money on the bottom line speaks louder than anything else.