ZeApelido
Active Member
While I had known of Elon Musk since PayPal and had dabbled in the periphery of Elon's world I had not really focussed on TSLA, despite having lots of interest in the Roadster, not least because I had been deeply enamored of the Lotus Elan that I drive, and the Lotus Cortina that nearly drove mad. The nation of electric cars had intrigued me since I had seen and driven in a 1909 Baker Electric as a teenager. In roughly early 2013 I was at a charity investor convention in South San Francisco when I was given the opportunity to drive a Model S for the duration fo the four day convention.
Those four days changed my life. From an investment perspective I had been involved with consumer payments and related fields so PayPal was a Big Deal for me, but not a deeply-satisfying, world-altering, life-changing experience. In fact I had been very involved in the charity precisely because the work side was so unfulfilling emotionally.
So the Model S appeared and was boded up with fellow charitable conventioneers. We all wanted a Tesla NOW!
With a history of observing Elon invent interactive mapping, consumer payments then devoting himself ridiculously to rocketry with obviously ridiculous goals I was intrigued but skeptical. Then came the Model S.
I went away from San Francisco and immediately began to shift investments to TSLA over the universal objections of everyone except my spouse. She reminded me that things worked well for us when we followed our dreams, not so when we tried to be rational. [aside: she left Rio de Janeiro to live with me in Yemen, so one could argue she had some degree of wanderlust]. Anyway we could not buy a Tesla because there was no way to get one in Brazil, so we just invested.
In mid-2014 the P85D was announced. Then I lost all control. I placed an order for Florida delivery where we had a mailbox and a legal address but no dwelling. After ordering the car we decided to buy somewhere to keep the car. After some searching we found a suitable place and closed on it. A few days later I was offered a P85D just as I wanted it which was used as a demonstrator in Georgia.
From that time on we kept adding to TSLA holdings every time something matured or we had some available new funds. We kept our other longer term holdings but TSLA ended out as nearly half our new money. We also sold our island and invested those proceeds mostly in TSLA. The rest is history.
I can honestly say that TSLA and prior exposure to Elon Musk has changed my life for the better. While we had used solar power when nearly everyone said not to we had also done some fairly outrageous things. Once TSLA appeared we ended out selling our aircraft, investing the proceeds in TSLA, switched to renewable wherever we could and so on. The side effects of all this have been quite amazing.
After a lifetime of constant career changes, academic efforts that ended out with a bizarre collection of major subjects and degrees and living in more than a dozen countries I actually ended out concentrating my interests on TSLA, SpaceX etc. In the process I ended out living in the same house for more than 15 years, Before TSLA I had never even lived in the same country for that long.
Thus, TSLA has brought great new stability to my life. How many people can claim that? FWIW, Elon Musk is unquestionably the longest tenured major auto chief in the world today, so one could argue TSLA has brought him stability too. OK, I admit it, this paragraph might be just a trifle 'tongue in cheek'.
But do you personally know Chico Buarque? If you do, then I'm really going to be jealous!