I don't have a direct holding in $TSLA, but I guess I hold it as a significant component of $NDQ, $IVV and in my offshore passive retirement portfolios of World Shares and Developed Market Shares, where it can be anything from 1.5% to 5% per fund. So, I'm guessing my total expsoure to TSLA is about 1% to 1.5% of my total assets. So I take a passing interest in it, but there is not a lot I can do.

I don't have much of a view either way as an investment but some of the things I think about:

There is obviously high levels of competition coming down the line, will they keep their leading edge?

Are they trying to be a premium or an everyday brand? I think they were premium but trying to expand to everyday - how does that play with consumers and into margins etc.

I also wonder whether having elon musk associated with the brand is a postive or a negative. Elon seems to be aligning himself to the right yet most that buy EVs currently are leftward leaning. I do know some people that his association has put them off buying a tesla now.

Then long term obviously EVs (besides batteries/tyres) need less maintenance does the mean less cars in the future. Furthermore if we get driverless cars does that make total car sales also go down as uber etc is magnitudes cheaper. All well off into the horizon obviously.

If China tensions continue or scale up this will impact China sales and production plants there. A bit like Apple...

I think Tesla massivley benefited from european carbon credits to get where it they are now but not sure how relevant that is these days? I think government tax incentives for EVs will still continue to help Tesla.

If you look at the market cap of Tesla, you can easily picture yourself a tech company with 70% gross margin, $25B+ revenue and annual growth rate of 40%+.

Tesla is not that kind of business. At least not until FSD is fully functioning at any part of the world without pre installed spatial information. Nobody knows if that's gonna happen since such an achievement requires a huge breakthrough from where we are right now.

On top of that, Tesla is a company with all the eggs in the same basket. That basket is called Elon Musk, the man behind everything and almost single handedly boosted the market cap of Tesla by becoming an icon of our generation. I am quite surprised that people don't see this as a huge risk. People kind of assume that Elon Musk will stick around forever. If Elon Musk left Tesla, for some reason, I don't know what will happen to the valuation. What I do know is I don't want to hold any Tesla share when I read that news.

If you bought Tesla before COVID, or 2013, which is even better, you can do whatever you want and I'm very jealous of you. Both holding and selling are good moves for you at your position. You can even buy more shares just because you are ridiculously rich now.

For me, I've never heard of Tesla until I heard the news "Tesla just passed 1 trillion dollar market cap". I did some research, figured that I missed the opportunity and then just moved on to other stuff.

I own quite a bit in my RL portfolio.

Hugely bullish on them (obviously), however all the concerns above are legitimate and I totally understand why people reach the conclusion not to invest in them.

Of all the risks, the key man risk of Elon is probably the one that concerns me the most, however the longer Tesla goes on the less they actually need him it seems.

Of all their moats/competitive advantages 2 stand out to me:

• Their manufacturing prowess, how much better they are at making the machine that makes the machine than the OEMs (2 main pieces of evidence here are Sandy Munro's breakdowns, and Herbet Diess (ex CEO of VW) being honest about how far behind Tesla they were).
• How much further ahead in a generalised solution to autonomy - I say generalised as I would say Waymo is currently winning the autonomous race by having autonomous vehicles actually generating income already - but I think their solution will take forever and be hugely expensive to roll-out en mass.