Daily reminder that Telsa is not — nor was ever intended to be — a car company. Tesla is fundamentally an "energy generation and storage" (battery/supercapacitor) company. Given Tesla's fundamentals (the types of assets they own, the logistics they've built out), the Powerwall and Megapack are closer to Tesla's core product than the cars are. (And they also make a bunch of other battery-ish things that have no consumer names, just MIL-SPEC procurement codes.)

Yes, right now car sales make up 78% of Tesla's revenue. But cars have 17% margins. The energy-storage division, currently at 10% of revenue, has more like 30% margins. And the car sales are falling as the battery sales ramp up.

The cars were always a B2C bootstrap play for Tesla, to build out the factories it needed to sell grid-scale batteries (and things like military UAV batteries) under large enterprise B2B contracts. Which is why Tesla is pushing the "car narrative" less and less over time, seeming to fade into B2C irrelevancy — all their marketing and sales is gradually pivoting to B2B outreach.

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JimDabell 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Telsa is not — nor was ever intended to be — a car company. Tesla is fundamentally an "energy generation and storage" (battery/supercapacitor) company.

> The cars were always a B2C bootstrap play for Tesla, to build out the factories it needed to sell grid-scale batteries

This seems like revisionist history. They called their company Tesla Motors, not Tesla Energy, after all.

This is a blog post from the founder and CEO about their first energy play. It seems clear that their first energy product was an unintended byproduct of the Roadster, they worried about it being a distraction from their core car business, but they decided to go ahead with it because they saw it as a way to strengthen their car business.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090814225814/http://www.teslam...

	▲	ZeroGravitas 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think that blog talks about selling their batteries to other car manufacturers. But, to support your wider point, there's some reporting that the initial grid BESS Megapack batteries had a test setup in the car park at Tesla and Elon was unaware they existed until they got mentioned to him in a meeting and someone pointed out the window to explain. He immediately wanted to shut that project down to focus on cars.

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CPLX 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Telsa is not — nor was ever intended to be — a car company. Tesla is fundamentally an "energy generation and storage" (battery/supercapacitor) company

Are we still doing this in 2025?

Uber is not a taxi company it’s a transportation company! Just wait until they roll out buses!

Juicero is not a fruit squeezing company it’s an end to end technology powered nourishment platform!

And so on. Save it for the VC PowerPoints.

Tesla is a car company. Maybe some day it’ll be defined by some other lines of business too. Maybe one day they’ll even surpass Yamaha.

	▲	enaaem 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Tesla fans don't seem to be aware of the existence of conglomerates. Imagine Tesla did half the things Hyundai did.

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utyop22 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Are you an investor of Tesla by any chance?

	▲	derefr 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Nope. Don't even own a car. Military-industrial-complexes are just my special interest. And apparently Musk's, too. (What do grid-scale batteries, rockets, data-satellite constellations, and tunnel boring machines have in common? They're all products/services that can be — and already are being — sold to multiple allied nations' militaries. AFAICT, this is 90% of the reason Trump can't fully cut ties with the guy.)

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rsynnott 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean if that’s true they’re _really_ overvalued; that sort of commodity utility stuff is very low margin.