Not financial advice, just my experience. I wrote these thoughts in January 2023, as someone who drove a Tesla and owned a small amount of the stock. A lot has happened since. Treat this as a time capsule, not a tip.
My Model Y, warts and all
Let me start with the car I drove: a Model Y.
Did it have panel gaps? Of course it did. Did the trunk sometimes refuse to close? It did. Compared with cars from the legacy brands, Tesla’s attention to detail was weaker. That’s just true, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
Still. This is the company that made it possible for all of us, not just a lucky few, to drive on electricity. It makes batteries. It runs an energy business. It moves slower than we hope, and slower than it promises, but nobody can deny it keeps moving forward.
I believe in facts. And that one is a fact.
Range and safety first, details later
Tesla seemed to me like a company that’s solid at the core. Its strategy, as I saw it, was to make the two most important things in a car, range and safety, the best they could be, and then patch up the rest of the details over time.
A Tesla went off a cliff more than 60 meters high (about 200 feet), and everyone inside survived. I kept asking myself: which legacy car could do that? And if you’re in a car with perfect, gap-free panels and you lose your life in a crash, what was the point of those perfect panels?
I’d rather have the trunk that sticks.
The love-hate company
For a lot of people in Korea, Tesla had become a love-hate relationship. The firm convictions people once had were crumbling. They were disappointed by the strange behavior of the man at the top. Competitors were popping up everywhere. So the question was fair: can we still trust this company?
My answer was yes. Not because I only want to see the good side. Rarely in human history has a company pushed so aggressively into energy and carbon emissions, which are problems for all of us.
No method is perfect, and Elon Musk’s choices came with plenty of downsides. If you’re betting on a company that depends on one person, things can get rough for investors in the short term.
About Musk and Twitter
We can’t fully understand how he thinks. Nobody knows how what he’s focused on right now will pay off later.
He wanted to build a media platform that doesn’t get pushed around by anyone. That was Twitter. Why couldn’t investors trust that idea? He was working 120 hours a week to grow a company other than Tesla, and people criticized him for it. I suspected that business would end up being one piece of his bigger picture.
He grew Tesla by 40%, and people criticized him. Tesla hit number one in sales in a lot of countries, and people still criticized him.
My view: if you invested in him and his company precisely because nobody else does business like he does, you have to give him some room. As long as he doesn’t do something fatally crazy, he’s a human doing human things.
Will he sell Tesla? I didn’t think so
At the time, people were talking about the possibility of Musk selling Tesla. He did sell PayPal on the way to his goals, so I understood the worry. But I thought selling Tesla was impossible.
Think about Mars. (A normal Tuesday thought, I know.) If his company ever goes there, it can’t do it with SpaceX alone. How do you move around on Mars? Where does the energy come from? I pictured Tesla’s energy business supplying the power, Tesla vehicles hauling materials, and robots building the cities. If that works, someday people could just move there and live on new ground.
He’s a man who likes to hold an entire business in his own hands. I didn’t think he’d ever hand Tesla to someone else.
Will our generation get to enjoy any of that? I’m not sure. Some people call his push to make humans a multi-planet species attention-seeking. To me, it looked like a kind of love for humanity. And I hadn’t seen him do anything I’d call truly, seriously crazy. Not yet, anyway.
Why I kept buying
I started investing a small amount in Tesla in 2019. I didn’t put much in for a while, because my investing skills and my homework on the company weren’t strong enough. But starting in late 2022, I put a plan into action: buy in steady chunks through the first half of 2023, picking up shares bit by bit.
That wasn’t blind faith. If I ever decided Tesla was losing the drive, the plans, and the mindset it had then, I was ready to move my money out without looking back.
But as of January 2023, here was the fact as I saw it: Tesla was doing something greater than any other company I knew. Long term, I was still in his corner.
Again: not financial advice. Just my opinion, as one Model Y owner.