A car was airborne for four seconds, and the company lost 620 billion.
I watched the press event twice. On October 15, Eastern Time, the second-generation Roadster charged up an almost vertical wall, stuck upside down, flipped through the air, then landed back on the ground. The whole thing relied on the A71 cold-gas propulsion system, developed jointly with SpaceX: it blasts 600 liters of high-pressure compressed air, while fans under the chassis generate two Gs of suction. It was airborne for only a few seconds. The venue had to be closed off, too. And the driver had to be a professional.
The next day, the stock closed down more than 2%. Over five trading days, it fell more than 7%—about $93 billion less than on October 12, or more than 600 billion yuan. A market cap of $1.4 trillion had a layer shaved off in five days.
A lot of people think the stock fell because the flying car is a gimmick. That gimmick had already been priced in once. What really made money leave was that the press event didn’t announce a final price. It only revealed a reservation payment: 332,000. The production timeline said 2028. Nine years behind schedule, and now they’ve pushed it back another three.
What I’m turning over in my mind is the structure of the deal. A reservation payment isn’t a deposit. It’s more like an interest-free, three-year loan to a company that gets to decide when it delivers. For three years, you can neither complete the purchase nor get out. Need the money urgently? You can only transfer your reservation—and you have to find someone to take it yourself. You negotiate the price. If you can’t agree, you just wait.
Anyone who ordered mining rigs in 2017 should find this process familiar. You send the money first, the delivery date gets pushed back again and again, and every day someone in the group chat asks when it’ll ship. In the end, the coins mined by the machines you finally receive don’t even cover the electricity bill. There’s nothing new about this structure. The most dangerous thing about a presale isn’t the product. It’s time. When enough time passes, if anything along the way changes, all you can do is stand there and watch.
The crypto world takes this structure even further. Once the white paper is done, you can set a price; delivery can be left for later. The difference is that a car has to survive crashes, get certified, and wait in line for a flight permit. He Xiaopeng put it pretty plainly: whether flying cars can really take to the road depends on things like range and flight safety, and flight certification is a long process that requires waiting in line around the world. Crypto doesn’t have that gate. So when both are selling the future, the car’s bill won’t come due for five years, while crypto’s is settled in five minutes. One is fast, the other slow, and the risk shifts accordingly. That’s all there is to it.
Musk himself admitted onstage that this project won’t make a noticeable difference to overall revenue. Whether that’s true or not, we’ll have to wait for the delivery slip in 2028. No one can verify it right now. No one can say for sure.
As for whether flying cars are a viable path forward—there’s no clear answer.
If you ask me, what’s being discounted in that 620 billion isn’t flying technology at all. It’s the cost of pushing the delivery date back yet again. Plenty of people like watching cars fly. Fewer and fewer are willing to pay 332,000 up front and then wait three years.
That’s it.
$DOGE $BTC $TAO
#特斯拉 #Roadster #预售 #NarrativePricing
I watched the press event twice. On October 15, Eastern Time, the second-generation Roadster charged up an almost vertical wall, stuck upside down, flipped through the air, then landed back on the ground. The whole thing relied on the A71 cold-gas propulsion system, developed jointly with SpaceX: it blasts 600 liters of high-pressure compressed air, while fans under the chassis generate two Gs of suction. It was airborne for only a few seconds. The venue had to be closed off, too. And the driver had to be a professional.
The next day, the stock closed down more than 2%. Over five trading days, it fell more than 7%—about $93 billion less than on October 12, or more than 600 billion yuan. A market cap of $1.4 trillion had a layer shaved off in five days.
A lot of people think the stock fell because the flying car is a gimmick. That gimmick had already been priced in once. What really made money leave was that the press event didn’t announce a final price. It only revealed a reservation payment: 332,000. The production timeline said 2028. Nine years behind schedule, and now they’ve pushed it back another three.
What I’m turning over in my mind is the structure of the deal. A reservation payment isn’t a deposit. It’s more like an interest-free, three-year loan to a company that gets to decide when it delivers. For three years, you can neither complete the purchase nor get out. Need the money urgently? You can only transfer your reservation—and you have to find someone to take it yourself. You negotiate the price. If you can’t agree, you just wait.
Anyone who ordered mining rigs in 2017 should find this process familiar. You send the money first, the delivery date gets pushed back again and again, and every day someone in the group chat asks when it’ll ship. In the end, the coins mined by the machines you finally receive don’t even cover the electricity bill. There’s nothing new about this structure. The most dangerous thing about a presale isn’t the product. It’s time. When enough time passes, if anything along the way changes, all you can do is stand there and watch.
The crypto world takes this structure even further. Once the white paper is done, you can set a price; delivery can be left for later. The difference is that a car has to survive crashes, get certified, and wait in line for a flight permit. He Xiaopeng put it pretty plainly: whether flying cars can really take to the road depends on things like range and flight safety, and flight certification is a long process that requires waiting in line around the world. Crypto doesn’t have that gate. So when both are selling the future, the car’s bill won’t come due for five years, while crypto’s is settled in five minutes. One is fast, the other slow, and the risk shifts accordingly. That’s all there is to it.
Musk himself admitted onstage that this project won’t make a noticeable difference to overall revenue. Whether that’s true or not, we’ll have to wait for the delivery slip in 2028. No one can verify it right now. No one can say for sure.
As for whether flying cars are a viable path forward—there’s no clear answer.
If you ask me, what’s being discounted in that 620 billion isn’t flying technology at all. It’s the cost of pushing the delivery date back yet again. Plenty of people like watching cars fly. Fewer and fewer are willing to pay 332,000 up front and then wait three years.
That’s it.
$DOGE $BTC $TAO
#特斯拉 #Roadster #预售 #NarrativePricing