Could this push Tesla R&D back a bit?
Do you remember Tesla back in its hay day? It was barely over a year ago when the company’s stocks used to be worth a fortune, then its CEO Elon Musk decided to sell a bunch of his shares and pour all that money into his recent purchase, Twitter, and now Tesla stocks are worth less than Exxon. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
To make matters worse, this is not some big dip in stock prices either. Tesla is now neck deep in trouble as the company’s stocks plunge towards its worst month, quarter and even year in history. IN HISTORY. Now we can sit here and analyze every single thing that led to this but then I’d have to publish a thesis.
Moreover, I’m far more interested in what this means for Tesla in the future over what happened in the past to lead the company to where it is. So, the real question to me is, will this push back the company’s Research and Development (R&D) a bit? My optimistic answer is maybe but my realistic answer is it will be pushed back a lot.
Let’s first review the numbers, Tesla stocks declined 8.1 percent to USD141.80 after closing lower than USD150 a few days ago. This was the first time in over two years the company’s stocks dipped this low. The company’s stock is also down 48 percent this quarter, its worst quarter in history.
On top of that, Tesla stocks have also fallen a whopping 60.9 percent so far this year and if you ask me, it’s only going to fall further before the year is over. Also, this drop makes 2022 the worst year for Tesla on record. So it would seem Tesla has finally hit rock bottom then.
So for a company like Tesla who has been innovating and is considered the pioneer of self-driving cars and electric vehicles (EVs) but the company has been very quiet on that front for quite some time now. The last innovation (if you can even call it that) was the Tesla Cybertruck. Let that sink in.
Furthermore, Tesla has not announced any new innovations yet and quite frankly should focus more on quality control over anything else in my opinion but of course a little R&D is still beneficial. However with stock prices dwindling I can only assume budgets are tight as well so how likely is R&D to actually get results?
Quite honestly, I don’t see Tesla being able to do anything with R&D for a while especially since the smart decision right now would be to try and “stop the bleeding” figuratively and the company needs to find a way to make back their losses and focus on sales rather than R&D.
What do you guys think? Is Tesla R&D still able to produce results or is Tesla too far gone?
