Phil Trubey paid Tesla (TSLA) $250,000 for a car years ago. On Thursday, Oct. 15, he finally saw it fly. At a rocket site near Waco, Texas, the new Roadster hung upside down 69 feet off the ground, held there by suction. Then small gas thrusters launched it over a row of cars in a midair roll. Elon Musk told buyers production starts in 2028, "actually, for real."
We wrote about the Roadster on Oct. 10, before the reveal. What's new is the show, and how Wall Street took it. The Journal's Tim Higgins called it pure spectacle. The styling borrows from fighter jets and Lamborghinis. Every Roadster has a fan that pulls air from under the car to pin it to the road. Tesla claims a top speed above 230 miles an hour. It says the base car reaches 60 in 1.6 seconds. The price is still a secret.
Wall Street shrugged
Investors didn't buy the show. Tesla stock fell 2.1% on Friday, Oct. 16, as tech slid. For the week it lost 7.3%, the worst of the Magnificent Seven. Analyst Dan Ives, a Tesla bull, wrote that the car "will not move the volume or revenue needle." He says it restores the brand's halo ahead of third-quarter earnings. The Journal's calendar puts that report on Wednesday, Oct. 21. Most of Tesla's money still comes from selling cars.
Here's the bigger turn Higgins sees. Musk says no new Tesla after the Roadster will be built for people to drive. He's betting the company on robots and the Cybercab, its robotaxi. Tesla says it reached more than 300 Cybercabs in Austin in the first month. Higgins reads that as handing the everyday car market to China. A Chinese-made EV costs about $11,000 less to build than a European one, by an AlixPartners count. The Paris Motor Show looked like Shanghai this year. U.S. automakers are launching new models at the slowest rate since at least the 1970s.
The buyers keep waiting. In 2017, a $50,000 deposit put you on the list for a Roadster due in 2020. That money came in when Tesla was short of cash. Trubey put down $250,000 and left the event let down. "Another two-year wait, and then, who knows?" he said. Sam Abuelsamid of the research firm Telemetry says he has almost no expectation of a 2028 start. Tesla has built four or five prototypes so far.
Our read
Investments/Risk · IN04, with a behavioral lesson. A spectacle isn't revenue. The video was built to trend, and it did. The business is still cars, margins and a robotaxi bet that hasn't paid off yet. Tesla is held at weight in 13 of our model books. Nothing added. We'd grade it on Wednesday's numbers. The barrel roll doesn't count.
Now the part that touches your own money. Trubey's $250,000 has sat with Tesla for years, earning him nothing. At Treasury-bill rates near 4%, that much cash could earn about $10,000 a year (our arithmetic). A deposit on a car, a condo or a kitchen remodel works the same way. It's usually an unsecured, interest-free loan to the seller. This week, pull out any deposit you have outstanding. Find the refund clause and the delivery date. If there's no firm date, you've made a loan, not a purchase. Bring that paper to your next review with us, and we'll read the terms together.