Tesla held another quarterly earnings call Wednesday night, in which CEO Elon Musk announced that the company made a bunch of money and would continue to do so forever — even without an affordable model in its stable. More curiously, though, Musk made another announcement: The Roadster is delayed, again, but the end product might fly because Peter Thiel wants it to.
On the earnings call, Musk apologized to “long-suffering deposit holders” (people who have paid either $50,000 or $250,000 for their spot in line) for the over seven years the car has been in development, though he did say that the company was “finally making progress” on the car. Musk previously said that engineering on the car was “mostly complete,” which is difficult to square with the latest “finally making progress” statement unless you consider both to be part of the endless web of lies and bullshit spewed by Musk every day. He spun more of that web on the earnings call:
I’d just like to thank our long-suffering deposit holders of the Tesla Roadster. The reason it hasn’t come out yet is because the Roadster is not just the icing on the cake, it’s the cherry on the icing on the cake. Our larger mission is to accelerate the progress towards a sustainable energy future, try to do things that maximize the probability the future is good for humanity and for Earth. That necessarily means that the things like that are kind of like dessert.
We’d all love to work on the next-gen Tesla Roadster, it’s super fun, and we are working on it, but it has to come behind the things that have a more serious impact on the good of the world. So thank you to all our long-suffering Tesla Roadster deposit holders, and we are actually finally making progress on that. We’re close to finalizing the design on that, it’s really going to be something spectacular.
So the Roadster’s design is almost finalized, the company is finally making progress on it, but the whole project is sort of a nice-to-have bonus rather than, say, a product offered up by a company for which people have already paid. Elon Musk is a businessman, you see, who knows business. Musk went on to talk about his relationship with right-wing financier Peter Thiel, and how the former intends to make the Roadster fly to please the latter’s whims:
You know, a friend of mine, Peter Thiel — sometimes people think Peter Thiel and I are rivals, we’re really good friends, to be clear — Peter was lamenting how the future doesn’t have flying cars. Well, we’ll see.
I’m not sure who thinks Musk and Thiel are rivals, given the pair’s shared interests, but apparently they are close enough for Musk to ignore customer orders and quite possibly the laws of physics in order to bend to Thiel’s offhand remarks. This is a good and normal way to run a car company, and if you put money down for a Roadster all those years ago you’re just going to have to wait. Elon Musk is saving the world, don’t you know.
