51–60 of 267 posts
You know what’s ironic is that Tesla survived because of Obama era subsidies. They were desperate to get one private enterprise to succeed because so many solar and other “clean” energy private ventures failed during that period. So, in my view, Obama created Elon. Now the rest of America has to deal with it in addition to the abject failure that is PPACA which ballooned US healthcare costs (not that Republicans have…
Can a private citizen do the same things that companies do? People reinvest in themselves too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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It's not rage-bait, it's a practical example of both how bad the tax code is and most topically how abusive Tesla is to the country that "hosts" it. Also there's really no such thing as fiduciary duty in public companies, not to the degree you're talking about or it's implied actions. I wish people would stop repeating it in that fashion, it's just a thought-terminating cliche. Violating fiduciary duty would be somet…
> "hoard wealth" > No mention of reinvestment > "Tesla was able to avoid paying ... taxes ... by claiming ... tax credits" (presented as bad somehow) > "We're not backing down" Where or where is the media coverage that attempts to speak to people who don't already buy in to the premise? This isn't journalism it might as well be blogging. Congratulations, you've made the world more polarized!
In what world is a massively profitable company paying almost nothing in taxes polarizing?
$300M in tax credits is basically the same as them paying $300M in tax and then getting a big check from the government for meeting some goal. I don't think it should be treated as any kind of avoidance on behalf of the company. Instead, check if the government paid that money for something useful, and if they didn't then blame the government.
I wish this article was written with a less biased tone. I'm genuinely interested in understanding it better. As far as I can tell, the article cites two things: $500M tax savings by using an accelerated depreciation schedule (unclear if they saved $500M more by using accelerated vs a regular depreciation schedule, but I assume no) and they claimed $300M in tax credits. The article doesn't address the other $1.5B, pr…
I think the point of the accelerated depreciation is roughly equivalent to taking a loan with 0% interest. It's allegedly zero-sum with respect to net income . They get to claim this income later, with various benefits, e.g. more cash on hand in the intervening period, inflation makes that "debt" less valuable later, and it's possible that the corporate tax rate will be lower in the future, so the tax rate on "this y…
I guess the caveat here is that it can be adversarial to short-term investors since the businesses assets are becoming worth less more quickly which gives less time for income to offset those expenses. That makes the company's expense:value ratio look worse.
I don't think the answer is to say that everyone needs to follow a linear depreciation curve. Fancy, new tech depreciates much more quickly in its early years than well-established tech. So the basic concept seems to make sense in some applications and I would assume Tesla has some pretty fancy tech that they're investing in.
On the other hand, this area feels a little fishy to me because a more accelerated curve limits the ability for a government to effectively apply taxation to companies during their administration. If companies were able to instantaneously depreciate their assets for 100%, assuming investors were OK with it, they'd just do that whenever the political winds blew in their favor for maximum savings.
It doesn't seem like there's any perfect, one size fits all solution. Accelerated depreciation seems fine, and can reflect the reality of investing in certain tech, but can also be abused by giving companies the ability to cash in when the time is right.
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Dang are we back to the years of the "Thanks Obama" I guess we truly live at the end of history and have no option but to rehash the classics, don't we ?
Sorry for the political comment but every time I see Tesla financials I think “this company should’ve failed in 2014 but-for those subsidies and ill-conceived carbon credits.”
> "hoard wealth" > No mention of reinvestment > "Tesla was able to avoid paying ... taxes ... by claiming ... tax credits" (presented as bad somehow) > "We're not backing down" Where or where is the media coverage that attempts to speak to people who don't already buy in to the premise? This isn't journalism it might as well be blogging. Congratulations, you've made the world more polarized!
In what world is a massively profitable company paying almost nothing in taxes polarizing?
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/10/18/163106924/a-ta...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what world is a massively profitable company paying almost nothing in taxes polarizing?
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No, that would be a big pile of Bitcoin[1], actually
[1]: https://fortune.com/2025/01/30/tesla-profits-bitcoin-crypto-...