Details, Details

In a world best confined to 280 characters there is not room to trifle with details, we therefore should not be surprised at Bill Ackmans latest description of his travails with Herbalife in which he states “We’ve been entirely right on our Herbalife investment in terms of the fundamentals of the business. We’ve been wrong on the share price”.  Unfortunately, being right in theory doesn’t mean much in the real world, perhaps he should point this out to Elon Musk and Tesla, where recent production snafus highlight the fact that manufacturing cars is actually difficult business. The transition from concept to production to production with scale is something that legitimate car companies have struggled with since inception. So, as much as Tesla fans would tout that Tesla is not a car company,  but rather a technology company( afforded the appropriate multiples we might add) there is a difference between an automotive vehicle and an iPad. If one would need further convincing that Tesla is not a car company, one automotive engineering expert who has seen automotive production processes across a number of different companies commented on Tesla, stating ” I have never seen so much manual labor on a line”. Not only is Tesla not tearing up the Detroit playbook, turns out they are using the same playbook, the one from the 1920’s.