Elon Musk mocks Tesla rival Rivian after his big movie debut on the market
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk speaks to media next to his Model S.
Nora Tam | South China Morning Post | Getty pictures
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that high production and break-even cash flow will be the true test for rival carmaker Rivian, which had a major IPO on Wednesday and now has a market value of over $ 100 billion.
“There have been hundreds of car launches, both electric and combustion, but Tesla is [the] “the only American automaker that has achieved high-volume production and positive cash flow in the last 1[ads1]00 years,” Musk said in a chirping Thursday.
He added: “I hope they are [Rivian] able to achieve high production and breakeven cash flow. That is the true test. “
Rivian, who did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment on Musk’s tweets, has never recorded revenue and expects less than $ 1 million in sales in the third quarter.
It says it has 55,400 pre-orders for the R1S SUV and R1T pickup and a contract to build 100,000 electric vans with Amazon by 2030.
But relying on Rivian to assemble the vehicles and deliver them profitably represents a huge game for investors who already value the company higher than the traditional car giants Ford and General Motors.
Despite a lack of revenue, Rivian raised around $ 12 billion in its market debut, making the IPO the largest in the world this year. The listing also made Rivian the second most valuable carmaker in the United States behind Tesla.
After the first two days of trading in 2010, Tesla had a market value of just over $ 2 billion. Meanwhile, RJ Scaringe, CEO of Rivian, was worth so much on his own after the company’s second day on the public market.
Rivian shares rose 57% during the first two days of Nasdaq. Scaringe, which founded Rivian in 2009, owns $ 17.6 million worth $ 2.2 billion, based on Thursday’s closing price of $ 122.99.
“We started thinking about the truck, SUV and crossover segments as they gave us a tremendous opportunity to demonstrate how a clean, technology-focused vehicle could eliminate long-accepted compromises,” Scaringe wrote in the company’s IPO prospectus.
“We wanted to establish our brand by delivering a combination of efficiency, performance on the road, off-road capacity, functional utility and product refinement that simply did not exist in the market.”
Rivian has poached a number of former Tesla employees, including key engineers who helped build the Tesla Model 3.
This is not the first time Musk has cast a shadow on Rivian. Last month, he tweeted “prototypes are trivial compared to scaling production and supply chains.”
– Additional reporting by Ari Levy.
