Al Gore Is Green With Envy

Al Gore was spotted while hiding in Silicon Valley this week. He looks like he is celebrating St. Patrick’s Day in July.   He no longer has a pinkish complexion on his rotund body.  His skin color is now fully green as he turned green with envy.  The objects of his envy are the shareholders in Tesla, the firm that continues to defy gravity and logic and has now hit an intraday high of $130.68 on Friday July 26, 2013.

Yes the Musketeer has the street all excited about his wonder cars.  Elon was pretty brilliant to realize that people like Dr. P of Los Angeles would flock to buy the Model S rather than other luxury vehicles.    The Model S outsold all luxury cars that they compete with during the first half of 2013.  Insideevs.com reports Tesla held 8.4% of the luxury car segment for the period.

http://insideevs.com/tesla-model-s-grabs-8-4-of-luxury-vehicle-sales-in-us-in-first-half-of-2013/

That means one in twelve of the folks like Dr. P with lots of money or lots of credit to spend on their personal vehicle chose a Tesla.  I tip my hat to the team at Draper Fisher Jurvetson for investing in Tesla and not Fisker as Kleiner Perkins did.  DFJ was smart not to let Al Gore and Colin Powell advise them on their investments.   Kleiner Perkins laments the day they met these two thermodynamic cretins who they thought were so well connected to Mr. Obama and Dr. Chu that the profits would simply pour in. KP used to be the Big Dog of VCs now they are simply a mutt.

This week I did get an email from a senior partner at DFJ who reads my blog telling me how happy he is with his Model S, and that he far prefers the car to a gasoline car and that he suffers no range anxiety.

I congratulated him and his partners at DFJ for making money of their investment in Tesla but I did explain that the car is not as green as he claimed (he claimed 49.5% efficient on natural gas used to generate electric power.   I also emailed that when Tesla’s segment of customers buy 10 carat diamond rings from De Beers they pay a luxury tax rather than getting a handout from Mr. Obama.   

If I were to be asked by Tesla to give advice on a pricing strategy I would tell Tesla to raise the price of the Model S to $130,000 and they would still sell as many cars to the rich, famous, and want to be Green crowd.  You see folks like Dr. P have plenty of cash and want to cruise in the HEV lane when they drive around Lala Land.  I just think it is a crime that per the Wall Street Journal that Dr. P’s car was subsidized to the tune of $45,000 by tax payers.  

Knowing Dr. P’s penchant to show off, I guess he bought his wife a 10 carat diamond for their 25^th wedding anniversary.  Thankfully Mr. Obama has not as of yet decided to subsidize diamonds.  He probably will after Mr. Huffman tells Mr. Obama at the next Carol King concert at the White House that diamonds permanently sequester pure carbon.