That is because Yahoo got overtaken by Google's superior ad platform and search. Tesla has no obvious viable competitors. It is a premium product that caters to a specific demographic, much like the iPhone in 2007.
Arguably the Model 3 is not a high end luxury car either, not priced at $35k. The Bolt is a direct competitor to the Model 3 with first-mover advantage.
The only argument against that is one has a badge that says "Chevrolet" and the other says "Tesla". If the Model 3 didn't have the Tesla name, no one would think anything of it. It'd just be yet another compact electric car, yawn, who cares, and then they'd buy the Chevrolet.
I'd say that the model 3 is comparable (in price also) to the BMW 320i.
The Chevrolet Bolt is similar in price, but I think somebody making a comparison between a BMW and a Chevy would be similarly mistaken. BMW and Tesla are luxury car manufacturer. Chevrolet isn't.
IMHO, the bolt is overpriced. It's a crossover SUV from a manufacturer that is known for making low cost, high-volume cars. It looks like it is most similar to the Chevy Trax, which starts at $21,000.
The Bolt is GM's first practical EV. If it succeeds, GM could easily choose to compete in the luxury EV market against Tesla.
If GM decided to do this, it would have many advantages over Tesla: a huge dealership and service network, lots of suppliers, easy financing, and all of the other perks you get when you buy a "normal" car from an established company.
Tesla aims to have razor thin margins for the thing that they actually produce. So their lack of dealers who supply an automatic mark-up is something that they cite as a strength, not a weakness.
The thing that Tesla is producing, however, is really expensive to build right now. The cost curves are great for it to come down, but until they do they are in the ironic business of selling expensive things with thin margins.
GM would find it harder than it thinks to compete against Tesla with an equivalent product. Just as Tesla is running into challenges scaling up production.
> So their lack of dealers who supply an automatic mark-up is something that they cite as a strength, not a weakness.
They don't have an automatic mark-up, but car dealers also operate on razor thin margins (the real money is in service and trade ins). However dealers pay their own rent and even spend money advertising. Tesla is on the hook for all of its dealerships, a significant cost that its competitors don't have. In the end I don't think it's such a game changer. It makes sense for Tesla, but doesn't magically make things cheaper.
It also makes it easier to service your car. If you own a Tesla and need warranty service, and you live in middle America, you may have a long drive ahead of you. If you own a Chevy, it's rarely a problem.
The primary threat to Tesla is Tesla's own ability to execute and succeed long term.
Developing a long-term-viable car company is hard even when it makes regular old gasoline cars. Tesla also needs to fulfill the Model 3 preorders, and that process could be derailed by a number of issues: manufacturing speed, quality control, factory problems, etc. That's a big challenge for a company that has made small numbers of high-end luxury cars until now.
I'm impressed by Tesla's success so far, but if I were to invest in a car company today, I would rather invest in GM. They are getting into the electric car market big time with the Bolt, and unlike Tesla, they already have realized economies of scale in car production. If the Bolt succeeds, GM could choose to produce a car that would be a good competitor to the Tesla Model 3.
In this framework, I tend to associate charisma with referent power, which deals with power through identification, admiration, and respect. This could be Bill Clinton's ability to feel your pain or Donald Trump's ability to tap into a sense of nationalism.
To answer your question more directly, the answer is no. Referent power is one kind of power. There are many others. Certainly, this is all debatable and not cut and dried, but I do like the bases of power linked to above as a way to create a vocabulary to talk about it.
Both are possible. You don't need power to be charismatic and you can learn to be more charismatic, but if you display charisma without power then you will be attacked frequently by those who have more of the latter.
The problem is that the courts can amend a buyout, which goes against the principles of free market capitalism ..a buyout represents a significant gain above the market price even if the offer is low relative to what it 'should' be. Matt is blaming the wrong target.
There's nothing particularly "free" about being compelled by majority vote to sell your shares at a price you don't agree to either. But, like executives' fidicuary duty not to act against the interests of their shareholders before mounting a takeover bid, it's baked into the rules of the market that shareholders and executives have freely chosen to participate in.
If you don't accept that in the interests of better functioning markets the law allows for both compulsory purchase of outstanding shares in the event of a successful takeover bid and litigation against those accused of ripping shareholders off by running down the value of the company before bidding on it, the principles of free market capitalism allow you to not even think of buying or managing a publicly owned company.
I don't think that Matt is really blaming anyone. He's just saying "Look at this situation that has happened and the oddball problems it has caused. It's kind of weird and no one quite knows how to deal with it."
It also doesn't seem that crazy to me that shareholders can sue management if they feel that management defrauded them.
