If you scroll the comments on my TikTok video comparing Tesla to Rivian, the comments are full of angry people (no surprise). Many of the people point out that, as I said in the video (no surprise there, either: people didn’t watch the entire video before spouting off in the comments) that they are very different companies.

It is worth noting that Rivian was founded in 2009, went public in 2021, and is expected to be profitable by 2025 or 2026.

Tesla was founded in 2003, Elon joined as a large investor in 2004, became CEO in 2008, and took the company public in 2010. It took Tesla 20 YEARS to become profitable.

So, it is worth explaining a few things:

For the people who say, “LOL! A Rivian is 75,000! Tesla is cheap!” Tesla cars were also expensive in the beginning.
When people say, “RIVIAN IS LOSING MONEY, DUMBASS!” Tesla also lost money for 20 years. This happens with most new businesses: META lost money before making money. Amazon did, too. So did Netflix. Even DoorDash, who dominates the space, is not profitable. And this is okay. It is normal.
People love to point out that Tesla sells WAY more cars than Rivian. Remember that Tesla has been around a lot longer and were able to dominate the space early, when there was not a lot of competition. If you go back to when Tesla sold around 50,000 cars per year, it was in the year 2015. So: Rivian is today where Tesla was in 2015: Not profitable, barely selling any cars, burning through cash and trying to scale production. It’s also worth noting that Tesla sales are down 45% in Europe. Not a good sign.

When flat screen TVs first came out, they were thousands of dollars per unit. They were new, the technology was expensive, and companies had to sell them for a lot of money to recoup the costs. And a few early adopters were eager to spend top dollar to be the first one to have one. As they sold more units, the price came down. This is how business works a lot of the time.

In 2015, if you told shareholders that Tesla, which was just a car company selling some EVs, that they’d be the dominant player in the EV space just 10 years later, a near trillion dollar corporation with eyes on self driving taxis and robots, people would have laughed at you, the same way people are in my comments today saying Tesla is so much more than Rivian is.

Yes. Rivian is now where Tesla once was.

Who knows where Rivian will be in 2035, or if they’ll even exist. But as a speculative investor, I’m willing to take a chance that they’ll scale production, lower costs, introduce newer, more affordable models down the road (like their upcoming R3), and who knows … the CEO might even become President. Stranger things have happened.

Cathie Wood thinks Tesla could hit $2,600, giving it an $8 trillion market cap. I’m not sure I buy that—but could Rivian pull off something unexpected? Maybe. The same Tesla fanboys today would have laughed in 2015 if you told them Tesla would be worth a trillion dollars. Let’s check back in 2035 and see who’s still laughing.