By any measure, five years is a long time. Five years is enough time for a solid automotive product cycle, or a college education, although I hear some are able to do both in less time. Five years is what separates a thirteen year old from a legal adult.

A lot can happen in five years, but over the last five years in particular a whole lot has happened. Five years ago, nobody outside the medical profession had heard of coronaviruses. Five years ago Boris Johnson had just become the prime minister of Great Britain. The shocks of January 6th, the full Russian invasion of Ukraine, Elon Musk buying Twitter, and the return of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” to the Billboard Hit 100, among countless others, still lay ahead of us.

Looking back, the idea of trying to make predictions about the future from the vantage point we had five years ago seems like an exercise in insanity. Who could have predicted the bizarre turns of events, the political realignments, physical and cognitive epidemics that have ravaged the intervening years? What, in the gauzy past of the “before times,” could possibly have made us believe we can predict anything about the future we now occupy?

Well, as it happens, I released a book about Tesla five years ago this week, that sought to anticipate (if not outright predict) where one of the most unpredictable stories in cars and technology was headed. By then we’d only had our first glimpse of the chaos that has come to surround Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk, in the form of 2018’s “pedo guy” and “funding secured” media storms, but the details of his personal arc over the following five years were still totally unpredictable. Even Tesla’s trajectory couldn’t be anticipated in any real detail, as the auto industry turned entirely upside down in 2020, along with the rest of the world.

So it’s a genuine surprise to find that, in spite of the unfathomable twists and turns of fate, my book Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors is still worth reading, even across the seemingly endless time and space of the last five years. In large part, that’s because I knew when I was writing it that the story still wouldn’t actually be complete by the time it went to print. Rather than trying to make specific predictions about Tesla, I sought to strip its history down to the barest essentials, which revealed two basic dynamics that continue to fundamentally shape it as a company. Today, these basic components of Tesla’s story are still the best way to understand not only where the company is, but where it is going.

The first major theme of Ludicrous is that Tesla brought a Silicon Valley software startup-inspired approach to the auto industry, which creates a number of well-understood advantages in premium segment product design and marketing, but which fundamentally trades off with operational excellence. This helped Tesla stand out in an industry defined by a few massive firms run by faceless committees, and activated a huge, affluent tech-adjacent premium market the legacy automakers failed to identify. But it is also fundamentally incompatible with Tesla’s ambition to make affordable, mass-market EVs, and created massive inefficiencies and countless other problems even as a low-volume premium brand.

The other major theme is that Tesla’s lack of appreciation of what works in the auto industry got it into financial trouble early and often, trapping it in a cycle of ever-escalating hype, in order to raise cash and put out today’s fires. This “fundraising treadmill” cycle built on itself, with ever-bigger promises required to pump ever-bigger cash raises, ultimately achieving “exit velocity” with 2016’s “Full Self-Driving” scam. Shifting from private venture capital to public markets with Tesla’s 2010 IPO, this dynamic would create the blueprint for what years later came to be called “meme stocks.”

In 2019 both the macroeconomic indicators and Tesla’s core business performance were faltering, and having watched Tesla go through numerous near-death experiences already I thought we might be approaching the moment when the hype was unable to make up for the Tesla’s weak fundamentals. Instead the early 2020 drop in Tesla’s stock rebounded with a vengeance as the COVID-era meme stonk phenomenon took hold, and a wave of liquidity was funneled into the most speculative stocks. Years of complaints that Tesla’s valuation was already too rich were blown away by an unprecedented new run in its stock.

At this precise moment, EV hype hit high gear, Tesla began producing its most mainstream model yet, the Model Y crossover, and the entire auto industry went into undersupply for the first time in living memory. Suddenly, not only was Tesla’s stock screaming, but it was growing faster and making bigger profits than anyone could have imagined. If you just looked at the numbers, it looked like Tesla’s core business fundamentals were beyond reproach. The central critique of Ludicrous, which questioned Tesla’s ability to operate profitably at mass scale, seemed to be blown apart as the firm approached 2 million annual sales.

And yet, now, in 2024, things look quite different. Having failed to reinvest in its products in order to show big profits, and its aging lineup assailed on all sides by a flood of competition, Tesla’s sales and profit margins are now a long way from the “hypergrowth” fans and investors have come to expect. Tesla’s only new product, the polarizing Cybertruck, is light years from the kind of mass appeal that helped launch the brand. Worse, rather than investing its alleged $30 billion in cash in entirely new products, particularly low-cost models that would expand the market, Tesla appears to be betting that updates to the current lineup will do the trick… even as sales numbers suggest they won’t.

Not only is Tesla once again looking like a company whose lack of focus and discipline makes it unable to compete at mass scale and lower prices now that the perfect storm that fueled it through COVID has receded, the “dream factory” of fraud is now eclipsing its very real automotive accomplishments. With federal fraud investigations into the still-undelivered “Full Self-Driving” ongoing, Musk continues to double down on AI and robotics, variously promising to “solve real-world AI,” and create a race of mechanical slaves that will lead us into a techno-economic utopia. Musk himself now claims that Tesla’s value as an automaker is “basically zero,” and that his promise of high-tech miracles to come is the reason to invest from here on out.

Here, after the fever dream of the last five years, are those two same dynamics that define Tesla’s story: the inability to operate sustainably as a real automaker at scale, and the pattern of hype and fraud that started small but now towers over Tesla the car company. I could never have predicted all the twists and turns that have taken Tesla’s story away from these dynamics and then led it right back to them, but I was right that they are the engine that drives this runaway mess. The years of work that went into Ludicrous may not have resulted in the shocking revelations people expect from an exposé, but it accurately diagnosed the core pathology of one of the most complex and confounding phemonena in modern technological and economic life. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, it did so in the guise of a book whose most fundamental ambition was simply to help people better understand where their cars come from, and why they are the way they are.

Just like I did five years ago, I am strongly convinced that the dynamics I identify in Ludicrous will continue to define Tesla’s story, but the details of how remain as mysterious as ever. This year’s presidential election is one of the only events that could still fundamentally change Tesla’s ultimate fate, as the re-election of Donald Trump guarantees further impunity for Musk’s scofflaw companies while Harris’s election makes legal consequences on a variety of fronts far more likely. But even the fact that Musk’s continued freedom comes down to a presidential election shows that, even as Tesla’s valuation spirals to ever more absurd heights, reality is becoming harder to defy.

For myself, one of the lessons I’ve taken away from the last five years is that trying to report and litigate a story like this day to day on social media is a recipe for failure. Even a modest effort of a first book, released long before the market was ready to accept its truths, has a better chance of making an impact than a flood of tweets lost in the internet’s eternal now. That’s why I’m writing another book. Similar to Ludicrous, but different, this one focuses less on the problems with Tesla’s core car business and instead looks at the glaring fraud and horrible impacts of Tesla’s use of driving automation technology.

I can’t wait to see what craziness has transpired by the time I’m done with this one.