"relative" to what? Relative to Toyota, Tesla is not successful. Relative to, say, General Motors, Tesla has, so far, successfully avoided bankruptcy. Tesla has built cars and sold a few of them, but they are years away from making money at it. Which is OK, of course...car building is capital intensive and takes a long time. But the jury is still out on whether Tesla will succeed or fail. I just think it takes massive chutzpah for Musk to present himself as someone that knows the answers to fixing Detroit, when his own car company has a lot of blunders in its history (which it may have learned from, and it may very well turn out to be a great car company...but, as I said, nobody knows that yet).
