Tesla Bear GOJOhnson says Battery Day 'All Smoke and Mirrors'

It's actually really interesting that if you look up the definition of "battery" in the dictionary you'll either get something like:

a group of two or more cells connected together to furnish electric current

or like:

a container consisting of one or more cells, in which chemical energy is converted into electricity and used as a source of power.

I'm not sure how this difference in definition happened, but they're obviously contradictory. Either one cell counts as a "battery" or it doesn't? I suspect it's because battery cells became household items, and we started just calling the calls "batteries", and so the word changed to the new usage.

Either way, any expert in the field would obviously use "cell" to talk about one thing, and "battery" to talk about another. So it's only possible to claim that Telsa doesn't make their own "batteries" by using a non-technical definition. And even then it's tricky because I believe Tesla owns the specific chemistry used in the cells made for them (at the very least for the ones out of GF1).

What should we call it when a company pays a partner/contractor to make something to their specification, especially if the design is protected IP? For example, should we criticize Apple because "they don't even build their own phones"? If a company is building their phones to their design, in a way that no one else can legally copy, does it really matter who's running the factory building the parts?

It feels like Johnson is making a semantic argument, as opposed to one based on technical merit? Or to put it another way, he's describing the facts in the worst sounding way, to make the truth sound much worse than it actually is. I had a professor who told me "the easiest way to lose an argument is to overstate your case" and it's exactly these kinds of statements that really make me question whether an analyst is providing useful information, or just repeating personal bias.

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