What Was Tesla Worried About While Growing Up? A Look Inside Their "Risk Diary"

Tesla is famous! We see their cool electric cars everywhere. But have you ever thought about what worries a big, fast-growing company like Tesla? What challenges did they face as they went from a small idea to a giant company?

It turns out, big companies have to write down their worries every year in a special report for the government. This report is called a "10-K," and one part, called "Risk Factors," is like reading the company's diary of potential problems.

My Project: Reading Tesla's Diary with Computers!

I got curious about Tesla's journey. So, I looked at these "Risk Factors" sections from their reports for 15 years – all the way from 2010 to 2024! That's a lot of reading.

Instead of reading it all myself, I used special data tools that understand language. This is called Natural Language Processing, or NLP. Think of it like asking a super-fast computer assistant to read everything and tell me, "What were the main topics Tesla kept talking about in its worries each year?"

What the NLP Found: Changing Worries Over Time

The Natural Language Processing (NLP) helper did a great job! It found 8 main themes or topics that Tesla worried about the most.

But the really cool part? These worries changed a lot over the 15 years! It makes sense, right? A small company worries about different things than a huge, worldwide company.

Figure 1. This chart shows how Tesla's main worries (risk themes) changed in importance between 2010 and 2024

Tesla's Worry Story (As Seen in the Chart!)

If you look at the chart (Figure 1), you can see the story:

• Baby Tesla (2010-2012): In the beginning, Tesla worried most about things like getting money and finding friends (partnerships) to help them build their first cars. You can see the line for this worry is high at the start on the chart.
• Growing Up Fast (2013-2017): As Tesla got bigger, new worries came up. They started worrying more about selling cars in other countries, building factories, and handling big money deals (like when they bought the solar panel company, SolarCity). Different lines on the chart go up during this time.
• Building BIG (2018-2020): Then came the time for HUGE factories – the Gigafactories! Making enough cars is hard work. So, the chart shows that worries about building these giant factories became the #1 topic for a while.
• World Player (2020-Now): More recently, the worries became about things happening in the world, like COVID, and the challenges of being a massive global company. Things like getting parts from suppliers, dealing with rules and investigations, new technology like self-driving cars, and thinking about the environment (ESG) became bigger worries. You can see new lines becoming more important towards the end of the chart.

What Does It All Mean?

Looking at Tesla's "worry diary" like this is pretty interesting! It shows us that:

• Growing a company, especially one doing new things like electric cars, means facing constantly changing problems.
• Building things (manufacturing) is really, really hard when you try to do it on a giant scale.
• World events, getting parts, and new technology create big challenges for even the most famous companies.

It gives us a different way to understand Tesla's amazing story – not just the successes, but the worries they had along the way!

This little project looked at Tesla's official 10-K reports (Item 1A, years 2010-2024) using data analytics tools (NLP) to find the main risk themes.

Want to see the technical details or the code behind this? You can find the full project notebook right here: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1K5nkvR-h0Odh5460nh7IPmXUOfartWzR?usp=sharing

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