Gary Zhou 
Tesla delivered nearly 500,000 electric cars last year and expects to sell more than 750,000 in 2021, according to Elon Musk, but the company had to go through “hell” to get there.
Tesla’s production problems and supply constraints, the CEO said on Monday, posed a “logistical problem that makes World War II look trivial.”
“I’m not kidding. The scale is insane,” Musk told investors on a conference call following Tesla’s first-quarter earnings report. “We’re talking millions of cars, massive global supply chain, 50 countries, dozens of regulatory regimes.”
The majority of the world’s countries were active in World War II, and major industrial powers threw their entire economic strength behind the war effort.
Musk reiterated a statement he’s made before, saying that Tesla’s most significant accomplishment was not producing an electric vehicle, but rather being the first new American car company to reach volume production without going bankrupt.
“Myself and many others at Tesla had to basically have several aneurysms to get this done,” Musk said.
Musk used the example of Tesla having to avoid building the Model S due to a shortage of trunk carpeting, and that the company had to search electronics stores in the Bay Area for USB cables to demonstrate how minor hiccups and delays can throw production into a tailspin.
“For a few days there, nobody could buy a USB cable in the Bay Area because we went and bought them all to put them in the car, literally,” Musk said. “There’s hundreds of stories like that.”
Tesla reported quarterly earnings that beat Wall Street’s estimates, though its record profits came from sales of bitcoin and regulatory credits, rather than automobiles.
