The stock was up as high as 17%, and closed up just under 14% (+$30 on the day to $248). With Morgan Stanley estimating a $320 price there is probably significant growth left, It seems they will have no problem funding that 5 to 7 Billion dollar battery plant.

You realize that unless they do another offering, are are buying another company with stock, the rise of fall of the price in the secondary market has absolutely no affect whatsoever on Tesla's ability to build a plant?

Assuming that you see nothing wrong with comparing a Civic to a BMW 7-series purely on cost either, then your comparison is valid. Otherwise people might think that it was a wee bit skewed.

Urban roads cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $15 million per lane mile (and up from there). Also remember that most roads have at least two lanes. Even adding a lane to an existing road can cost ~$5 million per mile. Commuter rail is usually dirt cheap in comparison to road expansion, but since maintenance and construction costs are so much less they have far fewer voices during bond elections than the concrete guys do.

Most people - especially those in the $80K car market - fly somewhere when they need to go over 300 miles in a single trip without ending up back where they started.

As opposed to oil, which is often extracted with polluting methods then shipped by boat around the world to be refined before being shipped again to its destination? And that happens for every tank, not just for manufacture.

Your calculation misses some crucial points.
Refinery energy losses (typically .85)
Transmission costs (varies by location since most oil is delivered by boat and gasoline is delivered by truck)
Also energy needed to manufacture the engine, refine the steel, etc, pp. ...

Its telling that the full lifecycle energy cost of a Tesla's power is still better than only one component of an ICE vehicle, don't you think?

It takes very few emissions to send something twice around the world these days. Don't make the mistake of looking at the absolute carbon cost of a modern vessel vs. a single piece of its cargo. A modern container ship can transport somewhere around 18 million cubic feet of cargo from China to the US using ~4,800 tons of fuel (1.3 million gallons). So a gallon of fuel can move approximately 14 cubic feet of stuff from the US to China (or back).

If you're on a macbook, one finger is a "left click" and two fingers is a "right click". Using a keyboard modifier would be odd and uncomfortable IMO. Go to System Preferences -> Trackpad -> Point & Click to enable this if someone's disabled it.

For scroll bars, you can go to System Preferences -> Show Scroll Bars -> Always if you wish. I have mine enabled that way too.

And yet you often see very large parcels of empty land going for millions of dollars. Why? Because many developers understand that its not necessarily the current income that a property produces, but its income potential that you're buying. Sure, there's a discount for buying "potential" rather than "actual" earnings... but an empty tract of land is far from worthless, even if its bringing in less in revenue (cows/towers/etc) than its costing in taxes.

That's what we have with WhatsApp - one of the largest, most attractive "tracts of land" on the internet, currently making little to no revenue. That doesn't mean it never will.

Having 10-11% of the living population of the entire human race using your platform on a regular basis (best guess removing bots, etc) "isn't that big" to you?

What, pray tell, would be?

And cars today are far, far better about that then they were 5 years ago. Its only a problem if - randomly - sometimes you want one pattern of airflow for a given situation (outside temp/humidity vs inside temp/humidity possibly referenced to location and time of day), and sometimes you want a totally different one, to the point that neither version is even "acceptable" when you want the other.

Turns out that, for most people, those situations are few and far between.

Facebook is going mobile - as are many (most) other players. This is one of the few mobile messaging networks that has a reach big enough to pull users away from Facebook. $19B is a reasonableamount of money to spend on defense to make a network that - internationally - is bigger than Twitter disappear as a risk.

Its not the revenue today, its the customer base (7% of the world population are regular users and its still growing rapidly). We're not used to international phenomenons like this, so of course the numbers look huge as absolutes. $38/customer is still a lot for a pure acquisition, so if they hadn't become large enough to be a credible threat they'd likely never have seen that much, but they did... and the rest is history.

Just because they've figured out how to scale it (for some jobs - anything needing reliable repeatable results tends to get surprisingly slow) doesn't mean it wasn't still a damn sight harder than scaling the rest of the stack :)

I'd prefer if they just continued to refine the already-very-good automatic climate control systems. There's no reason to need "immediate" control of the HVAC while driving.

And how many people are retrofitting noisy non-modern cars with high-end new UIs? That's not something that's typically installed after the fact. Many new vans and trucks are actually quite quiet and remarkably pleasant to drive.