And now that Musk is stepping back into his role as CEO, the stock is jumping again.
It was 227 a share on April 21th, now its at 347. I’ll never understand this stock.
Ah well. Lets see what a few more quarters of lowered sales and negative profits do to the stock. If investors think Musk getting more involved with Tesla will save it, they have no idea. Thats like saying Hitler getting more involved with Volkswagon would increase sales in Russia.
In a way I get it.
Tesla’s valuation only makes sense if you think musk is going to invent hyperspace cars and lead the first galactic republic. To those poor saps (or those playing “greater fool”), this is great news.
For the rest of us, this is an absurdly overvalued stock, that would still be overvalued if musk stepped down and a grown up took over.
Its weird because its my understanding that the stock market is usually fairly rational. People don’t want to risk their money on a bad bet. But Tesla defies all financial logic.
Tesla has about 3.2 billion outstanding shares, and about 100 million are sold and bought each day. So people are selling it, but people are also buying it in droves because they expect the stock to go up.
If you assume Musk is going to spearhead and pioneer some new technology at Tesla which ends up creating a multi trillion dollar company, go for it. But from this vantage point, it looks like he’s destroyed Teslas reputation and market. Car sales probably peaked in 2023 and 2024, and will continue to decline for endless reasons while other EVs make up larger and larger market shares. Not only that, but stories of his incompetence screwing up his businesses have been around for years. At his companies there were people whose job it was to keep him busy with bullshit so he wouldn’t fuck everything up by trying to get involved.
Even Tesla’s non car technology happens in a field of competitors. Other companies are working hard on batteries, bipedal robots, self driving. And Tesla is lagging, not leading. Tesla keeps bragging it’ll have self driving, when level 4 self driving cars made by other companies already exist.
Like I mentioned upthread, tesla’s profits are 0.05% of market cap for Q1, compared to Ford at 3%. If not for government subsidies that Trump is trying to cut, Tesla would be in the red.
China bought something like 6.3 million EVs in 2024, and of those about 600k were Teslas. Tesla’s market share of EVs in China is less than 10% and continuing to drop.
1/3 of Tesla sales in the US are in California. Tesla sales are dropping all over Europe. They can’t compete against domestic EVs in China.
Nobody wants a tesla for the most part. Sales probably peaked at 1.8 million in 2023, were about the same in 2024, and will go down in 2025. I can’t see any situation where sales start rapidly growing. It doesn’t matter if Musk leaves the company.
Look at Harley Davidson. Do people know why bikers love Harleys so much? Its because the original biker clubs were started by WW2 vets who couldn’t readjust to civilian life. They rode Harley Davidsons in WW2 and they didn’t want to buy motorcycles made in countries they had just gone to war with (BMW, Suzuki, Yamaha, Honda, etc). Even decades after WW2 ended, bikers who hadn’t been born before 1945 still hated motorcycles made in Germany or Japan.
Its going to be the same with Tesla. The brand will be toxic for decades. Not only will it be toxic, it’ll be toxic to the consumer market their products are directed at. Imagine selling nazi memorabilia at a BLM rally.
One of two things will happen.
And Tesla hasn’t really used its first mover advantage to make new models aggressively. Aside from the Cybertruck they have four; two very similar sedans and two very similar SUVs.
There actually is a 3rd option that is realistic, but horrifying.
I could see people investing in Tesla due to this. But even with that, I don’t see why they’d invest in his car company as opposed to any of the other companies he has ties to. Twitter’s value has dropped off a cliff since Musk bought it. But Tesla is the only public company I think he owns or runs. If starlink was a public company, maybe it would be worth 10x what its financials say it should be worth too.
However, this doesn’t take into account the fact that Tesla stock spiked at $401 in 2021, long before Musk helped Trump become president. If this theory were true, we wouldn’t have seen the stock go up when Musk said he’d step back from the gov to go back to Tesla, and we wouldn’t have seen the stock start spiking back in 2020. Virtually all the gains Tesla saw after the 2024 election disappeared until a few weeks ago, when Musk said he’d focus more on tesla.
TL;DR - I have no idea.
Major hedge fund has sold off $100 M shares. Musk’s own brother has sold shares, as has a member of the Board of Directors.
https://www.thestreet.com/technology/billionaire-fund-manager-unloads-600-million-of-tesla-stock
Well there’s more than one grift going on.
Musk’s grift is lying about what the company can and will do. It turns out that in today’s tech-hungry FOMO world, you can just brazenly lie, year after year.
Theranos should have been a lesson for us all: about just how much you can make up, and as long as you stop a bit short of where Elizabeth landed, you’ve built billions of dollars of “value”.
The new grift is trump using the levers of power to enrich himself and his cronies. It’s pretty insane really: while previous presidents were quick to divest even a peanut farm, trump has made a billion a month so far on crypto and other grifts. If he wasn’t a billionaire before, he is now.
So I guess I’ve talked myself into believing investing in Tesla stock makes sense. Both because of the greater fool theory (that there are still people believing the new roadster / mars mission / hyperloop / self driving / decent ai / RoboCop are all coming any day now), and getting a cut of the blatant corruption.
Tesla stock way down (-14%) today. Apparently because of a Trump-Musk flamewar on social media. If that doesn’t demonstrate that Tesla is a meme stock, I don’t know what would.
Musk’s biographer has spoken out:
My translation: “He’s a fucking loon!”
Can everything be privatized to meet Musks $1T package? With TSLA shareholders getting crumbs (substantial) in the name of privatization, while Musk et. al. get the rest? Where does this $1T come from— money printing, money transfer, both? $1T over 10 yrs of tax diversions, public to private? TSLA has to grow like 8 times and is already ~250times earnings. MSFT did it 1990-2000 but was never >50X earnings (not sure of my calcs). This would be a huge xfer of public money-private wealth.
This isnt just a TSLA stock price consideration, this is a USA taxpayer infrastructure privatization push
I have no idea how any of this works. People keep buying tesla stock, so they must see value in it.
Tesla sales peaked in 2023, went down in 2024, and are going down even more in 2025. I have no idea if people think tesla will corner the self driving market, but the robotaxis released in Austin were causing multiple near accidents.
I mentioned upthread how some people may have thought Musk had an inside track in government due to Trump’s administration. But since the falling about between the malignant narcissists, thats not the case. If anything, Trump is going to punish Musk and his businesses.
Tesla just announced record Q3 deliveries 7.4% over last year. Without a doubt it was because the EV tax break ended on September 30th. Stock is down 3.5% at the moment. Still, nearly 500k cars were delivered.
https://www.investors.com/news/tesla-stock-deliveries-expiring-ev-tax-credits/
Several German newspapers report that Forbes has “calculated” that Musk is worth half a trillion now. The richest man ever. Calculated means estimated, as many of musk’s assets* are not quoted on a stock exchange. I don’t know how much money you can borrow against that, and how far you could manipulate the market to be able to borrow even more money and manipulate the market even more, and who could notice, and what would (should?) happen then. But I am quite sure that somebody is cheating with Tesla shares. Will we ever know for sure, with proof? No idea.
And this robot that he is hyp(erventilat)ing so much about: will a person be able to piggyback on it, and will the experience be better or worse than a Segway?
* funny, I almost forgot the “t”. Would have been unintentional.
This belief needs to be sent to a farm upstate.
The market is never rational at any given moment. It veers between wild overpricing and wild underpricing. Over the long run these tendencies appear to balance, but the argument is purely circular: the balance is defined to be the rational point rather than a random one.
The reason is that a stock price is the fictional created-out-of-thin-air net present value. Nobody knows the short-term future and the long-term future is mere vapor.
Tech stock prices have forever been driven by the dazzling possible future gains that could be had if the dice fall the right way. The gaudier the patter the cheaper the crook, as Sam Spade said. Musk’s patter is perhaps the gaudiest the world has ever seen, across a range of ventures too huge for one person to control.
Nevertheless, the Tesla Board wants to keep him and he has millions of fanboys. They came up with a scheme. He wants to be the first trillionaire. The Board gathered vapors sufficient to fill a balloon and announced a number. The conditions attached to Musk would require him to fulfill the fanboys wettest dreams and then some. It can and will never happen. The balloon will pop. Ten years from now nobody will care because they will chasing another balloon.
So if there was a spike in Q3 sales because of the end of the EV tax break, we should see a similar decline in Q4.
Similar? No idea. I suspect there will be a decline. Historically Q4 is stronger than Q3 because of end of year incentives and maybe there will be some good ones. Cars had to be ordered by 9/30. I think all of those count as shipped even if delivery is into October and if so there won’t be any bleedover. Elon might decide to drastically drop prices which obviously hurts revenue but not shipments. Tesla shaming seems to have gone out of fashion so maybe the stigma is less.
FYI, the New York Times reported that other car manufacturers had much sharper sales increases.
General Motors said Tuesday that sales of its electric vehicles like the Chevrolet Equinox EV had more than doubled, while overall sales had risen 8 percent. Hyundai said its electric vehicle sales had doubled while overall retail sales in the United States had risen 11 percent. Volkswagen of America said sales of its electric vehicles had more than tripled, while total sales had fallen 6 percent.
Much sharper increase partially because they were much farther behind a year ago. This quarter isn’t very interesting. Next quarter will be.
The same article also mentioned big drops in Tesla’s European sales.
No surprise there. That’s been a trend. There was a big spike for all EVs in the US because the tax incentives ended. That’s all this is. Given that the stock dropped a bit, the market understands that.