btw please don't listen to me if you want to trade this.

as you see, most people don't even care what the company or the ceo is saying as long as the stock goes up. so you're way better off following that flow.

but if reality ever starts to matter again, boy that's a scary thought.

I guess we will have a few more years of bears claiming that the stock price is detached from reality with no falsifiable predictions about deliveries or earnings to allow bears to judge if their model of the company was correct or not.

Meanwhile Tesla will deliver 900k vehicles this year, 1.5M next year, 2.5M 2023 at 15% operating margin, then 20% and 25% respectively. Hard to do the math on this one, surely they will go broke any day now and bears were right all along and bulls were the insane ones.

Every week there will be new cracks, every earnings report there will be new records. And this thread will go on and on…

You realize the stock can make money AND it can be a fraud right? The beauty of musk is he just has to tweet some promise and it's as good as gold

Do the math on that one. A charge with swapped batteries would be hugely expensive.
Not only would you be paying for the stored power. You'd also be paying for these installations, the storage space, overhang batteries, their self discharge, maintenace on very complex machiney to swap out batteries (or even labor costs)...all of which has to work even once cars start to age, transport of batteries to and from locations due to shifting need (holidays/weekends),...
Your charging costs would just explode.

How exactly you integrate this with the battery cooling system is also a doozy. That works a couple times but the wear and tear on those interconnectors is not going to be cheap (again something the customer has to pay for with each swap). And once you switch form factor because you want to offer larger/smaller batteries for different size vehicles your problems just doubled. Not to mention that you will never get the entire global(!) auto industry to settle on one battery standard and then just stop all development.

(Nio is started out with such a scheme and it only really works because it's a luxury car and the owners don't really care that the swap service costs an arm and a leg.)

The reality of an EV is: On normal days you charge where you're at (at home, at work, ... ). There's no need to do this fast, whatsoever. On long trips you need to stop before the car does. With the charging speed of good EVs you're already charged up before you've finished your rest stop. So a swap wouldn't even save you any time.

Yeah, Tesla is totally vaporware and a fraud. Also they make millions of cars per year at 15% operating margins. Both these can be true at the same time.

1) they don't make millions of cars per year (yet)
2) other companies who actually do make millions of cars per year trade at like ~5% of their valuation.

Is there anyone here who would make the argument that Tesla issuing a tiny amount of equity now, respectively to pay off all long term debt would not be a good use of funds and a way to take some air in the stock and turn it into real value?

Sure debt is cheap right now but when your stock has so much air in it, taking some of that air and trading it for real value is always smart, isn't it?

They were on the path prior and sure making car batteries swappable like bb propone tanks for basically a swap fee could have worked but Tesla is far less reliant on others with this current model.

there were hundreds of millions in government subsidies at that time dependant on having the option to swap the battery.

that changed at some point and you never heard about tesla battery swap again.

read about it here if you want:
https://dailykanban.com/2015/06/23/t...ge-to-nowhere/

Keep the debt - Rates are beyond stupid cheap (effectively negative rates with what inflation is about to do over the next year).

Plus a little bit of offset for tax liability - when valuation isn’t tied to profit and is tied to cash flow - they’ve got to love debt right? (*well at least valuation should be tied to cash flow although TSLA is tied to hype)

/my attempt at corporate finance

Do you think Tesla's current value can be maintained (P/E over 200) on an Auto sales Grand slam market win only?

Meaning if none of the other areas (AI, RoboTaxis, Battery tech, etc) that Cathy Wood refers to as 'Convergence' end up also providing Grand Slam wins to Tesla can Auto Sales alone, even if they become the clear #1 in Auto sales be enough??

It is very hard to get one Grand Slam win, let alone REQUIRING multiple to 'Converge' in order to win the game. Can Tesla win on just one?

Yup. The P/E for all the top Automanufacturs who each sell millions of Auto's per year are between 7-9x. Tesla's P/E is over 200x.

Even if Tesla was to beat out Volkswagen and get their market share Tesla would still need a P/E of 30 to justify its current price which would mean even at Volkswagen size the investors would still be betting on exponential auto sales growth.

The only way Tesla could achieve that would to not just beat Volkswagen, Toyota and GM but to basically knock them out of the game so they are not also taking market share.

And understand that Tesla is now losing market share to the other EV makers and we are just at the very beginnings with those other makers about to flood the zone with EV's. Hundreds of new models at every price point. Even if Tesla remains the premium brand in EV's it is going to be near impossible for them to not keep losing market share.

Generally I would say yes to the above all day.

But Air is actually cheaper than even cheap debt.

Air can go away with Day's trading and sentiment swing. Taking some Air today and paying off billions in debt does not go away with day trading swings.

Companies eventually must become a real of Assets. Stock air is a place holder for Assets so swapping such a tiny amount at this point IMO makes sense.

Elon and Tesla are winning at life. They walked into the casino and are betting it all Black over and over again and keep hitting. They can now take some chips off the table and retire all the debt in their life and it will not even make a blip at how much chips they still have on the table they are gambling with.

What would you do?

Are these other companies growing? No
Stock price is the reflection of what people think a company will be doing in the future. Not of what they think it's doing today.
You think it will grow: stockprice goes up.
You think it will chugg along as is? Stockprice goes sideways.
You think it will shrink? Stockprice goes down.

Now with 2 new factories starting up and Tesla being booked to the tune of 1.3m reservations for Cybetruck alone - which of these scenarios do you think is most likely?
People are pricing in the growth over the next few years. It was the same with Amazon or Apple. They both had similar 'ridiculous' p/e values in their past. Would an investment at that time have been a bad idea? Certainly not.

That's not to say that Tesla must follow that trajectory and that an investment today is therfore a sure fire thing (it never is in the stock market)...but just saying that this situation isn't without precedent - even in recent history.

A lot of the debt is practically hostage. Chinese banks/governements basically fully financed Tesla's Shanghai expansion. Musk's ability to extract concessions from government bureaucrats seems to be transnational. As for the non-Chinese debt holders... they'll be forced to lend to keep TSLA afloat if TSLA gets in trouble and cheap equity raises are off the table for some reason.

see, this is just lazy and flat out wrong. sure they're growing.
granted not at tesla's rate and not in the middle of a pandemic and semiconductor crisis. i also think it's hard to grow at double digit rates for a decade when you're already 3-8% of the global car market.
but most of these companies had been growing steadily pre covid. and been highly profitable while doing so, if i might add.
my humble opinion is, that all that growth is more than priced in and then some.
i think if you look into that you'll find that the cybertruck shown breaks like a gazillion regulations about how to not build a car in every important car market of the world. i guess that's one reason, why it's delayed.
but i'm sure excited to see what they'll do about that.

i.e. the industry has spent the last decades building cars that can absorb more and more of the impact energy in a crash. the cybertruck body is like going back 50 years on that one.
you should have a look at how much capital it takes to design consumer hardware, write software and build warehouses vs. building and maintaining state of the art car factories.
i think you're in for a surprise.
i think it is. see my prior answer.

lol cybertruck ever being built in significant numbers.

Ok sure Tesla is growing. Any small company that is taking market share from giants will be growing quicker.






So Tesla the auto manufacture has a P/E of 213x.

Toyota has a P/E of 9x
GM has a P/E of 7.07x
Volkswagen a P/E of 8x

So using the last complete year of car sales 2020:


Tesla 2020 Sales



As more and more vehicles become EV's is Tesla just going to keep taking up all the market share at rates that dominate the giants such that Tesla will not only catch up to VW but replace them and still maintain a P/E 30 to justify today's market cap?

My question, if not clear, is once (and if) Tesla does realize all this great growth and catches up and passes VW, why would Tesla still have a growth multiple at 30 when the industry says 7-9 is the norm?

Again I think we all would agree that once you are a giant having a big growth multiple becomes tougher and tougher especially when the other auto manufacturers were late to the game but are now at the beginnings of flooding the zone with EV's at all price points.

So even if Tesla remains the dominant brand it is very hard to say they are going to catch up, surpass the giants and yet STILL maintain a massive growth multiple.

Electric cars are more popular than ever, but Tesla is losing market share to new competitors

Tesla will not take up all of the EV market... it's doubtful they even want to.

If I knew my stock was overvalued - then yeah issue.

(and take debt too? Why not both…)

Realistically their market share will only decrease as competition matures.

They have gone from 0 competitors to 20 in a couple of years

Although I am neutral on TSLA, have to say that earnings chart is the text book definition of a “J” plot of disruptive innovation

So then what is the play then? Is it 'convergence'? The belief that Tesla hits multiple Grand Slam home runs in multiple sectors?

You don't think it is? If not see my question just above.

It is already decreasing and the other manufacturers are only in their infancy with regards to new EV launches.

As long as it's legal in the US it doesn't matter (Pickup trucks aren't a thing anywhere else in the world. In most countries they wouldn't fit in any parking space - sometimes not even on the roads. Additionally, gas prices arctually ARE a thing most places outside the US)
Tesla has been getting record scores in car crash tests the world over. I see no reason why this should be different in upcoming cars. They clearly know what they are doing.

Apple was doing more than just writing software. Apple is more than a company that sells phones. Similarly with Amazon. They don't just run warehouses.
Tesla is doing all that and then some. Writing software, designing chips, running factories. I think that's pretty comparable.

As long as they can maintain the innovation lead, why not? Particularly since cars isn't what they are after in the long term.

Remember: Toyota, Ford, Mercedes an all the others don't WANT to build EVs. They will build enough so as to not have to pay any fines. They make a lot more profit on their old clunkers. The worst thing that could happen to their bottom line would be more EVs (and that would kill their stock price..they are caught in their own trap, having to please investors)
The only exception may be VW...but looking at their offerings they have quite a ways to go before they figure out how to build a competitive (and profitable) EV.

Note: The real competition isn't any of these. The Real competition is the likes of BYD or Geely (or fast expanding brands like Li Auto and Xpeng). We haven't seen them yet because demand has been high in China and their selling first to the local market.

By the time other autromakers have sensible offerings and can satisfy the market Tesla will have long transitioned into an energy company (or a robotaxi company - though I personally don't think that is going to work).
Tesla isn't about 'dominating the market' or 'driving other automakers into bankruptcy'.
...it's pretty plain when you look at their trajectory and what they are investing in where they are headed. Then look at the companies they are REALLY gunning for.

If Tesla are still expanding in other areas such as energy generation/storage, solar roofs, humanoid robots, robotaxi, HVAC, mobile homes, eVTOL, Dojo etc then yeah even if Tesla are making 20M vehicles/year they might still deserve a larger than 10 P/E ratio.

Imo VW etc have negative outlooks, they have large liabilities and assets that will become useless(ICE) in a few years rather than decades. This is a bit old but you get the picture:


Soon 4680 LFP in scale will make EVs cheaper to buy, to own and to sell than ICE, plus governments will make ICEs prohibitly expensive as they let them pay their external costs from pollution that kills and harms people, brings noise pollution and grey skies. 50kWh * $50/kWh is $2500, with a smaller cheaper motor. US goverment will give $8500 discount for EVs for the next decade which is not even needed. It’s a no brainer. Any drawbacks such as slow charging, low availability of fast chargers etc are problems of the past. The EV revolution will be quick and brutal for the ICE-companies.

we went over all these naratives a few times in this thread. agree to disagree.

just going to pick this one, because it's funny and obvious:
well all their other cars look like cars.
when you're crashing into something you kind of want to be in a car that crumbles at certain spots and not in a sturdy, cybertruck exoskeleton.

that's not tesla's fault. that's just physics. last i checked they didn't invent new physics yet.

but, as long as you and heltok and everybody else believes that they are the greatest company ever and will achieve everything they promised, despite being late on everything and showing no signs of actually achieving a lot of the stuff (i.e.: where's the truck? it's 5 years old and other companies have actual ev trucks they sell now)
... i guess everybody will keep buying and the stock will keep going up.
guess i need to buy more calls...

or just look at the real numbers for their energy business in a recent 10k.
they've been going backwards and then nowhere since bailing out solarcity 5 years ago.

and the renewable energy market had double digit growth rates in the meantime.
other, actual energy companies, are growing at record rates.