personally, my view hasn't changed:
fair value of the company has been tangentially close to 0 zero for the last, idk 6 or 7 years (basically around the time they bought solarcity).

just because a) they've been doing stuff and building cars and b) other people pay a gazillion $ for the shares, my view of the company hasn't changed. b allows them to do a, but in my view there has been no shareholder value created here for years. and honestly i don't think that will change in the near future.

Be reasonable. I've been bearish on TSLA for years, and am still bearish, but saying fair value is close to zero is absurd. The company makes billions of dollars in profit. I can admit that I underestimated the cult for the first few years, and after that I underestimated demand. I don't know what I'm underestimating now, but I've learned to just stay away from the stock.

ok, so when do shareholders get some of those profits? the day they pay a dollar in dividends or buy back shares is the day i will put fair value closer to $1 than $0.

until then... let's just say i am very skeptical their reported earnings, assets and especially liabilities reflect the true underlying economics and risks of the business.

It is interesting that I just checked my mini library to look for "investing books." I have lots of books on Dalio, Buffet, John Boggle; probably 30 on building wealth and another 20 on Real Estate, but only one true investing book. The intelligent Investor.

Admitted TESLA fanboy here.

So you don't trust the FS of the Companies? Are you comparing TSLA with say GM or Ford?
I don't believe in charts, heads and shoulders, and 200 day moving averages and momentum investing. I do closely follow TSLA's production numbers, profit per vehicle, capital investments, and side business incomes. I read the FS and quarterly reports.

I purchased more TSLA last week at $199 and this week at $214. I am still dollar cost averaging, but will probably stop if/when it hits $250/share. This is not because I think it won't go higher, but a portfolio balancing thing.
A couple points.
1) quote from Peter Lynch "Companies that have no debt can't go bankrupt."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLpfpcfYGtI
2) Check Tesla's Debt and Cash on hand.
3) Check Ford and GM's Debt, Cash on hand AND estimate their unfunded liabilities to their workers.
4) Tesla is not even a Car Company!

I used to own ChargePoint as I am a property Manager and had this in one of the buildings that I managed. They had a spokes person come to our company and give a talk on installing charger(s) in our buildings. I checked today They say 30,000! which probably means that many single charging stations have been installed for single users. I sold the CHPT stock and bought more TSLA. In case you didn't think of it, TSLA charging stations will be replacing all of the gas stations in the next 10 years. Ford has already conceded and made an agreement to make all the new EV vehicles with the NACS (TSLA) adapter. They have been using Electrify America charging stations with poor results.

I let my "Not FSD" drive part of my drive to lunch each Wednesday. It cannot drive in parking lots. It is not perfect. Of course it never will be, but It is getting better and better :fewer interventions on my part all the time. FSD 11.4 Is about as good as the worst of my driving friends.
Usually the car is not aggressive enough when making turns. What I would consider routine, the car is extra cautions about. It also does not adjust the upper limit of speed based on the number of cars around it. Of course it will drive reasonably when there are cars around it, but on the highway and no cars, it sticks to the limit you gave it.

Stop saying "Tesla is not a car company". Thats something dumb people say to justify the valuation. You aren't dumb.

You didn't even mention a single product in your post that wasn't cars

1 AI./FSD testing 11.4.2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hTqcmUjio0
Sell AI for 10K-15K per vehicle or whatever you want to charge, nobody else is even close. I only add about 1h of road mapping per week but there are
over 400K Tesla's out there adding new video maps to Dojo every day. Apr 15, 2023 — Total number of Teslas sold from its existence until today (2008 –
Q1 2023): 4,061,776 vehicles 10% of them have FSD.


2 Optimus, (robots the ones that look like humans and will probably be sent to mars first to prep it for human habitation.) (Smart robots run a very high
% of the Giga Factories, but are just huge robot arms run by some software.) They are the machines that make other machines. Optimus can make
those arms or make more Optimus or do those dangerous/dirty jobs that humans don't want to do. (on Mars)
If you watch a video of a Ford/GM line, there is a chassis suspended that moves along a production line where humans install components.
In the beginning of the video shows the old version. 13:00 is the new version.. Very few people touch the production line and the cars are perpetually in
motion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx6qjsEozlk

3 Mega Packs This is another monster business for Tesla. They are making batteries as fast as they can and have back orders thru 2024. You never hear
about it, but they are building more Mega Pack factories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aHHbtwm5xg

4 Solar Panels Still very small now in comparison.

5 Charging Network. Make money off Ford and any other vehicle company that uses their Network. I think it is $12.99/m to get the same rate as Tesla
Vehicle users. Tesla opened about 10% of their network with CCS adapters for other vehicles to use. This was part of the government requirement to
qualify for the Gov 7.5 B Subsidies on Charging stations.

Tesla installed the biggest number of DC fast chargers in the United States in this year’s first quarter, placing more than five times the number of chargers compared to its nearest competitor. Apr 5, 2023. According to data released by EV research firm EVAdoption, Tesla installed 1,292 DC fast charger ports in the US during the first three months of 2023, which equates to a whopping 59 percent of all new DC port installations. At the same time, Tesla opened 98 new Supercharger sites countrywide, averaging more than one per day.

Jim Farley (Ford) recently gave an interview where he described their vehicle software with 150 different vehicle components with 150 different software programs. 1:30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71jLKhevZsA
He does not say it but Ford is copying Tesla's model.

6 Closed loop recycling of rare earth materials. Very small now but will increase as the first EV vehicles from the 2010's "age out." Will likely create their own "Redwood Materials or buy the company from the new Director JB Straubel.

Aside from FSD you probably never hear of the other 5 businesses.

that's all made up garbage that will never work.

anyway, good luck

You sound exactly like me 25 years ago. I was big into PC's and would always say those crazy apple people think that they can build a better computer than MS based systems. LOL.
If I could talk to myself 25 years ago, I would tell myself.
Apple is not a computer company.

I remember the news reports of people lining up to buy the newest version of the Apple Ipod or IPhone.

Today that is the equivalent of the pre orders for Tesla Vehicles. Think of Telsa 3 as the Ipod and Telsa Y as the Iphone and Cybertruck as the IPad.
Tesla could be looking forward to record-breaking sales with its newest vehicle — the Cybertruck. This unique “electric pickup truck” has caught the world's attention with 1.5 million orders placed already ahead of its release later this year, according to Fred Lambert of Electrek (@electrek.co on Instagram).May 3, 2023

Apple was a computer company, then successfully branched out into other markets. What enabled that move was masterful marketing that positioned Apple as a consumer brand rather than a computer brand. Tesla is not that.

The Tesla 3 and Cybertruck are vehicles, just like all the Teslas preceding them, so Tesla is still just a car company. Apple broke out into entirely different markets, not just different form factors of the same product.

The supercharger network is also a vehicle

I wonder if there would be any benefit in just combining all his companies into a holding corp. He supposedly is going the AI LLM route too with X company. Twitter now has the ability to upload videos up to 2 hrs and is becoming very oriented for business owners. Seeing with permission pro users can get their subscribers emails.

https://nypost.com/2022/04/22/x-holdings/

Maybe they'll branch out into car air fresheners. Then we can call them a consumer staples company too.

This has been said in this thread so many times over the years. At some point bears should admit that Tesla might be worth the cash balance at least. Adding current earnings and a P/E of 10 can be debated sure, but the cash balance?

Then you can debate if Tesla has any outs for future earnings such as FSD, Robotaxi, 25k, Dojo, Megapack, Supercharger network, HVAC etc.

Anyway, a few more years and Tesla have higher market cap than Apple, higher earnings than Microsoft and bears will still say that Tesla is either overvalued or should be a zero.

why would it be worth their cash?* has it ever paid money to shareholders?

when the company goes south, they'll try and do a gazillion things. paying money to shareholders is not on that list.


like, how's that going to go?
elon: "sorry guys, can't keep the company going. will wind down and pay out shareholders before there's nothing left. because it's the right thing to do."
yup, yeah... very likely. it's not like he has ever spent billions on stupid moonshots and bailing out his family.


*(btw. if you net out short term assets and liabilites, all you're left with is basically inventory - which is not cash, but anyway)

Again, far be it from me to put forward the TSLA bull case, but your backpedaling to the assertion that TSLA doesn't pay dividends reveals the weakness of your claim that it's worth zero. AMZN has never paid a dividend. I guess that's a zero, too? I agree that Elon will likely never want to pay a dividend, but other things can happen to reify shareholder value. He could torch enough of his net worth (with some other lark like Twitter) that he has to sell his stake and cede control. The board could vote him out for whatever reason. He could just decide he's had enough and needs to focus on SpaceX or Twitter or whatever other thing catches his fancy. And then it's up to the board and other shareholders. Or, as he threatened years ago (debatably violating SEC rules), he and some group of backers could take Tesla private. That would handsomely reward shareholders who would get bought out.

lol, no.

for starters, AMZN actually has returned cash to shareholders by buying back ~7b in shares last year. but whatever, doesn't really matter.

more importantly, their investment over the years has made them a one of kind business. it would take hundreds of billions in investment to catch up to them in logistics. tesla is just a car company.

AMZN spends as much on research and development in 4 days as TSLA does in a quarter.

Buffet has never paid a dividend from BH since he purchased it in 1965. His philosophy as with Musk is I can put this $ to better use than the average joe investor.
I will agree with that while he still has more factories to build; whether that is battery production, vehicle production, or rare earth refining etc.
He has announced the a new factory in Mexico earlier this year and is expected to announce another before the end of 2023.

I started purchasing Tesla pre split. In current $ I have been purchasing stock from $330/share down to $110/share and now back to the current price.
My DCA is $226/share- so today I have finally passed back into the black on Tesla Stock.

berkshire's been buying back shares for years now...

of course they're doing rare earth refining now. just like they were doing solar panels and robots and their own chips and their own batteries and self-driving cars and the semi truck and the roadster 2 and the cybertruck and a smaller car...

those are not serious business ventures. he's just making this **** up and spending like the bare minimum on investment in those things to keep the story going and sell shares .

their r&d has been shrinking for years now. it's just potemkin village after potemkin village.

Buying back shares is not a dividend. It just drives the share price up. It also means that the directors of Berkshire do not see any outside company that is better to invest in than BH.
I agree all of the items you listed are currently tiny in comparison to Cars except the megapacks. Revenue from MegaPacks was 4B in 2022. 2023 Q1 is already 1.5B
If you look at the Tesla FS it is the line directly under Revenue from Vehicles. 2023 Q1 Revenue from Vehicles was 20B.

But it is returning money to shareholders.

You know I didn't add the line for services and other revenues to this discussion because it is hard to break out what is just short term interest and what is from supercharging network.
I would guess 50% of the 1.8B is from charging and will keep on going up.

I am sure the charging standard in North America will 100% be Tesla's NACS as just a few hours ago GM Also (Ford last week) announced it will use the Tesla Supercharging network.
I am going to put a huge short on Chargepoint (CHPT). If it was a public stock I would put a huge short on Electrify America too.
From 2025 on GM will make all their BEV's with the NACS port.

So in your opinion, if Tesla decides to do a $11B dividend, then after the dividend the company would be worth $11B more than it was before the decision.

So I guess most companies that never have paid dividends are overvalued and should be zeros. But they have that button they can press to create value, so must be a bit scary shorting them as soon as they decide to stop being stupid.

Anyway, you do you. I will keep investing in companies that will do dividends/buybacks in the future. Imo the market seems to reward these companies.

no.
i think most of them have honest and capable management teams and i'd expect them to act in the interest of shareholders a lot of the time. tesla management is among the absolute worst.

e.g. bailing out the worthless solar company of their cousins, making up takeover offers and getting sued for securities fraud....

so yeah, i haircut their cash by a huge amount in case the company goes south one day (which is my base case scenario)
if they'd actually pay out a constant dividend (not a one-off token dividend), i'd probably value them much higher than that amount. it would probably change my view of this just being one big grift to benefit one person to being something that resembles a real company.

paying a dividend is actually a nuissance for people short a stock, yes.
because they have to pay the dividend to their broker, so this instantly shrinks the potential return of the short. much better for shorts if management spents the company money on a guy dancing in a robot suit and stuff like that.

Congrats on your TSLA. EVGO WBX BLNK are the other charging stocks. EVGO down 15%. If im not mistaken WBX is in European countries. So maybe not as much trouble as others. Edit: Yep WBX is Spain.

I tried shorting CHPT this morning twice, got rejected twice. Not sure why, maybe my risk profile (recorded by the bank where I hold my accounts) is not high enough?!?
I tried shorting BUD today .. also rejected. I was also rejected at back when it was at 64 and 63/share.
I tried shorting F. Worked. Seems like I can only short something when it is going up! haha.