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> It is not manipulation. The stock is tremendously overvalued. This. I was going to say even $180 is still ridiculously overpriced. Teslas statements are not

> It is not manipulation. The stock is tremendously overvalued. This. I was going to say even $180 is still ridiculously overpriced. Teslas statements are not good by any means when compared to GM and are even poor when compared to a company in problem times like Ford. Tesla even has massively less capital expenditures than both GM and ford. For instance, Fords after tax income was 4 billion, they had capex of 1.7 billion, and an EPS of +0.2. Compare this to Tesla at -0.6 billion revenue, 0.7 billion capex, -4.8 EPS (and they are issuing new shares each quarter for financing). Yet Ford cost $11 a share while paying out a 5% dividend - and this is all from a company in rough patch. I have no idea why anyone is putting so much money into Tesla. You have to give Musk credit for great marketing and creating a cult around his image and ideas.

ng12 9y ago
Probably because the perception of Tesla is that it's more than just a car company. Retail investors don't see much of a future in the American car industry so they're betting hard on tech-first innovation. I wouldn't buy Tesla for more than $200 but I really don't think it's hard to see why people do.
- almost_usual 9y ago
  Which makes it a high risk speculative stock. You're essentially gambling on the future knowing the present company is extremely overvalued. I wouldn't even call it "investing" if you were to purchase their stock right now.
  - ng12 9y ago
    "Overvalued" is a funny term -- how can you overvalue a company who's competing on innovation? Remember people said the same thing about Facebook when they were worth $50b and Google when their only products were search and gmail. I agree that it's a risky buy, I disagree with the notion that there's something fundamentally wrong with high-value speculation.
    - almost_usual 9y ago
      Agree, there's nothing wrong with high value speculation as long as you recognize it. Tesla is overvalued. If you were to take a present snapshot in time (a data point) and compare the assets and cash value of Tesla with what its stock price is it would be wildly off. Everyone always remembers the winners, the Googles, Microsofts, and Facebooks. No one remembers the hundreds of dot bomb companies (including Cisco) that saw tremendous loss in stock when everyone thought they were "certain" to succeed.
- tunetine 9y ago
  I liken this stock to the first few quarters of GoPro leading into Christmas. Investors are making it pop up and down, but the moment the possibility of massive growth and revenue meets up to reality, it'll slide down to a reasonable price. "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it." https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_insp...
  - luismmolina 9y ago
    You lost me with that quote.
    - crgt 9y ago
      Interesting - having seen the linked TED talk, I immediately understood. Maybe worth a watch?
    - acalderaro 9y ago
      People don't buy Tesla because of what it does (make a profit selling cars) they buy it because they're making cars "to make the world a better place," by releiving reliance on fossil fuels. The why is more influential than the what. It's the same reason people are dumb enough to pay a 40% premium for Apple products that are equal in any meaningful metric to a PC.
wonder_bread 9y ago
Listing current financial metrics compared to incumbent automakers kind of misses the point on Tesla. Not that it isn't "overvalued" (might be the most ambiguous word in investing) but Tesla's annualized GM is ~8% better than Fords, they own the refueling network (as opposed to incumbents which outsource it to gas stations), and are poised to control much of the future battery supply. Your Musk marketing comment is spot on in my opinion but at the end of they day these are not analogous companies financially, Tesla's charted a much-bifurcated path to growth and profitability relative to current auto companies.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > [Tesla] are poised to control much of the future battery supply "Chinese companies have plans for additional factories with the capacity to pump out more than 120 gigawatt-hours a year by 2021, according to a report published this week by Bloomberg Intelligence... By comparison, when completed in 2018, Tesla Inc.’s Gigafactory will crank out up to 35 gigawatt-hours of battery cells annually. ... Roughly 55 percent of global lithium-ion battery production is already based in China, compared with 10 percent in the U.S. By 2021, China’s share is forecast to grow to 65 percent, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-28/china-is-about-to-bury-elon-musk-in-batteries https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-28/china-is-...
  - wonder_bread 9y ago
    Relative to the companies their stock is being compared against I'd say I'm still pretty impressed with their lithium-ion production plans.
  - lacksconfidence 9y ago
    It's perhaps worth noting that musk has said: > I will announce locations for between two and four Gigafactories later this year – probably four. This puts them in the range of around 175 (35 * 4 new + Nevada) gigawatt-hours annually. They are certainly looking to compete in this space
  - nsturis 9y ago
MichaelGG 9y ago
Can you explain the relevance of $11/share for Ford?
- almost_usual 9y ago
  It's a stock that's sanely valued and offers a dividend. I believe the author of the comment is pointing out a lot people think emotionally with their money.
- icedchai 9y ago
  Ford seems like a bargain at this price. (Disclosure: I've been in F around $6.)
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    I think the smart money should be looking at which established car-maker will be best able to make the transition to a future with electric personal vehicles and autonomous cars. It's clear there's going to be some kind of disruption in the next several years, and new players and the survivors are going to be splitting up the bounty.
JKCalhoun 9y ago
Investors buy on future prospects of a company. While Ford or GM seem like a good value to you and me, where is the future upside to these two companies? They are in about every country, they have vehicles in about every configuration. Tesla has a lot more upside for future growth. Then again, this is why companies like Ford and GM pay dividends on their stocks ... stockholders don't expect them to grow, just keep making money.
amorphid 9y ago
>> It is not manipulation. The stock is tremendously overvalued. > This. I was going to say even $180 is still ridiculously overpriced. My thoughts: - Goldman Sachs (GS) makes buy helping other people buy and sell Tesla-related securities, profiting whether Tesla shares go up or down, and I simply don't trust the recommendation enough to make bets on the recommendation's value - No one knows if the stock is overvalued because no one has perfect information about how Tesla will actually perform, including both Tesla & GS - If I actually did know where Tesla shares would go, I wouldn't tell anyone, unless revealing the price would be a bigger windfall for me than keeping the information confidential
- staticautomatic 9y ago
  But if "how Tesla will actually perform" in the future is already priced in today, the stock can't continue to go up unless it continues to be overpriced.
  - tachyonbeam 9y ago
    What is it with this "already priced in" bullshit? It should be obvious by now that stock prices are not based on pure, rational calculations of value. This is why one single news article, like this one, can drop the value of the stock by 7%. The only way to know how Tesla will perform is to watch things unfold. A few years back, when Tesla was struggling to make the Model S happen, would you say that its current success was "already priced in"? I would say that most of the big investors who are betting against Tesla are finance people, with a relatively poor understanding of the real potential for this company. They tend to see it purely as a car company. They don't understand that Tesla's battery production, their solar and utility-scale energy storage businesses are also worth quite a bit. They don't understand that the self-driving technology has a lot of value as well. They also don't understand that Tesla's electric cars are currently outperforming every other electric car, and every production ICE car as well. And lastly, they don't understand that Tesla is basically the Apple of cars, they sell cool, hot ticket items. Finance people who think "Tesla just can't unseat GM and Ford" are have definitely not "priced in" all the information. The people who are betting for Tesla are either people more familiar with technology, or people who are just really rooting for change, and happy to see a newcomer finally shake things up. The latter have not "priced in" much information either, they are going based on hope. I personally think that Tesla has a very good shot at succeeding. Not only because Elon Musk does seem to eventually deliver what he promises, but also because the company has so many people rooting for it. These days, when Tesla needs financing, they just issue more shares, and people buy them up. This basically means that Tesla can pull itself out of debt very easily. I don't think that Ford and GM can say the same, they do not have millions of small investors rooting for them, ready to pull them out of debt. If Tesla slips up in its Model 3 deliveries, even by quite a bit, I do think the stock price will suffer, temporarily, but I think that most people will forgive them. Many people, myself included, are just very happy to see electric cars finally becoming a reality. I know that if Tesla ever drops near $200 again, I will be buying a whole lot more of it.
wil421 9y ago
Why do people compare Telsa to companies like Ford and GM? Genuinely curious because I see it a lot. Both those companies sold over 1.2 million cars last year. Tesla around 16K. Numbers are US only.[1] [1]http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3022-autosales.html http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3022-autosales.html
nadim 9y ago
And the engineering?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Sohcahtoa82 9y ago
People are buying Tesla stock based on the idea of what the company can become, not what it is right now. Judging Tesla based on current numbers is simply being short-sighted. They have yet to produce a mass-manufactured car, sure, but unless you've been living in a cave, you know that the release of the Model 3, a car with over 400,000 reservations, is coming soon, and that's going to create somewhere between $13-17 billion in revenue as people pony up the money for the car.
naedish 9y ago
Talking about share prices is pointless without referring to number of shares. Tesla wouldn't be worth 16 times more than Ford just because their share price was 16 times higher. Tesla's market cap being $11B higher than Ford is surprising but then Tesla has momentum that investors are factoring in to the potential future value of the company. Ford has cash-flow but is stagnant; Tesla announced in May that they doubled their Revenue from 1st quarter 2016. The challenge for traditional car companies is that their new competitor is acting and being treated by investors as a speculative stock. Also, in your comparison of the financials you have called Tesla's after tax income for 2016 their revenue. And Fords capex for 2016 was just under 7B. From where did you source those figures? (Ford) http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/f/financials http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/f/financials (Tesla) http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/tsla/financials http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/tsla/financials

ng12 9y ago

Probably because the perception of Tesla is that it's more than just a car company. Retail investors don't see much of a future in the American car industry so they're betting hard on tech-first innovation. I wouldn't buy Tesla for more than $200 but I really don't think it's hard to see why people do.

almost_usual 9y ago
Which makes it a high risk speculative stock. You're essentially gambling on the future knowing the present company is extremely overvalued. I wouldn't even call it "investing" if you were to purchase their stock right now.
- ng12 9y ago
  "Overvalued" is a funny term -- how can you overvalue a company who's competing on innovation? Remember people said the same thing about Facebook when they were worth $50b and Google when their only products were search and gmail. I agree that it's a risky buy, I disagree with the notion that there's something fundamentally wrong with high-value speculation.
  - almost_usual 9y ago
    Agree, there's nothing wrong with high value speculation as long as you recognize it. Tesla is overvalued. If you were to take a present snapshot in time (a data point) and compare the assets and cash value of Tesla with what its stock price is it would be wildly off. Everyone always remembers the winners, the Googles, Microsofts, and Facebooks. No one remembers the hundreds of dot bomb companies (including Cisco) that saw tremendous loss in stock when everyone thought they were "certain" to succeed.
tunetine 9y ago
I liken this stock to the first few quarters of GoPro leading into Christmas. Investors are making it pop up and down, but the moment the possibility of massive growth and revenue meets up to reality, it'll slide down to a reasonable price. "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it." https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_insp...
- luismmolina 9y ago
  You lost me with that quote.
  - crgt 9y ago
    Interesting - having seen the linked TED talk, I immediately understood. Maybe worth a watch?
  - acalderaro 9y ago
    People don't buy Tesla because of what it does (make a profit selling cars) they buy it because they're making cars "to make the world a better place," by releiving reliance on fossil fuels. The why is more influential than the what. It's the same reason people are dumb enough to pay a 40% premium for Apple products that are equal in any meaningful metric to a PC.

wonder_bread 9y ago

Listing current financial metrics compared to incumbent automakers kind of misses the point on Tesla. Not that it isn't "overvalued" (might be the most ambiguous word in investing) but Tesla's annualized GM is ~8% better than Fords, they own the refueling network (as opposed to incumbents which outsource it to gas stations), and are poised to control much of the future battery supply. Your Musk marketing comment is spot on in my opinion but at the end of they day these are not analogous companies financially, Tesla's charted a much-bifurcated path to growth and profitability relative to current auto companies.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> [Tesla] are poised to control much of the future battery supply "Chinese companies have plans for additional factories with the capacity to pump out more than 120 gigawatt-hours a year by 2021, according to a report published this week by Bloomberg Intelligence... By comparison, when completed in 2018, Tesla Inc.’s Gigafactory will crank out up to 35 gigawatt-hours of battery cells annually. ... Roughly 55 percent of global lithium-ion battery production is already based in China, compared with 10 percent in the U.S. By 2021, China’s share is forecast to grow to 65 percent, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-28/china-is-about-to-bury-elon-musk-in-batteries https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-28/china-is-...
- wonder_bread 9y ago
  Relative to the companies their stock is being compared against I'd say I'm still pretty impressed with their lithium-ion production plans.
- lacksconfidence 9y ago
  It's perhaps worth noting that musk has said: > I will announce locations for between two and four Gigafactories later this year – probably four. This puts them in the range of around 175 (35 * 4 new + Nevada) gigawatt-hours annually. They are certainly looking to compete in this space
- nsturis 9y ago

MichaelGG 9y ago

Can you explain the relevance of $11/share for Ford?

almost_usual 9y ago
It's a stock that's sanely valued and offers a dividend. I believe the author of the comment is pointing out a lot people think emotionally with their money.
icedchai 9y ago
Ford seems like a bargain at this price. (Disclosure: I've been in F around $6.)
- stcredzero 9y ago
  I think the smart money should be looking at which established car-maker will be best able to make the transition to a future with electric personal vehicles and autonomous cars. It's clear there's going to be some kind of disruption in the next several years, and new players and the survivors are going to be splitting up the bounty.

JKCalhoun 9y ago

Investors buy on future prospects of a company. While Ford or GM seem like a good value to you and me, where is the future upside to these two companies? They are in about every country, they have vehicles in about every configuration. Tesla has a lot more upside for future growth. Then again, this is why companies like Ford and GM pay dividends on their stocks ... stockholders don't expect them to grow, just keep making money.

amorphid 9y ago

>> It is not manipulation. The stock is tremendously overvalued. > This. I was going to say even $180 is still ridiculously overpriced. My thoughts: - Goldman Sachs (GS) makes buy helping other people buy and sell Tesla-related securities, profiting whether Tesla shares go up or down, and I simply don't trust the recommendation enough to make bets on the recommendation's value - No one knows if the stock is overvalued because no one has perfect information about how Tesla will actually perform, including both Tesla & GS - If I actually did know where Tesla shares would go, I wouldn't tell anyone, unless revealing the price would be a bigger windfall for me than keeping the information confidential

staticautomatic 9y ago
But if "how Tesla will actually perform" in the future is already priced in today, the stock can't continue to go up unless it continues to be overpriced.
- tachyonbeam 9y ago
  What is it with this "already priced in" bullshit? It should be obvious by now that stock prices are not based on pure, rational calculations of value. This is why one single news article, like this one, can drop the value of the stock by 7%. The only way to know how Tesla will perform is to watch things unfold. A few years back, when Tesla was struggling to make the Model S happen, would you say that its current success was "already priced in"? I would say that most of the big investors who are betting against Tesla are finance people, with a relatively poor understanding of the real potential for this company. They tend to see it purely as a car company. They don't understand that Tesla's battery production, their solar and utility-scale energy storage businesses are also worth quite a bit. They don't understand that the self-driving technology has a lot of value as well. They also don't understand that Tesla's electric cars are currently outperforming every other electric car, and every production ICE car as well. And lastly, they don't understand that Tesla is basically the Apple of cars, they sell cool, hot ticket items. Finance people who think "Tesla just can't unseat GM and Ford" are have definitely not "priced in" all the information. The people who are betting for Tesla are either people more familiar with technology, or people who are just really rooting for change, and happy to see a newcomer finally shake things up. The latter have not "priced in" much information either, they are going based on hope. I personally think that Tesla has a very good shot at succeeding. Not only because Elon Musk does seem to eventually deliver what he promises, but also because the company has so many people rooting for it. These days, when Tesla needs financing, they just issue more shares, and people buy them up. This basically means that Tesla can pull itself out of debt very easily. I don't think that Ford and GM can say the same, they do not have millions of small investors rooting for them, ready to pull them out of debt. If Tesla slips up in its Model 3 deliveries, even by quite a bit, I do think the stock price will suffer, temporarily, but I think that most people will forgive them. Many people, myself included, are just very happy to see electric cars finally becoming a reality. I know that if Tesla ever drops near $200 again, I will be buying a whole lot more of it.

wil421 9y ago

Why do people compare Telsa to companies like Ford and GM? Genuinely curious because I see it a lot. Both those companies sold over 1.2 million cars last year. Tesla around 16K. Numbers are US only.[1] [1]http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3022-autosales.html http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3022-autosales.html

nadim 9y ago

And the engineering?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Sohcahtoa82 9y ago

People are buying Tesla stock based on the idea of what the company can become, not what it is right now. Judging Tesla based on current numbers is simply being short-sighted. They have yet to produce a mass-manufactured car, sure, but unless you've been living in a cave, you know that the release of the Model 3, a car with over 400,000 reservations, is coming soon, and that's going to create somewhere between $13-17 billion in revenue as people pony up the money for the car.

naedish 9y ago

Talking about share prices is pointless without referring to number of shares. Tesla wouldn't be worth 16 times more than Ford just because their share price was 16 times higher. Tesla's market cap being $11B higher than Ford is surprising but then Tesla has momentum that investors are factoring in to the potential future value of the company. Ford has cash-flow but is stagnant; Tesla announced in May that they doubled their Revenue from 1st quarter 2016. The challenge for traditional car companies is that their new competitor is acting and being treated by investors as a speculative stock. Also, in your comparison of the financials you have called Tesla's after tax income for 2016 their revenue. And Fords capex for 2016 was just under 7B. From where did you source those figures? (Ford) http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/f/financials http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/f/financials (Tesla) http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/tsla/financials http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/tsla/financials