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Hi guys - long time lurker, very seldom do I post or comment, but thought that HN might be interested in this. Although TSLA's market cap is down a bit from wh

Hi guys - long time lurker, very seldom do I post or comment, but thought that HN might be interested in this. Although TSLA's market cap is down a bit from when I wrote the article, it still makes up something like 30% of the global automaker market, despite only publicly listing 10 years ago! Is it overvalued or in a bubble? I'll leave that for you to decide.

nugget 6y ago
Investors want to "buy the future" and seem to have placed an enormous premium on companies that are disruptive to the status quo. It's hard to say whether it's a bubble or not, because value is always part perception. I will say that the current period feels more disruptive than any I have lived through in the past (dot com 1.0, 2008-2009). And it feels like the disruption can happen faster now; like nobody is safe, and any older Fortune 1000 company can be rendered obsolete within a decade by a new startup.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  And the existing companies companies do very little about their competition. I didn't invest in Amazon earlier as I thought the retailers would invest in trying to compete. Nope.
  - gogopuppygogo 6y ago
    Retailers are largely still not profitable with internet sales. Pre-pandemic a brick and mortar was doing about 5-10% via online and it was at best break even. Why would you invest money in something that was unprofitable when Amazon wasn’t even profitable for so long?
    - ethbr0 6y ago
      The problem most retailers face is that competing with Amazon requires substantial, multi-year capex into their supply chains. The more forward thinking realized that the catch-up bill was only going to get more expensive, as Amazon continued growing and optimizing. The less forward thinking... well, there's Sears. As consumers, we rarely see "how" free 2-day shipping, same day delivery, BOPIS, etc. But suffice it to say, it's very expensive to retool legacy supply chains optimized for brick and mortar inventory delivery. Kudos to Walmart, Target, and Home Depot for seeing what was coming.
      - quickthrower2 6y ago
        One way to outdo amazon in your niche is a better user experience. It’s not to hard seeing how bad amazons ux is. You need to attract people who value trust over pure price.
        ethbr0 6y ago
        At some point, rubber meets physical road though. You can't offer 2 day shipping, if your supply chain doesn't support it profitably. Amazon's genius was leveraging marketplace and FBA to scale the logistics they also used (gee, kinda like AWS) while taking a cut.
        quickthrower2 6y ago
        Well that's market segmentation. Some people want it to come quick. Others care about other things. I doubt 100% of people place 100% priority on delivery speed. In particular, I personally don't use Amazon much. Granted not in the US so maybe the site is different etc. But to me they are like an 'ebay' in terms of my trust in what they deliver, when sometimes I want a 'department store'. Now not everyone is like me but I suspect enough people are that Amazon isn't going to take over all shopping.
        gogopuppygogo 6y ago
        If you think Amazon is bad try buying women’s clothes online from a discount retailer. Amazon puts them all to shame.
  - skybrian 6y ago
    It seems like Walmart has made pretty major investments?
- gogopuppygogo 6y ago
  Keeping my eye on secondaries becoming available for cloud kitchens. Travis seems to have nailed where the industry sill rebound. Small owners will lose their entire business in this pandemic and then get started again leasing a space and relying on delivery apps to serve customers. Seems like a major disruptor.
  - nugget 6y ago
    Same here. I think most of the logistical overhead of a traditional small restaurant will be commoditized and abstracted away by cloud kitchen providers, a marketing/rewards layer, and delivery companies. The barriers to entry will come down, but competition will increase and margins may decrease. We'll be left with fewer "restauranteurs" and more chefs who can sit in the cockpit and simply plan and execute on menus. Since physical location is no longer a moat and menus are easily replicated, they will have to compete and win on brand. It will be interesting to see the margins on delivery-only versus indoor dining once the pandemic is behind us.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  > And it feels like the disruption can happen faster now; like nobody is safe^ ^ in industries that meet the following criteria: - Customer base has always-on internet connectivity - Integration points into meat space are already digitized - Is not regulated, or is regulated in such a way that regulations can be ignored / externalized
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- birdyrooster 6y ago
  Ahh yes the future where we've already priced in the destruction of our planet due to global warming but somehow the valuations keep increasing. But I am ranting again... as for Tesla... It's all this frothy fed money and Elon, the guy steering the damned ship, doesn't even think the value is warranted. He's been saying for a year that the company literally cannot live up to the hype and the price will need to correct. I think investors are going to lose out big and Elon is going to look like the bad guy. After all, he kept irresponsibly using the Reality Distortion Field Generator which Jobs, peace be upon him, left him in his estate. In the year 2017, Musk claimed that by 2019, the world would have cars that can drive itself while the passenger sleeps. He just didn't mention it would drive you into a highway divider head-on at 80mph. Damn these rants.
  - kjksf 6y ago
    "frothy fed money" doesn't explain anything because it doesn't seem to flow to companies that are other than Tesla. And you're mis-representing what Musk says or thinks. He tweeted, once, "the stock price is too high". That's it. It could have been a joke. It certainly doesn't imply that he doesn't think the value is unwarranted. As to "but Elon said..." blame game, here's Ford, in 2016, saying they'll have self driving cars in 2021: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/17/business/ford-promises-fleets-of-driverless-cars-within-five-years.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/17/business/ford-promises-fl... Tesla just released FSD beta, capable of doing fully intervention-less drives (sometimes). What does Ford has today?
    - Muanh 6y ago
      Stock price to high could have been a reference to the future stock split.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - nickik 6y ago
    What Elon actually said, if you would listen to him and not just over react to tweets as you seem to do, you would know that what he said was 'Tesla currently doesn't justify that stock price, you have to believe in its future execution' and he also added 'I believe we will get there and eventually the stock will be higher then it is now'. And its also funny that people relentlessly shit on Elon for the few predictions he has gotten wrong, and ignore all the correct predictions. Funny how that works when you constantly prove everybody wrong but nobody remembers all those idiots who were wrong. Elon himself says he is giving median outcome predictions, half of his predictions are assumed by him to be wrong. Also funny how one accident of a system that save countless lives is used to shit on him, but giving him credit for the countless lives that the system saved are ignored. You should reevaluate your priorities.
fastball 6y ago
> Is it overvalued or in a bubble Or neither...

nugget 6y ago

Investors want to "buy the future" and seem to have placed an enormous premium on companies that are disruptive to the status quo. It's hard to say whether it's a bubble or not, because value is always part perception. I will say that the current period feels more disruptive than any I have lived through in the past (dot com 1.0, 2008-2009). And it feels like the disruption can happen faster now; like nobody is safe, and any older Fortune 1000 company can be rendered obsolete within a decade by a new startup.

MattGaiser 6y ago
And the existing companies companies do very little about their competition. I didn't invest in Amazon earlier as I thought the retailers would invest in trying to compete. Nope.
- gogopuppygogo 6y ago
  Retailers are largely still not profitable with internet sales. Pre-pandemic a brick and mortar was doing about 5-10% via online and it was at best break even. Why would you invest money in something that was unprofitable when Amazon wasn’t even profitable for so long?
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    The problem most retailers face is that competing with Amazon requires substantial, multi-year capex into their supply chains. The more forward thinking realized that the catch-up bill was only going to get more expensive, as Amazon continued growing and optimizing. The less forward thinking... well, there's Sears. As consumers, we rarely see "how" free 2-day shipping, same day delivery, BOPIS, etc. But suffice it to say, it's very expensive to retool legacy supply chains optimized for brick and mortar inventory delivery. Kudos to Walmart, Target, and Home Depot for seeing what was coming.
    - quickthrower2 6y ago
      One way to outdo amazon in your niche is a better user experience. It’s not to hard seeing how bad amazons ux is. You need to attract people who value trust over pure price.
      - ethbr0 6y ago
        At some point, rubber meets physical road though. You can't offer 2 day shipping, if your supply chain doesn't support it profitably. Amazon's genius was leveraging marketplace and FBA to scale the logistics they also used (gee, kinda like AWS) while taking a cut.
        quickthrower2 6y ago
        Well that's market segmentation. Some people want it to come quick. Others care about other things. I doubt 100% of people place 100% priority on delivery speed. In particular, I personally don't use Amazon much. Granted not in the US so maybe the site is different etc. But to me they are like an 'ebay' in terms of my trust in what they deliver, when sometimes I want a 'department store'. Now not everyone is like me but I suspect enough people are that Amazon isn't going to take over all shopping.
      - gogopuppygogo 6y ago
        If you think Amazon is bad try buying women’s clothes online from a discount retailer. Amazon puts them all to shame.
- skybrian 6y ago
  It seems like Walmart has made pretty major investments?
gogopuppygogo 6y ago
Keeping my eye on secondaries becoming available for cloud kitchens. Travis seems to have nailed where the industry sill rebound. Small owners will lose their entire business in this pandemic and then get started again leasing a space and relying on delivery apps to serve customers. Seems like a major disruptor.
- nugget 6y ago
  Same here. I think most of the logistical overhead of a traditional small restaurant will be commoditized and abstracted away by cloud kitchen providers, a marketing/rewards layer, and delivery companies. The barriers to entry will come down, but competition will increase and margins may decrease. We'll be left with fewer "restauranteurs" and more chefs who can sit in the cockpit and simply plan and execute on menus. Since physical location is no longer a moat and menus are easily replicated, they will have to compete and win on brand. It will be interesting to see the margins on delivery-only versus indoor dining once the pandemic is behind us.
ethbr0 6y ago
> And it feels like the disruption can happen faster now; like nobody is safe^ ^ in industries that meet the following criteria: - Customer base has always-on internet connectivity - Integration points into meat space are already digitized - Is not regulated, or is regulated in such a way that regulations can be ignored / externalized
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
birdyrooster 6y ago
Ahh yes the future where we've already priced in the destruction of our planet due to global warming but somehow the valuations keep increasing. But I am ranting again... as for Tesla... It's all this frothy fed money and Elon, the guy steering the damned ship, doesn't even think the value is warranted. He's been saying for a year that the company literally cannot live up to the hype and the price will need to correct. I think investors are going to lose out big and Elon is going to look like the bad guy. After all, he kept irresponsibly using the Reality Distortion Field Generator which Jobs, peace be upon him, left him in his estate. In the year 2017, Musk claimed that by 2019, the world would have cars that can drive itself while the passenger sleeps. He just didn't mention it would drive you into a highway divider head-on at 80mph. Damn these rants.
- kjksf 6y ago
  "frothy fed money" doesn't explain anything because it doesn't seem to flow to companies that are other than Tesla. And you're mis-representing what Musk says or thinks. He tweeted, once, "the stock price is too high". That's it. It could have been a joke. It certainly doesn't imply that he doesn't think the value is unwarranted. As to "but Elon said..." blame game, here's Ford, in 2016, saying they'll have self driving cars in 2021: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/17/business/ford-promises-fleets-of-driverless-cars-within-five-years.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/17/business/ford-promises-fl... Tesla just released FSD beta, capable of doing fully intervention-less drives (sometimes). What does Ford has today?
  - Muanh 6y ago
    Stock price to high could have been a reference to the future stock split.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- nickik 6y ago
  What Elon actually said, if you would listen to him and not just over react to tweets as you seem to do, you would know that what he said was 'Tesla currently doesn't justify that stock price, you have to believe in its future execution' and he also added 'I believe we will get there and eventually the stock will be higher then it is now'. And its also funny that people relentlessly shit on Elon for the few predictions he has gotten wrong, and ignore all the correct predictions. Funny how that works when you constantly prove everybody wrong but nobody remembers all those idiots who were wrong. Elon himself says he is giving median outcome predictions, half of his predictions are assumed by him to be wrong. Also funny how one accident of a system that save countless lives is used to shit on him, but giving him credit for the countless lives that the system saved are ignored. You should reevaluate your priorities.

fastball 6y ago

> Is it overvalued or in a bubble Or neither...