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Hey, you’re not going to like hearing this, and feel free to ignore, but $TSLA is c. 20% below it’s peak valuation and still is trading at 100x earnings on pret

by RC_ITR 5y ago

Hey, you’re not going to like hearing this, and feel free to ignore, but $TSLA is c. 20% below it’s peak valuation and still is trading at 100x earnings on pretty mediocre growth. It’s still wildly overvalued, people don’t talk about it as much though since the price is flat, not up. Be careful of confirmation bias.

jquery 5y ago
I think you just proved his point. NKLA was an outright scam, and Tesla wasn’t, but the way many people talked about Tesla was as if it was a scam selling vapor ware. It took a very keen eye indeed to tease out fact from fiction. Tesla may have “mediocre growth” as you claim (I strongly disagree) but the number of Tesla cars I see on the road are a testament that the company is no scam.
- Pyramus 5y ago
  Interested how you define 'scam'. Would you say Wirecard was a scam (their payments network is still in use today), or Enron? My point is that the fact a company is producing a product does not necessarily disqualify them from being a 'scam'.
  - habitue 5y ago
    A scam can't be defined by the mere legal definition of fraud. A true scam is all about the feeling of people on the internet. Somehow people always forget that.
marvin 5y ago
Not sure I'd classify 100% year-on-year growth to revenues of $12 billion as mediocre, during a year when the production lines of two of their three cars were shut down for almost an entire quarter and we also went through the worst pandemic since 1918. The valuation is still steep by earnings and compared to likely competitors, but it's not based on speculation devoid of observations.
- cma 5y ago
  Tesla also reopened their Freemont plant within days against health department orders saying they were producing ventilators and then delivering expired bipap machines bought in bulk while really working on luxury cars. The pandemic didn't slow them much because they just violated the orders.
ajross 5y ago
Tesla wasn't faking videos by rolling a nonfunctional truck down a hill. They're shipping almost a million cars a year now (looks to be like 850k in 2021 I think). Mine took me to Yellowstone a few weeks back. Now, sure, "overvalued" is a very reasonable argument. I'd even agree. That's not the kind of rhetoric that was deployed against the company and you know it. Which is why people didn't believe folks screaming that Nikola was a scam.
- sethd 5y ago
  They had a video on their website for years (taken down very recently, I believe) that showed a FSD "self-driving" Tesla with the narrator saying something like "the driver is only present for legal reasons".
  - ajross 5y ago
    And again, people see arguments like this attempting to liken Tesla to a clearly fraudulent scam (the truck didn't even go!), and is it any wonder they threw up their hands and figured NKLA was a good bet? Look, nitpick about FSD if you like (I bought it, FWIW -- 100% happy customer). But don't claim it's the same as faking a motor in a truck that didn't have one.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  Well but Tesla is still calling their drive assist autopilot and Musk has at multiple times in the past said full independent driving is just around the corner and all these "around the corner" dates have past and there still is not fully independent autopilot. So yes there is a difference in scale, but not in principle I would say. Musk is also lying (I don't believe that by now he still believes we will have unassisted autopilot next year) to keep the stock price high.
  - ansible 5y ago
    So, full autonomous is... very hard. It is easy to get most of the way there, and then think you're nearly ready to ship a product. Staying on the road, obeying traffic laws, not hitting other cars, this is just the beginning. There are so many oddball situations you see when driving that an autonomous system also has to handle. One of the big ones is construction, and that alone brings a whole host of issues including wacky lane changes, following the direction of human workers, missing or misleading lane markings, debris, and more.

by RC_ITR 5y ago

jquery 5y ago

I think you just proved his point. NKLA was an outright scam, and Tesla wasn’t, but the way many people talked about Tesla was as if it was a scam selling vapor ware. It took a very keen eye indeed to tease out fact from fiction. Tesla may have “mediocre growth” as you claim (I strongly disagree) but the number of Tesla cars I see on the road are a testament that the company is no scam.

Pyramus 5y ago
Interested how you define 'scam'. Would you say Wirecard was a scam (their payments network is still in use today), or Enron? My point is that the fact a company is producing a product does not necessarily disqualify them from being a 'scam'.
- habitue 5y ago
  A scam can't be defined by the mere legal definition of fraud. A true scam is all about the feeling of people on the internet. Somehow people always forget that.

marvin 5y ago

Not sure I'd classify 100% year-on-year growth to revenues of $12 billion as mediocre, during a year when the production lines of two of their three cars were shut down for almost an entire quarter and we also went through the worst pandemic since 1918. The valuation is still steep by earnings and compared to likely competitors, but it's not based on speculation devoid of observations.

cma 5y ago
Tesla also reopened their Freemont plant within days against health department orders saying they were producing ventilators and then delivering expired bipap machines bought in bulk while really working on luxury cars. The pandemic didn't slow them much because they just violated the orders.

ajross 5y ago

Tesla wasn't faking videos by rolling a nonfunctional truck down a hill. They're shipping almost a million cars a year now (looks to be like 850k in 2021 I think). Mine took me to Yellowstone a few weeks back. Now, sure, "overvalued" is a very reasonable argument. I'd even agree. That's not the kind of rhetoric that was deployed against the company and you know it. Which is why people didn't believe folks screaming that Nikola was a scam.

sethd 5y ago
They had a video on their website for years (taken down very recently, I believe) that showed a FSD "self-driving" Tesla with the narrator saying something like "the driver is only present for legal reasons".
- ajross 5y ago
  And again, people see arguments like this attempting to liken Tesla to a clearly fraudulent scam (the truck didn't even go!), and is it any wonder they threw up their hands and figured NKLA was a good bet? Look, nitpick about FSD if you like (I bought it, FWIW -- 100% happy customer). But don't claim it's the same as faking a motor in a truck that didn't have one.
cycomanic 5y ago
Well but Tesla is still calling their drive assist autopilot and Musk has at multiple times in the past said full independent driving is just around the corner and all these "around the corner" dates have past and there still is not fully independent autopilot. So yes there is a difference in scale, but not in principle I would say. Musk is also lying (I don't believe that by now he still believes we will have unassisted autopilot next year) to keep the stock price high.
- ansible 5y ago
  So, full autonomous is... very hard. It is easy to get most of the way there, and then think you're nearly ready to ship a product. Staying on the road, obeying traffic laws, not hitting other cars, this is just the beginning. There are so many oddball situations you see when driving that an autonomous system also has to handle. One of the big ones is construction, and that alone brings a whole host of issues including wacky lane changes, following the direction of human workers, missing or misleading lane markings, debris, and more.