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Whenever I talked about this with Tesla fans they kept parroting this line about Tesla being "a battery company that also makes cars" or similar. I can understa

by smcl 2y ago

Whenever I talked about this with Tesla fans they kept parroting this line about Tesla being "a battery company that also makes cars" or similar. I can understand that this (having some non-car products and a charging network) grants them an advantage of sorts, but they're by far and away the most valuable company by market cap, while having a fraction of the sales of companies like Toyota, GM, Honda etc. It's like the market is expecting Tesla to explode in sales in the coming years and I can't see it, not just because people are turning on Elon Musk but because I don't know if they can even build enough cars to meet that expected valuation if that demand was actually there.

nprateem 2y ago
People who can't think for themselves will happily parrot anything they've heard to mask their ignorance.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Moving to a new country with a different national language has given me a direct personal appreciation for what Dunning Kruger feels like from the inside. Some may parrot for tribal reasons, but there's a huge number who have a superficial knowledge and it simply doesn't occur to them how deep their ignorance is — tribalism is one way critics are equal to fans in Musk's case (and not just that Musk's fans are parroting his shallow criticisms of everyone else), but the DK part applies to all of us. Even me pointing at P/E ratios here is merely one step up the ladder from looking at the share price, it's not a deep analysis, just a santiy check.
  - enslavedrobot 2y ago
    Having owned a ton of Tesla stock since 2018. I can tell you that your P/E analysis is very shallow. Anyone looking to determine the value of the company should at the very least read and understand the Tesla Master Plan 3 document. Their execution vs that plan is an actual metric you can use to project the future value of the company.
    - oblio 2y ago
      LOL. That's a generic description of the energy transition. It's not like the rest of the world is blind. Chinese companies are the champions of battery and solar panel manufacturing. Every major economy has major electric car manufacturers, China is ahead of everyone. Tesla's batteries are made in collaboration with LG Chem and someone else, I forgot who exactly. Your point is that you're expecting Tesla to monopolize the global energy storage and usage markets? It ain't working, if that's the plan. If reason returns, Tesla should probably be valued at less than Kia or Hyundai.
      - enslavedrobot 2y ago
        It's a description of Tesla's future business direction and a metric against which you can value the company. That's how you make meaningful models and value a business. P/E is meaningful only in context. Buying stocks based on PE is a very good way to lose money.
        oblio 2y ago
        And my point is that even with "their future business direction", their valuation makes no sense.
oblio 2y ago
It's worse than that. It turns out making electric cars is complicated but a lot of companies are transitioning already. Tesla fanboys were expecting Apple and Samsung to emerge out of the many phone manufacturers but it turns out... It's not the case. Mercedes has competent EVs, as do BMW, VW, Stellantis, Kia, Hyundai, etc and of course, all the Chinese brands. Also we've hit a temporary plateau in the EV transition as except for Chinese brands, everyone else is mostly making expensive models plus the infra isn't always there, so it looks like we need to wait for 2027-2028 to actually start seeing those 18-20-25k cars a lot of the world is waiting (that's when EVs actually start massively outselling combustion cars). More than that... Tesla is making all those batteries in partnership with battery companies. They're not some secret sauce.
bmicraft 2y ago
Apart from all those other reasons, the line is also incredibly stupid because they aren't even selling those batteries to anyone. (Those couple of "power walls" barely make a dent)

by smcl 2y ago

nprateem 2y ago

People who can't think for themselves will happily parrot anything they've heard to mask their ignorance.

ben_w 2y ago
Moving to a new country with a different national language has given me a direct personal appreciation for what Dunning Kruger feels like from the inside. Some may parrot for tribal reasons, but there's a huge number who have a superficial knowledge and it simply doesn't occur to them how deep their ignorance is — tribalism is one way critics are equal to fans in Musk's case (and not just that Musk's fans are parroting his shallow criticisms of everyone else), but the DK part applies to all of us. Even me pointing at P/E ratios here is merely one step up the ladder from looking at the share price, it's not a deep analysis, just a santiy check.
- enslavedrobot 2y ago
  Having owned a ton of Tesla stock since 2018. I can tell you that your P/E analysis is very shallow. Anyone looking to determine the value of the company should at the very least read and understand the Tesla Master Plan 3 document. Their execution vs that plan is an actual metric you can use to project the future value of the company.
  - oblio 2y ago
    LOL. That's a generic description of the energy transition. It's not like the rest of the world is blind. Chinese companies are the champions of battery and solar panel manufacturing. Every major economy has major electric car manufacturers, China is ahead of everyone. Tesla's batteries are made in collaboration with LG Chem and someone else, I forgot who exactly. Your point is that you're expecting Tesla to monopolize the global energy storage and usage markets? It ain't working, if that's the plan. If reason returns, Tesla should probably be valued at less than Kia or Hyundai.
    - enslavedrobot 2y ago
      It's a description of Tesla's future business direction and a metric against which you can value the company. That's how you make meaningful models and value a business. P/E is meaningful only in context. Buying stocks based on PE is a very good way to lose money.
      - oblio 2y ago
        And my point is that even with "their future business direction", their valuation makes no sense.

oblio 2y ago

It's worse than that. It turns out making electric cars is complicated but a lot of companies are transitioning already. Tesla fanboys were expecting Apple and Samsung to emerge out of the many phone manufacturers but it turns out... It's not the case. Mercedes has competent EVs, as do BMW, VW, Stellantis, Kia, Hyundai, etc and of course, all the Chinese brands. Also we've hit a temporary plateau in the EV transition as except for Chinese brands, everyone else is mostly making expensive models plus the infra isn't always there, so it looks like we need to wait for 2027-2028 to actually start seeing those 18-20-25k cars a lot of the world is waiting (that's when EVs actually start massively outselling combustion cars). More than that... Tesla is making all those batteries in partnership with battery companies. They're not some secret sauce.

bmicraft 2y ago

Apart from all those other reasons, the line is also incredibly stupid because they aren't even selling those batteries to anyone. (Those couple of "power walls" barely make a dent)