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It’s wild that $goog is so undervalued (p/e 27) given Alphabet owns Waymo in addition to everything else, and yet Tesla is so overvalued (p/e 243!!!) despite ze
by agnosticmantis 1y ago
It’s wild that $goog is so undervalued (p/e 27) given Alphabet owns Waymo in addition to everything else, and yet Tesla is so overvalued (p/e 243!!!) despite zero Robotaxis in the near (or far) future and lackluster sales.
Goes to show empty promises and fraudulent showmanship sell better than actual working products that people use.
- esalman 1y agoIndeed. The richest showman that ever lived and successfully duped both liberal and conservative population and politicians. Well deserved I say.
- izzydata 1y agoDeceiving people doesn't mean you deserve your gains.
- esseph 1y ago"Deserve" is a human construction.
- lobsterthief 1y agoWe are humans.
- esseph 1y agoRight, but we're adults, we realize that "deserve" is only as real as the ability to enforce it.
- spaceman_2020 1y agoWild that people will call the founder of SpaceX a "showman"
- luma 1y agoLet's settle on calling the founder of Hyperloop a "showman".
- lacy_tinpot 1y agoYes. Because we should all be judged by our failures.
- noodletheworld 1y agoHey, Im a fan. Fail fast. Build things. Most very rich people just sit and roll in their money in the finance markets like scrooge mcduck. But… I think the performance in the whitehouse was performative nonesense. What a waste of everyone’s time for the sake of appearances. More building things, less dancing please Elon.
- derektank 1y agoHe has done many impressive things, but one consistent thing about the man is that he always over promises and regularly under delivers. The examples are too numerous to count (smashing the CT's "armour" glass, humans to Mars in 2024, Thai cave submarine, naming your driver assistance technology Full Self Driving, etc, etc) Perhaps that's simply the price of achievement, but Showman is apt
- skybrian 1y agoThat is a real, important accomplishment, but he's also a showman.
- levocardia 1y agoThere are about 1,500 Waymo cars in existence, versus about 7,000,000 Teslas in the last seven years.
- aqme28 1y agoBut there are 0 Teslas that are as effective at self-driving as Waymo, so they're still ahead.
- wilg 1y agoI mean FSD is pretty good and useful. But yes, not unsupervised.
- LanceJones 1y agoMy Model Y in Vancouver drives me to and from work daily. I cannot get a Waymo here -- and I certainly cannot purchase one privately. Which is more effective where I live?
- dagenix 1y agoYou are supposed to supervise Tesla FSD. Waymo doesn't require someone in the driver's seat at all. They aren't the same thing.
- Workaccount2 1y agoTeslas have a ~about 500 miles between interventions (they don't release actual data, no surprise), whereas Waymo is at around 17,000 miles. That's a 34x divide. At full scale that's something like 30% of Teslas having an intervention every day.
- signatoremo 1y agoI don’t doubt that Waymo car is more advanced than FSD, but that comparison isn’t as impressive as it sounds. The numbers of FSD equipped Teslas dwarfs that of Waymos, and they are available everywhere, not just selective cities. You have to take that into account. Teslas is also much cheaper, and easier to scale. Tesla has better growth potential even if their tech is less impressive.
- LanceJones 1y agoOvervalued by traditional (PE) means. I've ridden in Waymo (50+) and Austin Robotaxis (12). Tesla has Waymo beat in terms of human-like feel, interior features (sync to your own Spotify, Youtube, etc). When Tesla removes the passenger seat monitor, scaling will happen much faster than Waymo... Tesla just received the initial license for driverless Robotaxi in Nevada. Tesla also produces more Robotaxi-capable Model Ys in ~6 hours as Waymo has cars in service (in total).
- CaliforniaKarl 1y agoWaymo does not have YouTube sync, but they do have Apotify sync.
- bugufu8f83 1y agoTesla's self-driving technology is a joke compared to Waymo's and the Tesla brand is extremely toxic now. I see from your other comments that you're big on Tesla (own several and have a son who works there) but as an unbiased observer I cannot fathom them winning this market.
- LanceJones 1y agoI have 2 AI4 Teslas with FSD, and I don't find V13.2.9 lacking at all in the Vancouver area. V14 will be a 10x increase in parameters, too. Why do you feel it's a "joke"?
- Fricken 1y agoTesla was SAE level 2 in 2013, and they are still SAE level 2. Waymo's Robotaxis are SAE level 4, and they can drive on public roads empty with no human supervision, both technically and legally.
- senordevnyc 1y agoAlso safely.
- 1y ago
- dmix 1y agoIf you buy Alphabet stock you're betting on the whole company doing well. Google makes around $300B a year. Uber's entire business makes around $50B and that took a decade. Waymo would have to become a major business to move Alphabet's stock price in the near term. Considering Waymo is very likely losing money, experiment very slowly with scaling up, and still raising billions in private capital outside Google... idk. Doesn't seem as simple as buy $goog in 2025. Otherwise I agree Tesla is a bit of a meme stock.
- mettamage 1y agoI don’t think Waymo is very likely a losing money experiment. I give them a 50% chance to be successful within the next 10 years. Successful being that self-driving cars are able to operate in 50% of the world/terrain types/region types, probably within another 10 years to scale up.
- robotresearcher 1y agoThey have already spent an enormous amount of money. It’s hard to see how they could make it back quickly, if ever. I’d like to be wrong, but I expect they will continue to be a money losing experiment for a long time yet.
- crazygringo 1y agoHow much money do they make off the average person in the value of ads shown per year? Now compare to how much money the average person spends on driving per year. If Waymo winds up running half the market in autonomous transportation over the next several decades, it'll make search look like peanuts in comparison.
- robotresearcher 1y agoThe entire global taxi market is ~$250B a year. Google made ~$265B from its ads last year.
- spaceman_2020 1y agoLargely because investors fear that Google's new products (especially AI) will cannibalize its massively lucrative ads business.
- thatguy1874 1y agobut if they're google's products how would they cannabalize ads biz. would revenue not just shift? or do you believe ai search will be overly adopted but not as profitable?
- israrkhan 1y agoI think its the later. And also the fact that they are not the firstmover in AI search. More people know about chatgpt than they know about gemini
- toast0 1y agoGoogle was late to search, late to smartphones, late to internet email. I'm having a hard time thinking of any of their large markets where they were a first mover, maybe YouTube-ish, widespread user uploaded internet video wasn't meaningfully available before the rise of YouTube. On topic, Waymo is clearly a first mover in self-driving, having the first legal commercial services. But, being the first mover is usually more of a disadvantage than an advantage, IMHO.
- SchemaLoad 1y agoI'm struggling to think of a single product where the first mover won. At best they are able to hold some market share like Dropbox or Slack, but eventually big tech moves in and crushes them by just offering the same thing but cheaper and more integrated.
- hadlock 1y agoFear is a bit of an understatement
- Eridrus 1y agoGOOGL is up like 25% over the last few weeks after they resolved the DoJ lawsuit about Search bundling. Clearly there were some investors who thought that was a material risk to the business. Tesla is clearly a meme stock though, and an example of how the market can say irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
- supportengineer 1y agoI finally capitulated and bought a few shares of TSLA, shorting wasn't working.
- Yoric 1y agoSo you think it's going to raise further?
- ethbr1 1y agoNo, they were just scared of missing out.
- giveita 1y agoI stuck some money in Uber at 90 recently based on fundamentals. I might be wrong but at least I used a calculator to be wrong :) and will learn. It needs to beat Sp500 to be considered right.
- Retric 1y agoSaying it’s “right” based on outcome alone is like saying ~half the people in Vegas and betting on black made a good decision. You can win and still have made a poor decision. A better approach is to look at the full range of your bets and try and decide if the betting strategy was good. But that gets difficult when you consider outcomes are linked through wider economic trends.
- giveita 1y ago
- fastball 1y agoTesla is literally operating a robotaxi service.
- FireBeyond 1y agoA whole 15 cars, with "supervisors" in the drivers seat! And only last week did they even open up the waitlist to non-influencers.
- fastball 1y agoThe supervisors are not in the driver's seat.
- Workaccount2 1y agohttps://electrek.co/2025/09/03/tesla-moves-robotaxi-safety-monitor-passenger-drivers-seat/ https://electrek.co/2025/09/03/tesla-moves-robotaxi-safety-m... The day this news was released, Elon released the video of him talking to the Optimus bot to overshadow the news. Showman gonna showman.
- fastball 1y agoTIL. I stand corrected. Though worth pointing out (as the article does) that on September 1st, new legislation in Texas was passed adding some restrictions to autonomous vehicles. So seems reasonably likely this is more regulatory than necessary.
- FireBeyond 1y agoI wonder what motivated Texas, who was famously very open to such testing, to tighten down the regulations more after time?
- fastball 1y agoI take back my "standing corrected" actually. It appears that the safety person being in the driver seat is only for trips involving highways, which Waymo hasn't launched yet either.
- exolymph 1y agoStocks are narrative-driven, and sometimes this aspect swamps the "fundamentals." Keynesian beauty contests all the way down.
- CGMthrowaway 1y agoGoogle is just not a risk taker these days. You don't risk you don't get rewarded.
- gerash 1y agoI believe TSLA also represents their humanoid robot segment with some questionable addressable market definitions done by investment analysts. I believe it’s overvalued but they are a forcing function for the other tech companies to push ahead
- sitzkrieg 1y agoPE has been irrelevant since the dotcom crash if not sooner. us equities are no based in reality
- OJFord 1y agoBut the earnings of Waymo (or hypothetically Tesla) are nothing in Alphabet as a whole. If you get a great deal on your house and then massively overpay for some avocados, the latter's going to barely move your overall wealth.
- ViscountPenguin 1y agoWaymo is a small portion of Alphabets business, while cars are a massive portion of Tesla's. If waymo was seperated out from Alphabet maybe it's p/E would be that high.
- Rover222 1y agoBecause some people read beyond headlines and realize that Tesla will most likely dominate with Robotaxi. Their traditional consumer vehicle revenue could pale in comparison. And Optimus could be another order of magnitude larger. That’s the optimistic bull case. It’s not impossible. Tesla will be able to scale Robotaxi much quicker than Waymo can scale.
- nradov 1y agoWhy? In principle the basic Waymo technology could be adapted to work on any modern vehicle. They aren't dependent on Jaguar manufacturing capacity to scale up.
- surajrmal 1y agoIt's capital intensive to make all of those devices. Tesla's strategy is to rent back devices they sell to consumers. This lowers the necessary capital costs and will enable quick scaling. It's a similar ploy to how Amazon quickly grew its delivery capabilities.
- nradov 1y agoAlphabet has $95B of cash and short-term investments on hand. I don't think lack of capital is the obstacle to scaling here. https://abc.xyz/investor/sec-filings/quarterly-filings/2025/ https://abc.xyz/investor/sec-filings/quarterly-filings/2025/ Tesla still has no autonomous vehicle that customers can actually buy, let alone rent back for taxi service. So any "strategy" remains entirely hypothetical.
- hollerith 1y ago>Alphabet has $95B of cash and short-term investments Not only that, but also they could probably raise 10 times that much by creating new shares and selling them (if they had a plausible story to tell investors as to why the money would be well spent).
- senordevnyc 1y ago