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So this guy was pretty active in the TeslaQ community. They believed Tesla to be (extremely) overvalued in 2017-2019 on the grounds that they would never become

So this guy was pretty active in the TeslaQ community. They believed Tesla to be (extremely) overvalued in 2017-2019 on the grounds that they would never become profitable.. or something. They lost a lot of money shorting Tesla. https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/91aha1/montana_skeptic_known_twitter_tesla_bear_deletes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/91aha1/montana... Anyways, seems like he's keeping the grudge alive. They were right about a couple of things back then. But majorly wrong in aggregate and with respect to the outcome.

dozerly 4mo ago
To be fair, they were overvalued in those days as well. Just because the on-paper value went up doesn’t make their statements false, it just means we’ve continued the charade.
- satvikpendem 4mo ago
  Or maybe that's just what value is, what someone else would pay for something.
  - zygology 4mo ago
    and it turns out people can be convinced to overpay for hot air and "futurism" does that make it truly valuable?
- prolly97 4mo ago
  When I followed TeslaQ, the valuation was around 60b. Today Tesla has 39b in accumulated retained earning (pr latest 10k, not q). If the thesis was that Tesla would be unable to create a system that would churn out cars that could be sold at scale with an economic surplus, then we have to reject it.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - rich_sasha 4mo ago
    I mean. Sure. Value is ultimately what someone will pay for something, and the name of the game is to buy low and sell high. People who bought TSLA made money. The point is, it's completely irrational - like winning lottery 3x in a row. Tesla's PE ratio, depending on how you look at it, something like 200-350. That means that if nothing changes, the expected return of earnings on your investment is 0.3-0.5%. You'll struggle to find a riskless fixed income instrument paying this little. Ok, so clearly that's not why people buy this. They hope the earnings will increase, and/or the value of the stock. Seeing as you can lock in 4.5% riskless yield for 10 years, you'd hope for at least this much from a stock - realistically much more. Let's call it 7% - still low methinks but so be it. That's 14-25x more than it earns now. You could say you don't care about earnings - just about price increase. Sure. But even to maintain the meagre PE ratio, earnings would have to double over 10 years. But realistically - this PE seems crazy for anything other than a crazy-high-growth stock. Which maybe Tesla is now but can't be forever. If it crawls down to a meagre 50x PE in 10 years time, to make your 7% return, earnings would still need to increase 8-14x in that time. Maybe they can do it. They now sell, apparently, about 2% of all cars. No idea if total car production is stable; if it stays the same, and their margins stay the same, Tesla would need to increase their market share 8-14x too, to 16-28%. Maybe they can improve their margins and sell fewer cars, yet make more money - but typically increasing market share comes with lower profit margins as you lower the price to sell more stuff. This is a veery bullish scenario. This is something an investment analyst for any other stock would need to sweat blood to argue. Yet this is what youre committing to when buying Tesla today. Of course none of it really matters at the end of the day. Prices can levitate forever given enough believers. Wars can apparently be declared won with tweets with nothing to back them up - repeatedly. But if you think reality will come at some point, this is what is needed for Tesla to make sense as an investment.
    - ggreer 4mo ago
      Tesla's valuation is high because investors expect them to sell goods & services other than cars, such as autonomous vehicle rides and humanoid robots for domestic & industrial use. Who knows if they'll be able to pull it off, but an analysis that treats Tesla as a car company misses why investors have priced so much growth into the company.
  - bryanlarsen 4mo ago
    And Elon has also acknowledged that they came within a hair of going bankrupt during that model 3 production ramp up. Tesla was either going to go bankrupt or become quite valuable, and their proper valuation would have been based on the unknowable odds of the two scenarios. Maybe it wa a 1% chance of going bankrupt, maybe it was 99%.
bmink 4mo ago
To be fair, few could have anticipated that Tesla and Musk would be unaffected by valid scrutiny and criticism. This is also addressed in the article: > E. DON’T TRY TO SHORT SPACEX!! > Elon Musk is a cult figure. Moreover, he has again and again proven himself immune to any meaningful market, legal, or regulatory scrutiny. > Musk’s detractors have been correct about Tesla’s terrible fundamentals, its Full Self-Driving lies, its robotaxi fantasies, its shaky accounting. But when they have imagined these things might affect the stock price, they have been wrong.
- prolly97 4mo ago
  All that. But also he makes products so compelling that people who dislike him drives in them. "Fuck Elon" gotta be an all time top seller among bumper stickers. > few could have anticipated that Tesla and Musk would be unaffected by valid scrutiny and criticism. This almost implies that the scrutiny itself, and not the economic reality, should be the reason of Teslas demise or otherwise lesser financial outcome. Which seems a little self referential. If Elon doesn't wash his hands after peeing, and we pointed it out, that would be valid criticism. Ewww pee-hands. But the economic reality and aggregate outcome wouldn't change. Like not even if the frontpage of WSJ, The Times or FT said "eww Elon pee-hands". And that the thing - with enterprises of this scale, you could always nitpick and find some things that are suboptimal. But we gotta see it in proportion. 100mm accounting error in Tesla is not the same as a 100mm accounting error in the local McDonalds franchise. For one the error is magnitudes larger than their real economic footprint. For the other it's a rounding error. TL;DR: I hear you - yes there is valid criticism. We just gotta see it in proportion. I like Teslas cars. But I don't like pee-hands.
  - Zigurd 4mo ago
    Tesla isn't the technology, performance, luxury, infotainment, or value leader in EV's any longer. If you think the Germans know what the salute meant, and they stopped buying the cars, you can take the hint and have a lot of excellent choices. There is no future prospect of explosive growth at Tesla any longer. That price to earnings ratio is not less absurd for having lasted this long.
general1465 4mo ago
Grudge? I would say he was spot on. And he still is.
- l23k4 4mo ago
  How exactly do those numbers add up in your mind? At around $60B valuation sometime in 2018, how was TeslaQ spot on? Are you maybe claiming that Tesla is lying in their current disclosures?
  - general1465 4mo ago
    So what is the reason of Tesla having greater valuation than Toyota while making 3 car models and you can't connect Apple Car / Android Auto into either ? Do you think that Kathie Woods trying to memestock Tesla to 2000USD/share is normal? Or do you think that promises like 20 million cars / year within 2030 while having extremely limited amount of models were ever achievable?
    - l23k4 4mo ago
      Tesla has been able to demonstrate significant growth which Toyota hasn't. >Do you think that Kathie Woods trying to memestock Tesla to 2000USD/share is normal? Frankly, I don't see why any sane adult would care enough to have an opinion. >Or do you think that promises like 20 million cars / year within 2030 while having extremely limited amount of models were ever achievable? I doubt the timeline was, I don't see why the model range would really be an issue.
      - piva00 4mo ago
        > Tesla has been able to demonstrate significant growth which Toyota hasn't. That doesn't mean much when Toyota was already a behemoth company, it's much harder to grow when you are already enormous.
eboy 4mo ago
[dead]
thisisit 4mo ago
Market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent by Keynes says everything about what happened here. But to say there’s a “grudge” seems to ignore another market fact “past results are not indicative of future results”. He might be right this time around for all you know. Is there anything you disagree apart from saying he is a Musk hater? Otherwise this comment is just unhelpful.

dozerly 4mo ago

To be fair, they were overvalued in those days as well. Just because the on-paper value went up doesn’t make their statements false, it just means we’ve continued the charade.

satvikpendem 4mo ago
Or maybe that's just what value is, what someone else would pay for something.
- zygology 4mo ago
  and it turns out people can be convinced to overpay for hot air and "futurism" does that make it truly valuable?
prolly97 4mo ago
When I followed TeslaQ, the valuation was around 60b. Today Tesla has 39b in accumulated retained earning (pr latest 10k, not q). If the thesis was that Tesla would be unable to create a system that would churn out cars that could be sold at scale with an economic surplus, then we have to reject it.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- rich_sasha 4mo ago
  I mean. Sure. Value is ultimately what someone will pay for something, and the name of the game is to buy low and sell high. People who bought TSLA made money. The point is, it's completely irrational - like winning lottery 3x in a row. Tesla's PE ratio, depending on how you look at it, something like 200-350. That means that if nothing changes, the expected return of earnings on your investment is 0.3-0.5%. You'll struggle to find a riskless fixed income instrument paying this little. Ok, so clearly that's not why people buy this. They hope the earnings will increase, and/or the value of the stock. Seeing as you can lock in 4.5% riskless yield for 10 years, you'd hope for at least this much from a stock - realistically much more. Let's call it 7% - still low methinks but so be it. That's 14-25x more than it earns now. You could say you don't care about earnings - just about price increase. Sure. But even to maintain the meagre PE ratio, earnings would have to double over 10 years. But realistically - this PE seems crazy for anything other than a crazy-high-growth stock. Which maybe Tesla is now but can't be forever. If it crawls down to a meagre 50x PE in 10 years time, to make your 7% return, earnings would still need to increase 8-14x in that time. Maybe they can do it. They now sell, apparently, about 2% of all cars. No idea if total car production is stable; if it stays the same, and their margins stay the same, Tesla would need to increase their market share 8-14x too, to 16-28%. Maybe they can improve their margins and sell fewer cars, yet make more money - but typically increasing market share comes with lower profit margins as you lower the price to sell more stuff. This is a veery bullish scenario. This is something an investment analyst for any other stock would need to sweat blood to argue. Yet this is what youre committing to when buying Tesla today. Of course none of it really matters at the end of the day. Prices can levitate forever given enough believers. Wars can apparently be declared won with tweets with nothing to back them up - repeatedly. But if you think reality will come at some point, this is what is needed for Tesla to make sense as an investment.
  - ggreer 4mo ago
    Tesla's valuation is high because investors expect them to sell goods & services other than cars, such as autonomous vehicle rides and humanoid robots for domestic & industrial use. Who knows if they'll be able to pull it off, but an analysis that treats Tesla as a car company misses why investors have priced so much growth into the company.
- bryanlarsen 4mo ago
  And Elon has also acknowledged that they came within a hair of going bankrupt during that model 3 production ramp up. Tesla was either going to go bankrupt or become quite valuable, and their proper valuation would have been based on the unknowable odds of the two scenarios. Maybe it wa a 1% chance of going bankrupt, maybe it was 99%.

bmink 4mo ago

To be fair, few could have anticipated that Tesla and Musk would be unaffected by valid scrutiny and criticism. This is also addressed in the article: > E. DON’T TRY TO SHORT SPACEX!! > Elon Musk is a cult figure. Moreover, he has again and again proven himself immune to any meaningful market, legal, or regulatory scrutiny. > Musk’s detractors have been correct about Tesla’s terrible fundamentals, its Full Self-Driving lies, its robotaxi fantasies, its shaky accounting. But when they have imagined these things might affect the stock price, they have been wrong.

prolly97 4mo ago
All that. But also he makes products so compelling that people who dislike him drives in them. "Fuck Elon" gotta be an all time top seller among bumper stickers. > few could have anticipated that Tesla and Musk would be unaffected by valid scrutiny and criticism. This almost implies that the scrutiny itself, and not the economic reality, should be the reason of Teslas demise or otherwise lesser financial outcome. Which seems a little self referential. If Elon doesn't wash his hands after peeing, and we pointed it out, that would be valid criticism. Ewww pee-hands. But the economic reality and aggregate outcome wouldn't change. Like not even if the frontpage of WSJ, The Times or FT said "eww Elon pee-hands". And that the thing - with enterprises of this scale, you could always nitpick and find some things that are suboptimal. But we gotta see it in proportion. 100mm accounting error in Tesla is not the same as a 100mm accounting error in the local McDonalds franchise. For one the error is magnitudes larger than their real economic footprint. For the other it's a rounding error. TL;DR: I hear you - yes there is valid criticism. We just gotta see it in proportion. I like Teslas cars. But I don't like pee-hands.
- Zigurd 4mo ago
  Tesla isn't the technology, performance, luxury, infotainment, or value leader in EV's any longer. If you think the Germans know what the salute meant, and they stopped buying the cars, you can take the hint and have a lot of excellent choices. There is no future prospect of explosive growth at Tesla any longer. That price to earnings ratio is not less absurd for having lasted this long.

general1465 4mo ago

Grudge? I would say he was spot on. And he still is.

l23k4 4mo ago
How exactly do those numbers add up in your mind? At around $60B valuation sometime in 2018, how was TeslaQ spot on? Are you maybe claiming that Tesla is lying in their current disclosures?
- general1465 4mo ago
  So what is the reason of Tesla having greater valuation than Toyota while making 3 car models and you can't connect Apple Car / Android Auto into either ? Do you think that Kathie Woods trying to memestock Tesla to 2000USD/share is normal? Or do you think that promises like 20 million cars / year within 2030 while having extremely limited amount of models were ever achievable?
  - l23k4 4mo ago
    Tesla has been able to demonstrate significant growth which Toyota hasn't. >Do you think that Kathie Woods trying to memestock Tesla to 2000USD/share is normal? Frankly, I don't see why any sane adult would care enough to have an opinion. >Or do you think that promises like 20 million cars / year within 2030 while having extremely limited amount of models were ever achievable? I doubt the timeline was, I don't see why the model range would really be an issue.
    - piva00 4mo ago
      > Tesla has been able to demonstrate significant growth which Toyota hasn't. That doesn't mean much when Toyota was already a behemoth company, it's much harder to grow when you are already enormous.

eboy 4mo ago

[dead]

thisisit 4mo ago

Market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent by Keynes says everything about what happened here. But to say there’s a “grudge” seems to ignore another market fact “past results are not indicative of future results”. He might be right this time around for all you know. Is there anything you disagree apart from saying he is a Musk hater? Otherwise this comment is just unhelpful.