Tesla has been over-bought for years and everyone knows it, but as Keynes once said: the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. My strategy has just been to stay away. TSLA could blow up in the next 6 months, or it could go up for the next 6 years. To me, at least, it's not worth f'ing around and finding out, especially when the market as a whole is doing so well.
> especially when the market as a whole is doing so well.
… is it? There was some news maybe within the last month saying only the top 15 or so of s&p companies were the only companies showing healthy growth and everything else below that has barely any growth, is losing value or is stagnant.
This is why I care. I've been putting less into the Vanguard 500, and more into my own diverse individual stock picks... I want the S&P or similar, but without a few specific stocks like this one.
There's a few companies doing direct indexing like this, where you can give them a ban list for any given index: You can, say, also take out Microstrategy or something like that.
Now, as to whether those companies will remain solvent long enough, will give you simple enough taxes, and can keep expenses low while rebalancing is another story. You are doing frontier-ish things. It's not as if you have Vanguard or Fidelity offering products like that.
Actually I read the other day that it is because indexes rebalance. If you buy the shares in an index and then hold, your returns are much lower than an index fund that is rebalanced. Unfortunately I can't find reference.
I also like this quote:
For US stocks, Wu of Sparkline estimates that accounting for intangible assets would cut perceived overvaluation by about 25 to 50 per cent, relative to headline valuation metrics. “While the market is by no means cheap, once firms are given credit for their intangible assets, valuations look far less frothy than the headlines imply,” he says.
It's only about 1-2 percent of most broad market funds, but if you do care it should be relatively easy to hedge. TSLQ is a 2X TSLA short etf, so if you have 100K in index funds, you'd buy like $750 worth of this.
I moved to FSPTX a while back because it doesn't have TSLA. I'm not sure how long I'll stay there though, it has like a quarter of its holdings in NVDA now which has been great so far but it's going to hurt when the AI bubble pops.
I was always mystified about the value of Tesla stocks. The pe is still absurdly high and the market cap is bigger then probably all the big manufacturers combined. It's obvious that people are investing in musk as a person. But there has to be a correction sooner or later. Tesla has value as a car company, but their first mover advantage is dwindling. Add to that musks politics and it's not surprising that the executives are reading the writing on the wall.
They had, and still have, an immense first mover advantage in the internals of EVs - look at some of the mechanic analyses/teardowns of Tesla internals and it's a night-and-day difference against other US EVs in terms of engineering around reliability, simplicity, and efficiency.
But, they never actually followed that up with truly improving the the vehicle interior and all the other bits of build quality, and then doubled down with the Cybertruck, which has brilliant internals wrapped in bodywork that's impossible to clean and with trim that will literally fall off in the wrong weather.
One drawback cited consistently about Tesla cars is poor suspension. They may or may not have better design overall, and have better EV manufacturing than US competitors, but I don't see an "immense advantage" when they fail to address one of the things many users easily feel.
They designed the car bodies to be light for battery-related reasons, but in doing so, the cabins of even their luxury cars sound like budget economy vehicles.
Also one way Chinese EVs combat their efficiency disadvantage is fast charging and large batteries, and the charging cost is so negligible anyway that largely the user experience has been the same. Tesla has very little first mover advantage left against Chinese EVs, if any. It's sad that other Europe and US manufacturers haven't been able to be competitive, and probably Ford and GM will never be competitive because of protectionism.
If a lot of investors are in passive funds, they end up buying a lot of whatever is biggest... which drives up the prices... which makes those stocks bigger parts of the stock market... repeat until ???.
Right now about 45% of the market is passively invested, and economists estimate you'd need 80%+ passive investments for active investors to reliably beat the market. We're not close to it yet.
Perhaps that’d be different if you could afford to have a team of doctors monitor your bloodwork etc and adjust medication to maintain energy, a personal chef consulting with them to ensure your meals help that, stylists to pick out tailored clothes for each occasion, regular massage, personal training, etc.
They’re a different kind of rich that those who merely have a spare 30 million or so.
They have people to coordinate their housing, transportation and children.
They don't cook or clean for themselves, they can simply rent out luxury accomodations wherever they land and if an idea hits them at any hour then some person is being paid to answer the phone and figure out what the heck it actually means they should do at 3am when they thought of it.
And then when they turn up somewhere, they talk solely about how hard they worked before someone tells them their next meeting, where dinner will be tonight and here's your private driver.
This is a genuine question, because the discussion here is centered around cars, but is Tesla not just a car company? Aren’t they trying to position themselves in robotics? I figured that’s where the pricing comes from - a mix of people betting on cars + robotics, and an automated robotic workforce + AI being the future of industrial and maybe even retail labour?
Why would a robotics company justify higher valuations? Isn’t that going to be a capital intensive, low margin race to the bottom like cars?
Seems like only pure software businesses (which are extremely capital light and often come with network or lock in effects) can justify the really crazy valuations.
Thinking of it, is there anything Tesla is involved in that isn't in the end capital intensive needing to build actual things with possible competition driving margins down?
Hell, even robotaxis will have price pressure if market affords say 3 or 4 players. Not many will pay double compared to competition.
The robotaxi evaluation only made sense when they claimed to be years ahead of competitors. A robotaxi service operating in a regular taxi market could have large margins. But Waymo is already operating, any Tesla robotaxi company is going to compete away all the margin with Waymo.
As I understand it, Waymo is restricted to areas that it has mapped extremely well, i.e. major cities.
Which also happens to be where most of the money would be, so it's probably a good bet. Tesla seems to be hoping to displace Uber in the suburbs, while being an also-ran against Waymo in the denser downtowns. That includes ferrying a fair number of people into and out of cities, where Waymo can't (currently) go.
That's probably not as lucrative as Waymo's core market, but it could have some decent margins.
I think a big part of the valuation is self driving. If (and that's a big if) they would get it right, they could have cheaper taxi services than e.g. Uber ($200B market cap), without paying for drivers. And if self driving would work in consumer cars, profits from subscriptions could be big.
If you think cars + robots is the future, Boston Dynamics is owned by Hyundai these days. (That was a ~$1 billion valuation 5 years ago.) Watch some of their videos. None of them feature a guy in a leotard doing the robot.
Are they a car company? A software company? An AI company? A robotics company? They seem to switch identies a lot and it makes them come across to me as a jack of all trades.
Is being battery company any better than being car company? You still have competition and are capital intensive and customers choose based on value. Probably even more so than with cars as products are not always on show.
Being a battery company also seems to put you at significantly more risk of having your lunch eaten by Chinese manufacturers than being a car company would. Although exclusively being an electric car company probably increases that risk too.
I think they had almost infinite first mover advantage with the model S (the only car they've ever got completely right)...
They / he squandered it all ... and now we'll witness the long, slow decline as they get (and are already being) trounced both in design language and technical capability.
I got out when Elon Musk fired the whole Supercharger team.
That was roughly a year after the entire North American Auto industry standardized on the Supercharger standard, the Supercharger Network opened to non-tesla cars, and they were poised to expand.
The rational thing to do if Elon Musk didn't want to be in the charging business would be to spin out the Supercharger Network as a different company. Instead, he fired the entire team over a petty argument.
That was the first clear case of mismanagement that I saw.
Since that happened (a year ago) the Supercharger network grew from 6473 to 7377 stations, and from 59596 to 70228 connectors (numbers from Q2 2025 earnings release), so it's not like they stopped expanding the network after that layoff.
I suppose if growth is all that matters, that's probably good news. It's probably worth mentioning a good chunk of those will have been the ongoing projects with current stock.
On the other hand, if long-term maintenance and optimizations for this absolutely critical new infrastructure are even a little bit of a priority? Then it's still unlikely the "smart" move to eliminate the entire department.
Also carrying around suitcases full of designer drugs is maybe a bad sign for CEO, staying up all night playing video games, and working--charitably speaking--"part time" are all rather uninspiring choices...
Basically, when Tesla's stock started to dip, he went on a cost-cutting rampage. The head of Superchargers made a proposal to grow, and Elon got angry and fired the whole team.
It's one of those moments where, if Elon got angry, and then waited to cool off before doing anything rash, it would have been forgivable.
Well, sadly, Space Cersei owns another good chunk, and Space Jaime has a bunch, then Space Reek is surprisingly well-endowed, and Space Baelish is probably somewhere in the mix. All of whom sit on the Space Iron Council, and advise Space Joffrey about what dank memes they should focus on during the upcoming Space Tourney, where they will be testing new Space Fire Water to use on the Walkers approaching the Space Mexican Border. At least, until the Master of Tired Analogies signals the end of festivities by beating a dead Space Horse.
For years Tesla had been over promising and under delivering. It had to catch up sooner or later. I believe the flashpoint might have been the Tesla Cybertruck launch. These insiders should have knowledge about the issues and sales figures for the Cybertruck.
Our car industry has been told to get its shit together and failed or not even tried so many times.
It's times to just let in BYD for a few years and just slaughter all the incumbents. I don't care what we do after that. But a bloody reckoning is sorely needed.
It's happening already. The affordable car market is being increasingly neglected. Ford has abandoned their best selling focus and fiesta models and are chasing a more premium market. Expect soulless Chinese models to fill in the gaps.
So if we leave the racism aside, we can look forward to some solid choices? That's assuming the racist tariffs don't inflate the prices for the affordable options I suppose...it sure does seem like racism might be making things worse on both fronts.
When Toyota, Honda, Mitsubishi, Hyundai, KIA, etc came, and Detroit turned into a zombie city, did it help?
Well, I can admit that Ford learned from Honda quite a bit, which could be readily seen in their Focus line. Is it their fault that consumers stubbornly want the likes of F-150 or Chevy Suburban, which are not even proper cars?
Unironically, yes, it did. It didn't necessarily help Detroit specifically for a wide variety of reasons, but it made American car companies up their game and make more competitive vehicles, helping ensure the survival of American companies and offer more and better choices for American car buyers. I'm not a huge fan of the way Ford pivoted away from small good cars to exclusively selling large pickups and SUVs (and the Mustang, I guess), but it still represents Ford's attempt to stay more competitive than they would had to have been without foreign competition.
Cars are bad, but there are far more people driving a car than working in the automobile industry. The former has a better claim to societal health than the latter.
Cars are good in some circumstances, mass transit, in other circumstances. One size does not fit all.
Small, inexpensive cars would also be good in some circumstances, but the US auto industry, for some reason, struggles to offer something as compact as Honda Fit, or at least something as reliable as Toyota Corolla.
The US car makers were very much responsible for their demise in 2000s. My question is: did the fierce competition help? Has the "blood reckoning" ever happened? What was the cost of it?
Yes, the when I was there last year I had a great time seeing the sites, shoplifters, meth/heroin use in the open, shops closing. I'm sure the SUV tax will take care of that.
This is an unacceptable comment on HN. You've been here long enough to know that. Please make an effort to observe the guidelines and keep in mind that HN is only a place where people want to participate because others make an effort to keep the standards up.
Go ahead and short Tesla.
Electret has been an anti Tesla machine for years, it used to be mostly positive and at a some point it flipped very hard. I would guess they it's a vendetta or they get paid by someone to spew misinformation.
In this case can you imagine the pressure on a high executive with lot's of share with the recent drama around the elections, Trump, Epstein, etc. Again, Elon stand alone in his dedication.
I think it's very hard to put a price on Tsla at the moment with FSD getting ready, I just did a family road trip with my (old HW3) Tesla from Montréal to Manhattan it was almost flawless, way safer than if I drove myself. What is the value of that? What is the value of that system in highway trucks that drive all day?
