[shubhamjain]

The mystery I can wrap my head around is how Tesla has avoided getting hammered despite being hit from a hundred different directions. What exactly is the market pricing in?

They peaked around 2021, and even after posting multiple quarters of disappointing results, the stock is still trading above 2021 levels. For almost any other company, slightly lowering guidance or missing estimates by a few percentage points simply tanks the stock. But for Tesla, no amount of Musk’s idiocy seems to be enough to seriously move it.

[paxys]

Tesla is the world’s largest meme stock. People stopped applying rational pricing models, and rationality in general, to it a lot time ago.

[jmcgough]

PE ratios will suddenly matter again when we get hit with the next recession.

[dudefeliciano]

yup, remember when musk was pushing doge coin? not much difference

[jredwards]

That can't be whole story, though. They're still profitable.

[bamboozled]

If Tesla is worth a trillion dollars, is it a meme ?

[maxbond]

The market discounts future returns but it is unclear and shifting what proportion of those returns are from the operations of the company in the market it sells products in and what proportion comes from the operations of traders in financial markets. More plainly, traders discount returns from buybacks and dividends financed by the operations of the company and returns from selling their shares to "greater fools".

As long as the music is playing they will keep dancing. Musk is a master of DJing that party. We might wake up tomorrow and find that his house of cards has fallen apart, but we might wake up to learn they really have solved FSD. That ambiguity keeps the price from collapsing.

[beAbU]

What is it about FSD that results in this valuation though?

If elon builds a time machine and goes to the future to get FSD tech from 100 years from now and rolls it out to all teslas tomorrow, what will change? Will every car driver get rid of their cars and get a tesla? Will that suddenly justify the stupid valuation?

Realistically, I don't think the majority of drivers will care that much. Sure, their sales will go up, but I can't see it going up by that much.

FSD will never be "achieved" suddenly. The tech will incrementally improve every year, across all manufacturers until one day we are manual driving only 1% of the time with FSD doing the rest. Like AGI, there is no moat in FSD. This is the natural outcome of the trajectory that we are on right now, and nothing about tesla is making me believe they will offer anything that other OEMs can't.

No, I think the market is much more cynical than that. Tesla is a meme stock similar to bitcoin or GME. Investors are degenerate gamblers, hoping that it will continue to rise because that's what it does atm, and hoping they won't be the one left behind holding the bag when it crashes one day. It's little more than a voluntary ponzi scheme that most big investors openly buy into knowing full well what's at stake.

[notTooFarGone]

Really it's just pricing in musk fusing all of his business under the tesla name.

[dh2022]

Even if they have FSD ready tomorrow the financials would not support this valuation.

Summing the sales figures in [0] we get 9M to 10M Teslas on the road. Let's say 10M and and let's say Tesla will keep selling 1.6M / year for the next 5 years [1]. This is 18M Teslas and let's assume all of them are converted into paying customers at $100 / month [2]. This works out to $21 B / year in income. $22 B / year in income cannot justify $1.5 T in market value.

Good thing they are switching to robots :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc.#Timelin... [1] - this is a huge assumption. Teslas sales are declining because of Musk's image, lack of innovation and competition from China.

[2] this is another huge assumption - I know 5 Teslas owners. They tried the $100 / month assisted driving (or whatever Tesla calls it these days). All said it was cool, but not worth it and did not sign up after the trial period. These are professionals who value their time (tech engineers and 1 banker)

[danaris]

There's zero chance that Musk will have suddenly "solved" FSD in a day, a week, or a year. He's not an engineer; he's a money man, and a grifter.

That's why people keep giving Tesla money: because Musk has fooled so many people into believing he's this amazing engineer, who could, possibly, "solve" FSD overnight—and, moreover, has gotten them to buy into it so deeply that they have tied their identity into that belief, and so in order to continue to cling to it, they reject empirical evidence of both his lack of qualifications and his outright crimes.

[SvenL]

They don’t care because Musk is marketing Tesla not as a car company but as a technology company (building robots and self driving rental service). And why does he do that? Maybe because his car sales are down…

[shubhamjain]

I always assumed “tech company” meant using technology to build a fundamentally better car from the ground up. I don't know at what point the bait-and-switch happened, it was suddenly about pursuing every stupid moonshot fantasy at the cost of making better cars.

[tbrownaw]

I thought it was always a tech company focused around trying to import things from the future. Since before they ever had enough sales that sales could go down.

[newyankee]

Actually the funny thing is that there is a mixing of meme stuff, Elon verse impacts (AI + self driving + Energy) etc. and under none of these circumstances is a 200+ PE justified.

The funny thing is after 6 years of effort apparently they have managed to get the dry coating process for batteries working and according to a few reputed sources have ingredients for entire battery chain available locally.

The thing is if this stock was underpriced and rational this would be such a positive news after 2-3 years of growth stall.

Instead they are trying to keep the hype up with endless goalpost changing and self driving possibly stuck perenially in edge case doom scenario with camera only decision

[Zigurd]

Batteries are boring, or at least the hype has a short shelf life. There are enough normies making progress on batteries that Elon hasn't got a credible argument that he is different and better.

Same for cheap Teslas. Some hype trains hit the buffers sooner than later.

[TulliusCicero]

There's a lot of true believers who think Tesla+Musk will crack self driving and/or humanoid robots any day now.

[jdross]

I am so confused when I read things like this because my Tesla model 3 is effectively self driving for me for months now. Hundreds of miles without intervention. No other car I can buy can do this yet

[vintermann]

Meanwhile in China, the humanoid robots are doing Tai Chi and somersaults...

[tartoran]

And there are also a lot of people claiming Tesla stock is being manipulated.

[dvrj101]

"true believers" yup this never changes .

[panick21_]

I agree with you. I personally dropped my stock when it was clear that the bull thesis had collapsed.

I had priced in, margin staying the same or going slowly down. FSD not working but achieving at least a decent amount of software sale conversion. Service to become a profit center. And most importantly, a profitable truck and 'Model 2' program to further push volume. Beyond that, just generally that electrification was ongoing and Tesla had a role to play.

I never considered Robi-Taxi or Human Robots.

All of these failed. Volume didn't continue to go up. Margin couldn't be substantiated. FSD didn't get much buys (not helped by absurdly increasing price). Truck program was a failure (and I don't think its because of the design). And 'Model 2' program was cancelled.

I profited a lot from this stock and I think there was time where the stock-price was reasonable (I don't buy the claim that it was always a pure meme stock). But every quarter it got worse and worse. I can't understand why its still so high either.

[gigatexal]

It’s Elon. It’s a meme stock. Fundamentals don’t matter. That his wealth is so wrapped up in the public valuation of Tesla I guess investors think he will do everything he can to keep th stock price up that is until SpaceX goes public the I think he won’t care because his wealth will come form that primarily.

[tim333]

I guess the thesis is Musk is building the sci-fi future. Robots, cities on Mars etc.

It's impressive what marketing images can achieve - the future vision pumping the stock, the seig heil halving car sales.

[curiousguy]

Wouldn’t this be a side effect of everyone buying only indexes funds or ETFs?

Me and other millions of people are investing in our pensions every month and buying ETF (S&P500 or global) and indirectly buying Tesla stocks even if we don’t want to.

The system would need a big shock to cause the ETFs to rebalance and reduce the proportion of Tesla stocks that are part of the index.

[keeda]

Haven't looked into this much myself, but throwing it out there: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/04/19/for-15-yea...

[xg15]

I wonder if some of it is because of Musk, not despite him. Yes, his actions and statements in the last year have been terrible, but he also demonstrated he is very close to one of the most important power centers on the planet. That might be enough for some investors.

[scotty79]

> What exactly is the market pricing in?

Musk, the perception of. As always. Popular media drilled in that geniuses behaving like idiots is on point. So other idiots with money still suspect him of being a genius and singlehandedly turning things around at some point before the cliff.

[Rover222]

It's not a mystery, regardless of if it's dumb or not - the market is pricing in likely dominance in robotics, both cybercab and optimus.

[jqpabc123]

Long story short --- it's a cult --- there is no logical way to explain it.

Musk is the leader selling his own brand of fantasy that he makes up as he goes along. A lot (if not most) of what he says never comes to pass but people still cling to every prognostication as if it is gospel.

For over two decades, he was all about taking over the auto business with full self driving EVs. Obviously never happened. So now he is off to take over ride sharing and robots and AI and whatever else comes down the pike tomorrow.

[Hamuko]

>What exactly is the market pricing in?

Elon Musk.

[wvenable]

But that doesn't make any sense anymore either.

[4gotunameagain]

Its CEO is the most gifted person alive ..in pump and dump schemes.

The rational thing would be to short it, but Tesla value will remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

It really has tarnished the name of the genius inventor.

[hcnews]

At some point you have to wonder if there's some manipulation going on? Do 100s of bots buy and sell these stocks at specific times to keep the price up? Maybe there's an institutional investor or few who secretly back Elon and are part of a scheme?

A bit speculative reply but would appreciate if anybody links any such analysis'/investigations.

From my limited knowledge, I know people have been shorting Tesla based on fundamentals for a while now but haven't been successful.

[bjourne]

The billionaire class loves their crypto nazis--they won't let Musk fall from grace. Given the Epstein files, the Panama papers, and what we know about the elite networks, you'd have to be a sucker not to believe that the stock market is manipulated to the core.