Regarding the price of TSLA, perhaps someone can help: If Tesla were to somehow sell 500,000 Model 3's in 2018, and make a net profit of 15% on each $35,000 car (very high, the auto industry majors make ~5%), and somehow had all the capital necessary paid for, and no financing or other costs they would earn:

500,000 * $5,250 = $2.6 BB in profit

With ~160 MM shares outstanding that's an EPS of ~$16.

At $270/share, that's a P/E of ~17 -- cheap, but not incredibly so.

In other words, if everything goes perfectly, buying shares now would be "sort of cheap", equivalent to a ~6% return. Obviously, the shares have a lot of risk.

This is practically best-case. So how do you justify buying at these levels, with the risks involved? You can't say "growth" without modelling it. Do you expect TSLA to sell a million cars a year, or more with these types of margins? Where will the earnings come from?