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Comment by ng12 | Hacker News Reader

Probably because the perception of Tesla is that it's more than just a car company. Retail investors don't see much of a future in the American car industry so they're betting hard on tech-first innovation.

I wouldn't buy Tesla for more than $200 but I really don't think it's hard to see why people do.

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I liken this stock to the first few quarters of GoPro leading into Christmas. Investors are making it pop up and down, but the moment the possibility of massive growth and revenue meets up to reality, it'll slide down to a reasonable price.

"People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it."

https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_insp...

You lost me with that quote.

Interesting - having seen the linked TED talk, I immediately understood. Maybe worth a watch?

People don't buy Tesla because of what it does (make a profit selling cars) they buy it because they're making cars "to make the world a better place," by releiving reliance on fossil fuels.

The why is more influential than the what. It's the same reason people are dumb enough to pay a 40% premium for Apple products that are equal in any meaningful metric to a PC.

Which makes it a high risk speculative stock. You're essentially gambling on the future knowing the present company is extremely overvalued. I wouldn't even call it "investing" if you were to purchase their stock right now.

"Overvalued" is a funny term -- how can you overvalue a company who's competing on innovation? Remember people said the same thing about Facebook when they were worth $50b and Google when their only products were search and gmail. I agree that it's a risky buy, I disagree with the notion that there's something fundamentally wrong with high-value speculation.

Agree, there's nothing wrong with high value speculation as long as you recognize it.

Tesla is overvalued. If you were to take a present snapshot in time (a data point) and compare the assets and cash value of Tesla with what its stock price is it would be wildly off.

Everyone always remembers the winners, the Googles, Microsofts, and Facebooks. No one remembers the hundreds of dot bomb companies (including Cisco) that saw tremendous loss in stock when everyone thought they were "certain" to succeed.

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