Does that even count as "hedge-fund manager" these days?
Although, I gotta hand it to him, this does seem a bit absurd:
"As a reality check, Tesla is worth twice as much as Ford ... yet Ford made 6 million cars last year at a $7.6 billion profit while Tesla made 100,000 cars at a $2 billion loss"
And at least right now, investors seem to think that Tesla will become wildly successful eventually. Will that actually happen? Who knows.
They would have to get 60X bigger in terms of output to get where Ford already is and has been for a long time.
Do people really think that Tesla will grow 120x larger with 100% probability? Or 240x larger with 50% possibility? That seems irrational to me.
In my opinion that's a very small bit that can't possible justify the current price. If I was going to justify investing Tesla today I would have to make the case to myself that my ROI on Tesla would be better then my other possible ROI I could get else where. Let's say I am hoping for a very reasonable 6.5% return, based on rule of 72 I would expect the value to double in ~ 11 years. Assuming Ford grows at a similar rate over the next eleven years Tesla would have 4x the market cap as Ford currently does. I just don't see how you could expect to invest at the current levels and expect a reasonable return. Even if Tesla perfectly executes for the next 11 years there is no way it would be worth it's current evaluation let alone have room for a decent ROI.
Ford isn't really one of the car companies that looks like it will remain relevant in 10 years time.
Maybe the battery capacity alone is the differentiator? If Ford wanted to start rolling out electric cars, they'd need a lot of batteries, and from what I understand Tesla may be the front-runner in high capacity, low price batteries. That is, until the requisite rare-earth metals are monopolized by a hostile (economically or otherwise) nation and squeeze rent-seeking profits from the electric car boom (fad?).
Manufacturing also isn't easy, but it also isn't super hard compared to electric cars and autonomous driving.
Dozens of car companies have managed to do it, while none have managed to build electric cars and AD well yet.
I'm not an expert in the area, but I am not aware of a game-changing implementation that Tesla has made, is there one? Like, did they make electric motors better in some fundamental, un-reproducable way? That would be a 'moat' they could use to stave off competitors. Or is their battery tech a game changer? From my lay perspective, it appears that their battery manufacturing capacity (i.e., gigafactory) may be, but the battery tech itself is more or less industry-standad stuff.
I guess the big question is what is their competitive advantage compared to Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota, etc.? I ask that not as an attack, but a genuine question to ponder. Nissan has the Leaf in production today, they have all the tech necessary to develop and manufacture and bring to market an electric vehicle. What's stopping them from launching a 'Tesla-killer' under their Infinity brand aimed at the same market as Tesla? It appears nothing is, at least nothing technological. It's probably just a product-market fit question, and as soon as the market for a high end electric vehicle is big enough (thanks to Tesla) then they probably will. And at that point, what Tesla is just another car manufacturer, but one that seems to suck at manufacturing and bringing cars to market. Those kinks may be ironed out, but in the long term it seems that they should be expected to settle into a position as one of many car maker options, where consumers choose a Tesla for similar reasons as one would choose any other car. So, from that perspective, the valuation seems spurious.
Is the play all about self-driving cars? Is the promise of self-driving cars the only thing behind Tesla and Uber? Then again, I ask what advantage these players have, if any. The incumbents may be slow, but do you really think Toyota, GM, Ford, etc. aren't working on this stuff too? They are. Every major car manufacturer has a self-driving car program in the works. Heck, Mercedes has been working on it since at least the late 90's when they brought to market the first radar-assisted cruise controls.
I don't mean to shit all over Tesla here, as surely their existence has sped up the development and public perception of electric vehicles in a major way. And I get the Musk fanboy-ism, he's totally cool and his portfolio of companies is equally totally cool (even though, contrary to perception, he did not in fact 'found' Tesla, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning did, Elon came in at the series A round of funding). And their cars are totally awesome, and that's something to admire. But as far as their current market valuation, from a totally dispassionate analysis, it seems irrational. Long-term it's hard to see them as justifying a valuation at multiples that much higher than the incumbents. I just don't see the logic. But maybe it doesn't have to be 'logical,' maybe financial markets aren't entirely rational, and maybe that's OK.
Their electric cars simply perform 50% better than the vast majority of other electric cars in every aspect, speed, acceleration, range (very important). Then you can also add design, driving comfort, software integration, where they beat any other electric car (manufacturer).
Thus, their technology is vastly superior.
Mastering manfucacturing isn't easy for a young company, though, it simply takes time.
The other car companies had more than 100 years to figure it out, give Tesla a few more years to catch up with them.
That said, IBM certainly did well in that particular transition.
You do not see new car companies popping up left and right, because profitable manufacturing at scale is insanely hard, and profit margins are not that great. So companies who acquired that knowledge tend to stick around. Unseating them is tricky, as Tesla M3 scale up illustrates.