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Comment by bwanab | Hacker News Reader

Except - Tesla has a real product that has a real demand. Enron's smart guys transformed the company from a traditional energy company which met that criterion to a financial engineering company that didn't know enough about financial engineering to survive.

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Tesla is a car company valued like a tech company right now. Unless they solve the problem of self-driving their stock is overvalued. Let's check-in shall we? Uber - self-driving is dead, BMW self-driving is years away, Alphabet - self-driving is in its very early stages, Tesla - We'll have it by the end of the year or I'll eat my hat!

Google is maybe the only other company with the capability to collect the data necessary to solve self-driving. But they don't own the car production, they need to partner, and hence are at the whims of traditional automakers' margins and product designs.

Tesla is collecting sensor data from their entire fleet, probably mapped to when the user needs to override autopilot. A really elegant source of training data when you think about it.

https://electrek.co/2017/06/14/tesla-autopilot-data-floodgat...

The stock price has no bearing on the financial viability of the company.

Overvalued stock happens all the time. Musk himself has repeatedly stated his belief that Tesla stock has been overvalued by the markets. Even with a bunch of fraud that is still different from Enron.

I like to remind myself how many firms are financial engineering firms first and customer facing firms second. Banks, insurers, (at one time) Porsche, Tesla (imho for this one).

You can add airlines to that list. Here's[1] an article that goes into it a bit. American Airlines actually loses money on their whole "flying people around" business. All of their profit last year was derived via selling points/miles for their frequent flyer program. And it's not limited just to American - I'm not sure about foreign carriers, but it's really common for US legacy carriers to derive substantially all of their profit from marketing revenue related to their loyalty program.

[1] https://viewfromthewing.boardingarea.com/2019/01/24/earnings...

Sony apparently makes most of its profit from its insurance business.

Fundamentally Enron became the market maker for energy products. They didn't seem to understand that a market maker's role depends entirely on having the confidence of the market participants. Enron then started to do more and more outlandish things whereby they eventually lost the confidence of the participants and that's when it imploded almost over night. Tesla isn't really in a similar situation but Google is.

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