Tesla trades on expectations of future profitability, just like any other company analyzed intrinsically with e.g. a DCF model or Gordon Growth Model.
It's Finance 101.
It's Finance 101.
When in 2014, we set out to evaluate tesla, no one in the industry saw 5 full years of negative cash flows. If they did, they certainly didn't show it in their models. And the stock price certainly made no sense if people with shorter time horizons were holding onto it.
So one of 2 things is true:
1) the market is all knowing and it sees out to a time horizon where tesla would have positive cash flows and discounts it absolutely perfectly. In which case, the market didn't see Bear Stearns or 2008 coming, so spare me the clairvoyancy pitch.
2) The entire thing trades on fairy dust because vast portions of the market work on self fulfilling prophecies of both big money brokers, and idiot retail i.e. in both cases, they believe the stock will go up based on false assumptions and even worse models and hold on for dear life as the fed pumps the market into the next euphoric orgasm.
2) We have a name for this hand - the federal reserve of the united states of america. If you saw the last Mr. Robot season, there's an episode where Mr. Robot says "behind every great fortune lies a great crime, this is the corporate motto of these United States". He was only slightly wrong. Behind all great fortunes since the advent of central banking lies the hand of the federal reserve.