Tesla surges past $525B in market cap, soon overtake Berkshire Hathaway | Hacker News Reader

Tesla surges past $525B in market cap, soon overtake Berkshire Hathaway

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13 pointspaulpauper33 comments

Tesla is important and all but this seems to assume they take the whole car and truck market at this valuation? Is that reasonable?

Tesla’s stock price hasn’t been reasonable for a number of years now. But it is the same ol’ discussion. I’d suggest shorting Tesla but someone will then come along like clockwork with an overused quote about how the market can remain irrational...and they’d be right. Buy in, or ignore it, those are your current options on Tesla.

Or maybe you are just wrong on your evaluation and it has nothing to do with the market being irrational.

That's possible, but you're not really making the argument (or any argument at all if it's just "you're wrong") why Tesla should be worth more than multiple car companies combined, companies that turn a profit and sell loads more cars. Forward-looking? Only if the one looking forward is delusional.

Some people point to Tesla's margins, which are very high by industry standards. However, IMO these margins will decrease as real competition ramps up and the market turns further from performance/enthusiast to true mass market vehicles.

I believe all their current main stream competitors (Ford/GM/Volvo/Toyota/Honda) are all going to be facing serious challenges. I worked on some projects for car dealerships and the surprising profits come from their maintenance. I just don't see how you can make money with maintenance on an electric car so I think they will shut down like Blockbuster. The issue we found was when the electric cars make it to the floor, the sales rep has no incentive to sell it because their dealership will go out of business. I haven't had someone give me a logical explanation to avoid this. Either we get mass dealership bankruptcies, or the dealers get bought out by the company. The best dealers I know got out a few years ago.

The other part is they are giving away all their trade patents and want to create competition. When I play Madden and I am up 14-0 late in the first, I like to keep others in the game otherwise their wifi drops and it feels like Tesla is doing the same with their competition.

Another argument in my mind is what I learned from BlackBerry and Apple. When I first got into BB, it was the market leader and their financials were off the charts. I understood market cap and numbers and it just made financial sense but the market is forward looking and when Apple took over I missed the boat and sat for a long time with shares. During that time Apple (the company whose products I hated because it was so simple and restricted) went from a cool tech company (Jobs) to a business company (current CEO) and my thought at the time was the market would kill them as they no longer are going to be a cutting edge innovative company, however, that was just the start of Apple as they were finally making real money and gouging everywhere. Also at the same time, BlackBerry made profits for a single quarter and its stock started rallying however their product was dying and the consumers had lost faith in it and were looking for something fresh. The first BlackBerry Z10 is basically what Android 10 and iOS is today yet the market didn't want it.

This is what I see is happening in Tesla now. You have a company finally making money. They have an innovative product and are still a tech company. Everyone in the energy space wants to work for them also. I like to think I worked with some of the smartest solar electricity engineers in Canada and the some of smartest ones are now working at Tesla now. They just made profits which the market loves, they were announcing BlackBerry is back when that happened. I haven't had enough cash to hold Tesla as I lost most of my net worth on BlackBerry but my first position was early 2013/2014 with 200 shares and made 30% got out. Then I got in around $390 before it split and sold around the $1600 mark. I bought in again after the split and I am going to continue adding to the position, currently up about 30% again.

Also the fundamental business side of me sees them getting added to the S&P 500 so I would expect they are going to be bough heavy so I am planning to add more to my position soon.

Disclaimer: I also saw the Elon manifesto pretty early on, 2006 and was convinced this is the future but I was still interested in buying Canadian so I supported BlackBerry.

TLDR: Canadian who bought BlackBerry and got burned. Learned from it and bought TSLA now. Leading product, finally making money, everyone wants to work for them and they seem to not care about competition.

From what I can tell, dealerships are not owned by the car manufacturers. These guys are not dumb and will adapt. Other car manufacturers are borrowing the Tesla reservation model (see Ford Bronco, GM electric Hummer). They are offering extensive customization. Like Tesla, dedicated service shops will be necessary to perform even basic maintenance and retrofitting, so maybe that could keep independent dealerships afloat. Regarding Tesla itself, what other structural advantages (besides a head start and cool factor) do they have over the competition that will prevent their margins from eroding?

See I don't think that's true. They aren't smart. Everyone hates dealerships. Tell me one person that likes their dealership? They deal with them because they have to for the warranty then they get a new car when their lease is up because it's easier to deal with compared to mechanics. I just want to pick the exact car I want and get it. It's nearly impossible with any other dealer (This is the typical customer as I buy used cars but I will be buying the Tesla Truck if TSLA shares pay).

The dealers are not selling it today. I used to go into the Nissan dealerships frequently and the Leaf used to be under a tarp. They had no incentive to lead the charge and now they are behind is my thinking.

The big advantage I see is the dealers. Them being not owned by the dealer is the problem. I think Elon saw this early on as he wanted to own his own dealerships because there was no money in their business model. Also the dealerships don't want to be mechanic shops as the money in a mechanic shop is not the greatest return on money as they lose out on all the added profits of sales, dealer rebates and interest. In addition to first mover and tech, their charging station, the best talent and they have solar (I was also a SCTY investor) which means they have the entire market cornered I think. They also produce their own batteries.

Honestly the main reason is they said, here is our design, go copy us, we know you can't do better. When someone tells me that I respect it and that's the tipping point for me.

Edit: Most the dealerships in a city are owned by the same person from my understanding. So the big auto malls with Ford/GM/Toyota is all owned by 1 person.

I have made the argument, just not in response to you.

Tesla isn't a car company. It's an energy company that started with cars.

That fact isn't sufficient to justify its price, but it's a critical component. Just measuring it against car companies misses a large fraction of its value -- maybe even a large majority of it.

Tesla will be $800 in December and $2000 within a decade. It is just getting started. Look at my post history since TSLA at $400 (presplit.)

Probably not, but they're also in a strong position on self-driving, solar and batteries.

They are nowhere on self-driving beyond an over-hyped version of lane-following that everyone else has. Similarly they bring nothing to the table when it comes to solar. They have a battery manufacturing facility but no actual tech of note in that space but they are reasonably good at getting Panasonic to build a lot of batteries on their behalf.

At some point I am expecting Tesla to trade a reasonable chunk of its wildly over-valued stock for a large ownership chunk in a company that actually knows how to build cars in volume.

actually i’m using the FSD beta in my car and it’s pretty impressive. anyone who thinks it is just lane keeping hasn’t been paying attention.

is it worth 10K (model 3 owner and very curious)

>They are nowhere on self-driving beyond an over-hyped version of lane-following that everyone else has.

heh I guess all these videos on youtube of FSD are fakes

I worked in self-driving tech. Almost every self-driving company can make such videos, but they are still waaaay too far from real self-driving, even L4.

Except the company isn't making the video. Customers who paid $8K+ for the feature record them in their day to day lives, everywhere (downtown during rush-hour, in the forest, in the suburbs, at night, playing with obstacles, masking some of the camera or the radar, etc).

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fsd+beta+5

Are you time traveler from 2016? Literally everything you say is simply wrong.

They are getting better and better at building the machines that build the machines.

Also, it's not about today. Who is in the best position to be the iOS of driving, if not Tesla?

Have any of those things made outstanding improvements over the past year, justifying a 500% increase?

I think that's more a reflection of increased confidence in Tesla's viability/survivability. As well as a lack of other exciting, inspiring, industry defining companies to invest in.

Increased confidence in their viability can drive a stock price up, but what changed to increase people's confidence in them?

And "exciting" is rarely something one should look for in their investments.

How much capital does the high stock price give to Tesla? Making cars is capital intensive. Is the valuation self fulfilling - does the extremely high valuation give them capital to help them get closer to the valuation?

does the extremely high valuation give them capital

Only if they sell more shares. Once the shares have been initially sold, the share price can increase ten-fold but the company won't get any of that money. That's the simple, general answer to your question, anyway.

They don't actually need that much to justify their valuation. Go look at some of the bull cases by analysts. Some of them have a stock price in this range and their targets for Tesla are 5-10x below what Tesla targets in the next 10 years. If they can keep the current growth up for a few more years, and they continue to improve margin, this valuation is not just justifiable but will look like a steal. They have been improving their margin thanks to vertical integration and will continue to drive this further into battery cells and much more.

Tesla also is the dominate player in home battery storage and the biggest provider of grid battery storage. Two gigantic growth markets. They already have very good products for this markets and with their own battery production, this is a market they can continue grow in for 10+ years. Tesla is also a very large solar provider, that is another growth market.

Now I know on HN its considered good from to shit on Tesla and Self-Driving, but the opportunity in that market is so gigantic, that even a small chance of getting there is huge. Tesla has huge resources invested in it, they make their own hardware and they have a bigger fleet in the world then anybody and have much more real world data then anybody. And Tesla unlike other don't need 100s of million of venture investment to keep working on it.

Tesla numbers are quite comparable to Amazon a couple of years ago and there we had the same people who for 10+ years said how overvalued they were. Tesla is a huge company playing in even bigger markets growing faster then anybody.

It's interesting to consider that with just the last 3 days worth of valuation gain, they could purchase both Ford and GM at their present valuations.

Which, if they could pull off a single one, would leave the other fighting for survival.

That is a good idea. Take a fantasy valuation and turn it into real. They should buy Toyota if they want to kill the rest of the industry.

Tesla is a battery company that baits you in with flashy cars.

That's the new story from "Battery Investor Day" after they failed to deliver on the big promises of "Autonomy Investor Day." Now they say autonomy isn't important and everyone else will get it within a couple years of Tesla anyway (meanwhile others are ahead).

Before they said it would make each car worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and increase their margins like never before.

That's not a new take. That's what they've been doing all along.

Surprising to find Tesla FUD after all their successes.

All along they have been making up the next big thing (like solar shingles) and downplaying the former?

I'd say they are just a tech company that happens to make cars. No matter how they position their battery advantages everyone can easily copy them. They don't have magic chemistry. Plus batteries are so cheap already it doesn't matter anymore.

Every other car company has an EV, some with similar battery sizes. But no-one has infotainment and gizmos like Tesla has. This is where Tesla's premium kicks in (asides from packing bigger batteries for no particularly good reason).

I'm looking for an EV for my parents in Europe and Tesla is basically 1.8x more for quite much better range and way better tech, but questionable build quality. Basically non-starter for now.

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