And what exactly were they looking at? The revolutionary tech? How well as that met expectations?
> You can say, of course, that these people just got lucky.
Yes, that is what I'm saying. Few people made lots of money off meme stocks.
(Unless, of course, you‘re in it for the sympathy of those who share your viewpoint. Then publicly debating makes a lot of sense. Although then you‘d be following the same mimetic impulse that you rightfully criticize in those who buy stocks based on memes and fashions, wouldn‘t you?)
My feeling was that you already had your conclusion. I.e. that Tesla has not technological advantage, and that the stock's 20x really is just a function of it being a meme stock, fueled by Millenials with FOMO.
I really do not know how much research you have done on Tesla, or whether you are actually participating in the market.
Also, I think you might have an allergic reaction to what one might call the Tesla fanboy crowd, which I can very much understand.
The thing is, dealing with an opposing viewpoint is a computationally expensive operation. One will only do it if one has a really, really strong incentive to be "less wrong" about this particular topic. Otherwise, in areas in which one has no real skin in the game, it really is just easier to stick to one's guns and treat the discussion as as a form of entertainment.
And even when there is an actual incentive to learn, doing such discussions in a public forum is even harder, because there's an audience. On HN, you also have the "paper trail". Nobody likes to see themselves of having been wrong about something. Much less about something that could have made them literally millions. It's already painful if one comes to such a conclusion by oneself. But having it rubbed in your face by someone else - how can that not trigger hostility?
Also, discussing the past has little value, because there's nothing you can change about what has already happened. The only value that there is in discussing the past is if one uses the past to tune one's mental model in a way that, when the next opportunity arises in the future, one's chances of success will be higher.
That, and not Tesla per se, is actually what made me react to this post. People standing there explaining away their failure (literally "apologizing" = "talking something away") - be it about Tesla, be it about women - that just seems so out of the Hacker culture to me. I mean, if my Python program throws an error, I don't argue with the interpreter. Instead, I look for my mistake and find a way to fix it. In fact, I don't even bother to feel bad about having made the mistake in the first place. I just keep on being focused on the goal I want to achieve, and will find whatever workaround or mental shift will give me what I want.
This post is already long enough. You may feel that I'm just pontificating and evading the question. But I think before any data can be exchanged, one needs a proper "handshake" to ensure that one agrees on the premises that make any form of exchange possible in the first place.
I really do not want to go through a list of arguments about the value of Tesla as a company here. These cannot be discussed in bullet form, because it will just lead to endless recursion. I would either bore you to death by being too verbose, or I'd be inviting ridicule by sounding naive. (If anyone is genuinely interested, feel free to email me. There recently was a post here about the benefits of talking to strangers, and I'm very happy to use this topic as a vehicle to talk to people I wouldn't meet otherwise.)
But I will give you one higher level argument that people might be seeing about Tesla that those who focus on P/E are missing:
People are insecure about the future. Few people know whether, ten years from now, their job will still exist. In a such a world of insecurity about the future, people tend to flock to those who seemingly can not only see the future, but actually create it.
What Tesla has done is that they have demonstrated to the world that an electric car can not only be sexy, but be better than a gasoline car in pretty much every respect (noise, user-facing emissions, safety, acceleration, traction, etc.). You just have to watch the GM Superbowl ad to see that other carmakers are basically reacting to Tesla, and trying to catch up.
I am not saying that Tesla is going to succeed because they were first. But I am saying that Tesla has done something that is the very prototype of capitalism. They went Zero To One. Instead of competing on faster horses, they invented the automobile (the thing that "self-drives", if ya catch my drift :-P). They drilled for oil long before the rest of the world even had an idea what to do with this gooey stuff. They proved themselves as those who re-evaluate all values, as Nietzsche would have said.
They not only predicted the future. They created it.
And so, in a world where noone seems to know where we're heading, some people put their trust in Tesla.
And this is closely connected to something else:
What did Paul Graham say about the most important trait in any entrepreneur that will predict his long-term success?
He said that it's determination.
And I believe that many people think that there few people on earth today running a company that are as determined as Elon Musk.
Who else has bet his entire fortune on his company, at a time when most people agreed that it would go under? Who else has been ridiculed and litererally spat at for trying to build a private enterprise rocket company, and succeeded in doing things that, to this day, not even big governments have been able to day (say, landing and re-using rocket boosters)?
If you read Ashley Vance's Musk biography, there's that one scene that has stuck in my mind ever since. It's about how Elon, back in the days of PayPal, agreed to join his colleagues for a bike tour up some very steep hill. I'll leave it up to you to find and read that story. But that, to me, is all you need to know about the level of determination people see in Elon Musk.
There's other stories like that. Like Talulah Riley telling how Elon got up in the middle of the night and walked through the snow clothed just in a T-Shirt to pick her some flowers.
Now, you can think Elon Musk is a showman and an imposter. You can say he is just floating all of these stories because he read too much Napoleon when he was young and is merely trying to create a myth surrounding his personality, in order to amass wealth and power over people.
But the fact that some people out there are going to see in Elon Musk and in Tesla both a vision for the future and the determination to pull through is something that you better take into consideration when you think about betting against this company.
I'll consider what you've said, there is a lot to digest.