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Comment by qaq | Hacker News Reader

If you think it's absurd you can always short it

I think someday reality will set in and Tesla stock will plummet, but I would be crazy to short it. I guarantee Tesla fans can stay irrational way longer than I can stay solvent.

I think regardless Tesla is positioned to have a lot of value. Granted I don’t know a whole lot about it so let me know if I’m wrong but it seems like even if their cars fizzle out eventually they are still building the majority of electric car infrastructure. If more and more companies cut deals with Tesla to use their stations they may end up being some majority of the countries “gas stations”. If I were investing in them it’d be as an energy company instead of a car company.

It’s funny that people have been coming out of the woodwork finally, realizing Teslas worth the valuation because of the charging station partnerships they’ve done recently. Those are actually meaningless and will contribute a very very tiny percentage of profits into the future. The reason Teslas valuation is so high is because people value it as an AI company which may dominate Robo taxis and humanoid robots in the future

Why do you say that? It seems like it’s going to be really hard to build a network of fast charging stations for EVs and Tesla has a big head start it seems like.

Nobody remembers the first gas station. Nobody remembers who built the better gas pump. EV charging is already well down the path of simply being another commodity

Why would that be hard? Aside from company politics, what's stopping Shell or Exxon or BP from outfitting their gas stations with EV charging equipment? Clearly they don't see such a move as profitable right now, but as EV adoption increases, that could change.

I'm not saying doing so is trivial; aside from the equipment cost, many/most/all of those stations will also need electrical supply upgrades. But they at least already have the land, and a company like Tesla will have to deal with equipment cost, electrical supply upgrades, and the cost of acquiring land.

It is hard. But tesla is opening it up to the competition basically for free. It’s actually a bad move for tesla if you’re only concerned with profit, but it aligns with their mission of accelerating the transition to sustainable energy. People just find it hard to believe that a company that size actually cares about its mission

Tesla is just building big transformers and ways to plug cars into them, though. They're not building power plants; they still have to buy their "fuel" from third parties. To me, that makes this aspect of their business much less compelling.

They're building a virtual distributed power plant though [1], and they're building solar.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/tesla-virtual-power-pla...

All that means is that you don't believe your own story.

People said this all the time about Tesla a few year ago. But the stock value back then is easly justified by what they have achieved since.

So the reality is that 'Tesla fans' were not irrational, but they were simply correct. And the people who endlessly repeat the 'market can stay irrational longer then you can sty solvent line' were simply wrong.

Its also an absurd fantasy that Tesla stock is only carried by irrational Musk fan boys. When in reality is mostly large institutional investors who do the same financial analysis on Tesla as anything else they buy.

The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

Yeah, the people who shorted TSLA in the past 18 months did pretty great. It remains a solid strategy.

Cherry picking dates can make any company look like an excellent short.

Okay. If you shorted it 24 months ago you are still ahead.

Now do the math with 48 months

Or 6

It is almost as if stock prices fluctuate over time. Who'd have thought...

This kind of info nugget is useful only for time travelers who can take advantage of it.

Made ~$10,000 from that bet last year. I was pretty pleased with myself.

Would you have made more if you were still holding that short position today?

Good work; you successfully managed to time the market. I'm sure there were many, many others who didn't make out so well.

Now redo the calculation a bunch of times to account for all the other possible times you could have both opened and closed that short position, and see how many other times you would have turned a profit. Probably not in many of them.

You got lucky. Contrary to some popular belief, lucky timing is not a generally-applicable investing strategy.

Totally agreed

imagine betting against one of the smartest and one of the richest man in the world

yes they make mistakes, but it has been a bloodbath out there for $TSLA shorters in the past 5 years

smartest? id agree in darling paypal days but have you see whats going on over in tw*terland?

lol'd at the downvotes

definitely not the smartest at the heights of marie curie nor stephem hawking

but smart and rich enough to be worth more than all of us in this thread

shorters are literally betting against the guy that spearheaded reusable rockets in space, i'm not saying all his decisions and perspectives are agreeable, but seriously what do you all think is your leverage against the guy?

Another smart guy that is almost as rich is short tesla ie Bill Gates I don't know or care about who is right and who is wrong just saying your investment should not be purely based on Musk name. Personally I think Tesla might win the car race but as prices for electricity, batteries and pc chips keep going down. I am not so sure about self driving cars being worth that much as it will be race to the bottom in terms of price and cost.

Cheaper electricity is coming that is the bigger change than most people realise not electric cars. So far majority of electricity has been produced using fossil fuels a finite resource where as solar is practically an infinite resource price for harvesting it as well as storing it keeps dropping.

> in darling paypal days

Not even. Musk had a company which had plans for an online bank (can you imagine?) but it wasn't working out so well. So his company merged with one that was in the process of creating PayPal (trademarked, prototype in place)...

Musk was the largest shareholder of the combined companies, so he was made CEO...

And promptly spent four months complaining that the working prototype needed to be thrown away, because it was written in Java on Solaris, and he didn't understand it, and he wanted it rewritten in Classic ASP on Windows.

Four months, because at that point, the board, lead by Peter Thiel had had enough of it and removed him as CEO.

That was the extent of Musk's tenure at PayPal.

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