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Comment by medler | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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