Their margin are contracting, and it's actually probable they will loose money in Q3, Q4 this year. They don't have any significant advantage on competition anymore, and China's competition is already well ahead Tesla.
Elon himself suggested Tesla is worthless as a 'car making company' and it's value will come from solving autonomy with FSD. While Tesla is very good at marketing, there were 2 companies allowed to operate self-driving taxis in SF past month, and there are already several operating in China. It's hard to argue that Tesla still has the lead in that domain.
Look at the financials of this 'underlying charging network for the entire continental US' - the optimistic ones, project that it will bring ... 10B$ in revenues in 5-10 years (revenues, not profit !).
It's absolutely meaningless in the big picture of this company revenues and valuation.
No one said irrelevant either, but that their best days are behind them. From an investor's point of view that could certainly be correct.
It's not that he will solve FSD, Tesla is valuable until FSD is solved as then it becomes just a car company.
And he picked the correct impossible puzzle that will never be solved. Same with the SpaceX premise.
The market value is the desire of groups of people that it be solved.
The lesson here is what impossible problem is our domains that we can market that our company is attempting to solve it and which of those impossible problems happens to intersect with a large group of people wanting said problem solved.
This doesn’t jive with their investor guidance, nor the sales figures. I’m curious where this prediction is coming from.
Maybe it is due to the capital expenditures from all of the new factories being built?
I don't think their did any investor guidance about profits - I may be wrong though.
Re factories - I don't think they are building any new factories now - are they ? The only one announced is Mexico, but they still don't even have the official permits yet.
https://ir.tesla.com/#quarterly-disclosure
Deliveries are currently on track and each vehicle delivered is profitable, with a larger margin (18.2%) than any other major car manufacturer. This may not be true with the first Cybertruck deliveries later this year, but total number of delivered Cybertrucks will be tiny. Cybertruck deliveries should ramp up in 2024 and the margins should improve.
About those large margins - yes, they are a bit higher than others, but it's not that much - and they appear much more price sensitive now. Thing is, they compare themselves to Ford / Toyota etc, while they don't sell nearly as many cars. A much better comparison is to the likes of BMW / Mercedes - but it doesn't paint the same picture.
Cybertruck deliveries are definitely not happening this year (unless we talk about <100 units for marketing purposes - much like the Tesla Semi deliveries start a year ago...)
We're depending on the feedback mechanism here working correctly. If it doesn't, we are rewarding unproductive behaviours.
Does that answer the question, though? Future growth is an estimate and approximation, is not real, and says nothing about current revenues and losses.
Another way to think of it is if I spent 10 billion to make a company which now successfully produces gold bricks from wood in a way most think I'll be historically net positive in 5 years then it's not really a mystery why waiting 5 years for the number to hit 0 is not particularly relevant to when people may be interested in buying parts of the company.