Given less than stellar sales how come TSLA stock is not far below all times high and 15% higher than a year ago? Investors still expect some miracle?
Tesla seems basically priced based on hype, rather than anything relating to its actual business.
And possibly also the overt government corruption is priced in.
And when you get to active management, those managers might not either be that good. And it works as long as market keeps going up.
Tesla's total profits over its entire existence ($37,883m [0]) is about as much as Musk has personally made by selling Tesla shares ($40bn ish [1]), but of that profit I can find $12.8bn can be attributed to government incentives[2] that have now largely or completely gone away.
[0] Net lifetime based on all the ups and downs of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla%2C_Inc.#Finances
[1] I assume some of this got rounded: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/elon-musk-te...
[2] Between US federal ($11.4bn for just zero-emission vehicles standards) and local state incentives (and more, I didn't fully sum everything): https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/e...
That being said, yeah, profits were down a bit but a lot of that was stock compensation and other things. In practical terms they went from a cash position of 36 billion to 44 billion.
They are in a phenomenal position financially as they have very little debt. By comparison GM made 2.7 billion and Stellantis lost 20 billion.
Tesla is in such a great cash position that Apple only has about 10 billion more than them in cash.
The future looks fantastic.
Selling shares for more than the company made in its entire existence, demonstrates the shares are overvalued.
> By comparison GM made 2.7 billion and Stellantis lost 20 billion.
2.7/3.7 = 0.73; GM's market cap is $77.67bn, using them as your framing of the problem gets you to a Tesla market cap of $106.40bn, not their actual ~$1.5T.
And Toyota made 40-45 billion USD profit for each of the last few years, i.e. more than Tesla in its lifetime, while having a market cap that's currently $316.8bn.
Telsa, market cap $1551bn, about 5x that of a company which makes more each year than it did in total, is overpriced. Especially given how harshly both Tesla's profits and sales are declining even in otherwise growing markets.
Telsa could shift the decimal point on its market cap one place and still be overpriced.
Given what they are as a business, they are not in "a phenomenal position financially", they are in an OK position for a normal boring traditional car company and a terrible one for a trillion-dollar market cap club company.
(Numbers from companiesmarketcap.com, in case anyone complains those are out of date).
Tesla is far more than a car company. Even someone who hates them can recognize that
Price != value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
> Tesla is far more than a car company.
No, they're not. The only thing they sell are cars and car-stuff. They have yet to sell those humanoid robots they show off. Hell, there's other car companies who also make humanoid robots, who have more than twice Tesla's revenue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Motor_Group
Even Tesla's subsidiary, Tesla Energy, which breaks out beyond "cars" is only about 10% of revenue of the car company, so even if you argue their ownership structure makes the group "more", it's still not "far more", but rather "rounding error".
Tesla's AI is just car AI, which other car manufacturers also have, and bluntly seem to be doing a bit better with it.
Even if they were "much more", a 90% drop in market cap would still see it priced like a high-growth tech firm, of the kind which people are independently worried may be in a bubble.
When the market prices this in, Tesla's share price will go down 90-99% on the international market. Perhaps not in USD though, depends how hard that goes weird.