The mystery I can wrap my head around is how Tesla has avoided getting hammered despite being hit from a hundred different directions. What exactly is the market pricing in?
They peaked around 2021, and even after posting multiple quarters of disappointing results, the stock is still trading above 2021 levels. For almost any other company, slightly lowering guidance or missing estimates by a few percentage points simply tanks the stock. But for Tesla, no amount of Musk’s idiocy seems to be enough to seriously move it.
The market discounts future returns but it is unclear and shifting what proportion of those returns are from the operations of the company in the market it sells products in and what proportion comes from the operations of traders in financial markets. More plainly, traders discount returns from buybacks and dividends financed by the operations of the company and returns from selling their shares to "greater fools".
As long as the music is playing they will keep dancing. Musk is a master of DJing that party. We might wake up tomorrow and find that his house of cards has fallen apart, but we might wake up to learn they really have solved FSD. That ambiguity keeps the price from collapsing.
What is it about FSD that results in this valuation though?
If elon builds a time machine and goes to the future to get FSD tech from 100 years from now and rolls it out to all teslas tomorrow, what will change? Will every car driver get rid of their cars and get a tesla? Will that suddenly justify the stupid valuation?
Realistically, I don't think the majority of drivers will care that much. Sure, their sales will go up, but I can't see it going up by that much.
FSD will never be "achieved" suddenly. The tech will incrementally improve every year, across all manufacturers until one day we are manual driving only 1% of the time with FSD doing the rest. Like AGI, there is no moat in FSD. This is the natural outcome of the trajectory that we are on right now, and nothing about tesla is making me believe they will offer anything that other OEMs can't.
No, I think the market is much more cynical than that. Tesla is a meme stock similar to bitcoin or GME. Investors are degenerate gamblers, hoping that it will continue to rise because that's what it does atm, and hoping they won't be the one left behind holding the bag when it crashes one day. It's little more than a voluntary ponzi scheme that most big investors openly buy into knowing full well what's at stake.
Exactly. It's meme stock. There's no rational explanation for this ridiculous valuation.
Tesla has been overvalued for a long time, and not by a bit either; they're worth more than the next several car makers put together, yet sell less cars than any of them. Their high valuation could still be considered defensible when they were the fastest growing car company in the world and the only one selling electric cars. But none of that is true; everybody is selling electric cars now, and BYD is selling more than Tesla, I think. And instead of growing, Tesla is now shrinking in many markets. Even their self driving is not the best.
The share price should have collapsed, yet it remains high. How? It makes no sense to me.
>What is it about FSD that results in this valuation though?
Are you willing to accept the ugly answer? Because the point of FSD isn't what they pitch. The replacing human drivers to save lives yada yada... That ain't it. The point is creating a handful of leverage points through which the autonomy of the populace to move wherever they want can be controlled through. Once the tech is the majority driver, people can finally be properly managed as the little work units they are. That's the dark part of the valuation. The power aspect. The ones who own the means to locomote are the ultimate rent collectors. There's simply no arguing that can be done by a populace that can be prevented from showing up to any attempt at collective protest via geofencing. Or if they do show up, can be added to a comprehensive list for participating in disruptive activities.
Capabilities, ladies and gentlemen. We have to assess these things on the ground of what they enable. Delegating transport entirely to a third party necessarily creates a vulnerability of society to manipulation by the ones running the damn thing; and the ones running the damn thing want money, and security for themselves.
Because their stocks aren't memes, their investors are serious, nobody really GAF about self driving and fully autonomous driving isn't actually the "killer app" many think it is.
There are so, so, so many companies operating in this space right now. You list two that have given up. A quick google brings back at least a dozen operations that appear to be still ongoing.
BMW Personal Pilot, Merc Drive Pilot, and Honda Sensing Elite are Level 3 automation tech you can buy right now. Tesla is still at level 2!!
Whether Tesla is going to be the first to achieve true autonomy or not is a toss-up. And and regardless of who achieves it, the rest will be very very short on their heels.
> BMW Personal Pilot, Merc Drive Pilot, and Honda Sensing Elite are Level 3 automation tech you can buy right now. Tesla is still at level 2!!
You need to put about 10 asterisks on those. MB Drive Pilot has been discontinued due to "low demand and high cost", and those other 2 systems appear to have substantial restrictions. Meanwhile, FSD today "works" on pretty much any road or highway. I can easily see certain folks see that as far ahead of competitors, since it physically can do more in more places and operate in more conditions.
That can't/won't happen. Musk's wealth is primarily in SpaceX now and he has a much higher ownership stake in SpaceX than Tesla. As well as that, Tesla is public so he can't just do napkin math and decide to merge them. So the question is: Does Tesla buy SpaceX? Well no, Tesla can't afford it. Ok, well can SpaceX buy Tesla? Well no, SpaceX can't afford it either. So do they announce a merger? Well that doesn't make any sense because Tesla is valued like a meme stock so it would massively dilute Musk's ownership of the overall company. So the idea that they fuse might be driving up the stock, but by driving up the stock you're actually preventing it happening. If Tesla starts to trade at realistic multiples and comes down to lets say a 200Bn company, I'd expect SpaceX to snap it up at that valuation, but it'd be crazy to do it before then.
Even if they have FSD ready tomorrow the financials would not support this valuation.
Summing the sales figures in [0] we get 9M to 10M Teslas on the road. Let's say 10M and and let's say Tesla will keep selling 1.6M / year for the next 5 years [1]. This is 18M Teslas and let's assume all of them are converted into paying customers at $100 / month [2]. This works out to $21 B / year in income. $22 B / year in income cannot justify $1.5 T in market value.
[2] this is another huge assumption - I know 5 Teslas owners. They tried the $100 / month assisted driving (or whatever Tesla calls it these days). All said it was cool, but not worth it and did not sign up after the trial period. These are professionals who value their time (tech engineers and 1 banker)
There's zero chance that Musk will have suddenly "solved" FSD in a day, a week, or a year. He's not an engineer; he's a money man, and a grifter.
That's why people keep giving Tesla money: because Musk has fooled so many people into believing he's this amazing engineer, who could, possibly, "solve" FSD overnight—and, moreover, has gotten them to buy into it so deeply that they have tied their identity into that belief, and so in order to continue to cling to it, they reject empirical evidence of both his lack of qualifications and his outright crimes.
Well he certainly wouldn't but the engineers working for Tesla might, with a probability that is very low but greater than 0. It's much higher (but still low) in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years. Tomorrow is a metanym for the future.
But to be very clear I not only don't think they will but I don't think that they think they will, or they wouldn't be shifting focus to Optimus. I'm not invested in Tesla except for my exposure through
index funds.
If anyone who is a fan of Tesla can get through this article without changing their mind. Well. Bless their heart.
To be maximally reductive, FSD will never work because the sensor suite is deficient. There are other reasons but that one's enough.
Same for a rocket that's ridiculously large for orbital missions but can't go beyond orbit without 15 to 25 refueling flights of the same enormous rocket.
The reasons for both these failing are going to be manyfold and complex, but there are enough simple reasons that everyone should understand.
It would be actually fun to see where the limit is on echolocation with serious ML processing these days. Apparently people did quite well in 2022 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9655721/
> Do Tesla shareholders think the rest of the auto industry are in a coma?
I have no idea what institutional investors think, and they're probably the relevant group here.
From the way I've observed individuals discussing it, defending it, on HN… it pattern-matches to my understanding of what people these days call "main character syndrome", i.e. that the other companies are just a supporting cast to provide an interesting challenge for the only one that's not an NPC.
Or, they're stuck in a narrative that stopped making sense only gradually. Tesla solving self-driving ten years ago would have been a triumph. Solving it today, meh. They would be ahead of others by a couple of years, max.
I appreciate when my vocabulary expands. I understood this by context and similarity to 'synonym'. I may have encountered it before (probably), but I didn't know it. Excellent use in a post.
> he's this amazing engineer, who could, possibly, "solve" FSD overnight
Even if thay were true many people hate Elon now. Enough that they will pass on any technology he is the only purveyor of.
After he celebrated letting children starve (USAID) by dancing on stage with a chainsaw many people decided to never buy any Musk product for any reason. Now there are the Epstein ties.
Worse, many people who dont care about politics at all won't get involved, because Musk is an unstable drug user and its not wise to entangle yourself in his business affairs.
You really thought the poster meant that Elon Musk personally went and implemented FSD? Just for your information, Musk is also not personally assembling every Tesla vehicle.
Well if there are plenty of posters then it should be easy to give me 5 comments of different people where it's clear they believe Tesla R&D is a solo Elon Musk operation.
They don’t care because Musk is marketing Tesla not as a car company but as a technology company (building robots and self driving rental service). And why does he do that? Maybe because his car sales are down…
I always assumed “tech company” meant using technology to build a fundamentally better car from the ground up. I don't know at what point the bait-and-switch happened, it was suddenly about pursuing every stupid moonshot fantasy at the cost of making better cars.
I thought it was always a tech company focused around trying to import things from the future. Since before they ever had enough sales that sales could go down.
Actually the funny thing is that there is a mixing of meme stuff, Elon verse impacts (AI + self driving + Energy) etc. and under none of these circumstances is a 200+ PE justified.
The funny thing is after 6 years of effort apparently they have managed to get the dry coating process for batteries working and according to a few reputed sources have ingredients for entire battery chain available locally.
The thing is if this stock was underpriced and rational this would be such a positive news after 2-3 years of growth stall.
Instead they are trying to keep the hype up with endless goalpost changing and self driving possibly stuck perenially in edge case doom scenario with camera only decision
Batteries are boring, or at least the hype has a short shelf life. There are enough normies making progress on batteries that Elon hasn't got a credible argument that he is different and better.
Same for cheap Teslas. Some hype trains hit the buffers sooner than later.
I am so confused when I read things like this because my Tesla model 3 is effectively self driving for me for months now. Hundreds of miles without intervention. No other car I can buy can do this yet
That’s irresponsible at best give it doesn’t support full self driving. I never understood why end users are allowed to just beta test a car on public roads.
Is it responsible to let users do auto speed and auto lane on a high speed highway without other autopilot features ?
Rollout both technologies at scale , and try to guess with one will cause more harm giving th fact there will be users in both cars trying to put legs on a steering wheel :
A stupid tech that will not even try to do safe things
Or software that is let’s say 4x less safe vs avg human but still very capable of doing maneuvering without hitting obvious walls etc ?
Giving people more ways to shut themselves in the foot does not improve the safety.
I find the entire thing a kind of dark pattern as the system along with misleading marketing makes you lax over time just to catch you off guard.
You get used with the system to work correctly and then when you expect less it does the unthinkable and the whole world blames you for not supervising a beta software product on the road on day 300 with the same rigour you did on day one.
I can see a very direct correlation with LLM systems. Claude has been working great for me until one day when it git reset the entire repo and I’ve lost two days work because it couldn’t revert a file it corrupted . This happened because I just supervised it just like you would supervise a FSD car with “bypass” mode. Fortunately it didn’t kill anyone , just two days of work lost. If there was the risk of someone being killed I would never allow a bypass /fsd/supervise mode regardless of how unlikely this is to happen.
they have very good guardrails to prevent you that, unlike autolane etc.
Teslas has sensors , eye trackers etc is it possible to shoot yourself in the leg, sure. But not in any different way vs human doing irrational things in the car, make up, arguing , love etc.
Human-being is an irrational create that should not drive except for fun in isolated environment. Tesla or Waymo or anyone else.... It is good to remove human from the road, the faster the better.
>> It is good to remove human from the road, the faster the better.
I’m all for this but not to replace dumb people with dumb software. I think the FSD should be treated more like the airplane safety. We have the opportunity to do this right not just what’s the cheapest way we can get away with it.
well, if you don't read news that try to panic about everything new, that's +- exactly how people currently use FSD.
When I'm driving FSD If i want to drink, eat, etc, instead of doing weird one hand tricks every driver did, i just turn FSD and let it drive. When I'm tired , I'm doing the same. Again , attention control works really good, it doesn't let you sit on the phone etc. unlike many other cars with less advanced features. You can't be on FSD + Phone but you can easily be on the phone + lane control in other car.
Phone is by far the biggest real killer of people, and no body is trying to create a campaign against phone mounts, etc.
Based on the self driving trials in my Model Y, I find it terrifying that anyone trusts it to drive them around. It required multiple interventions in a single 10-minute drive last time I tried it.
I'm using FSD for 100% of my driving and only need to intervene maybe once a week. It's usually because the car is not confident of too slow, not because it's doing something dangerous. Two years ago it was very different where almost every trip I needed to intervene to avoid crash. The progress they have made is truly amazing.
This exact sentence (minus the specific version) is claimed every single week.
No, you do not "become scary good" every single week the past 10 years and yet still not be able to drive coast to coast all by itself (which Elon promised it would do a decade ago)
You are just human and bad at evaluating it. You might even be experiencing literal statistical noise.
I have not been proclaiming scary good every week for the last 10 years. In fact, I have cancelled my subscription at least two times, once on v13 and once on v14, with the reason ‘not good enough yet.’ I am telling you that for me personally it has crossed a threshold very recently.
It certainly wasn't in the past few weeks, but I've been hearing about how good it's gotten for years. Certainly not planning to pay to find out if it's true now, but I'll give it another try next free trial!
Make sure you are on AI4 hardware when you do. If you buy FSD on AI3 you’ll be limited to v13, which is is terrible. I have used both and they are in different leagues altogether.
You need only look at Tesla's attempts to compete with Waymo to see that you are just wrong. They tried to actually deploy fully autonomous Teslas, and it doesn't really work, it requires a human supervisor per car.
They are behind Waymo but they are getting there. They started giving fully autonomous drives since last month without safety driver in Austin. Tesla chose a harder camera-only approach but it's more scalable once it works.
Clearly at this point the camera-only thing is the ego of Musk getting in the way of the business, because any rational executive would have slapped a LIDAR there long ago.
> Mr Keegan said he was “pretty confident” that in “the next five to 10 years” driverless vehicles would “make a major contribution in terms of sustainable transport” on Dublin’s streets.
As always, people were overoptimistic back then, too. There are currently no driverless vehicles in Dublin at all, with none expected anytime soon unless you count the metro system (strictly speaking driverless, but clearly not what he was talking about).
Ask Musk why he refuses to provide details of accidents so we can make a judgment.
Tesla’s own Vehicle Safety Report claims that the average US driver experiences a minor collision every 229,000 miles, meaning the robotaxi fleet is crashing four times more often even by the company’s own benchmark.
I don't see how we could know the rate of US driver minor collisions like that. No way most people reporting 1-4mph "collisions" with things like this.
You don't have to know. You can fully remove the few "minor" accidents (that a self driving car shouldn't be doing ever anyway) and the Tesla still comes out worse than a statistical bucket that includes a staggering number of people who are currently driving drunk or high or reading a book
The car cannot be drunk or high. It can't be sleepy. It can't be distracted. It can't be worse at driving than any of the other cars. It can't get road rage. So why is it running into a stationary object at 17mph?
Worse, it's very very easy to take a human that crashes a lot and say "You actually shouldn't be on the road anymore" or at least their insurance becomes expensive. The system in all of these cars is identical. If one is hitting parked objects at 17mph, they would almost all do it.
Even on highways I've had to intervene maybe once every 50 miles as it will often miss exits for me. This is a 2025 Model 3 with the latest 14.2 update in a major US metro.
The data from their self driving pilots disagrees even if it works for you. Its simply not read to be a taxi that makes money by itself.
It might a nice feature for your car to have. But most people aren't paying for it, the conversion rate is very low.
So they are not making money from taxis and not making much money from software sales.
So does it matter that for you personally it drives you around sometimes?
Even if you price in a 4x increase in FSD buy conversion ratio, you can't explain the stock price.
And I say this as a former Tesla investor who assumed that conversion ratio would be better then it is. But for that reason (and many others) I couldn't justify the valuation and dropped the stock.
Because if you get in an accident you personally not Tesla are liable. Soon as I’m not liable for an accident when the computer is driving I’d sell my other cars and put my family in pink PT Cruisers if those were the only cars offering that
I am confused as to why you think no interventions in "hundreds of miles" is good enough. It has to be no interventions for hundreds of thousands of miles WITH THE CAR BEING EMPTY to be good enough.
Months where you’re still required to be paying attention. Meanwhile 2 years ago Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot a level 3 system let you sit and watch a movie without paying attention to the road.
Personally that’s way more useful for me even if they didn’t let you turn it on at highway speeds.
They canceled it because of poor adoption rather than any technical issues.
Which if anything looks worse for Tesla long term. If luxury car owners aren’t willing to pay 200$/month for self driving then trying to up charge people buying used model 3 and Y’s after canceling the S and X looks dubious. Which means that 100$/month subscription likely loses them money vs an 8k purchase.
Mercedes system was pretty useless because you could only use it in very limited conditions (specific freeways, only following another car). Nobody wants to pay $200/month to use it for 5% of their driving. Tesla FSD drives for you end-to-end.
Most people have a rather consistent commute, so the Mercedes was a more like a 0% or 80% kind of thing. The issue was adding more roads wasn’t going to help, the underlying benefit to attention free driving just wasn’t that valuable even to customers who could use the system regularly.
They are looking to reintroduce it with a much higher top of 81MPH which might help, but agin my issue isn’t with the particular system but the underlying assumption of how much people value attention free driving.
I agree with you. I personally dropped my stock when it was clear that the bull thesis had collapsed.
I had priced in, margin staying the same or going slowly down. FSD not working but achieving at least a decent amount of software sale conversion. Service to become a profit center. And most importantly, a profitable truck and 'Model 2' program to further push volume. Beyond that, just generally that electrification was ongoing and Tesla had a role to play.
I never considered Robi-Taxi or Human Robots.
All of these failed. Volume didn't continue to go up. Margin couldn't be substantiated. FSD didn't get much buys (not helped by absurdly increasing price). Truck program was a failure (and I don't think its because of the design). And 'Model 2' program was cancelled.
I profited a lot from this stock and I think there was time where the stock-price was reasonable (I don't buy the claim that it was always a pure meme stock). But every quarter it got worse and worse. I can't understand why its still so high either.
It’s Elon. It’s a meme stock. Fundamentals don’t matter. That his wealth is so wrapped up in the public valuation of Tesla I guess investors think he will do everything he can to keep th stock price up that is until SpaceX goes public the I think he won’t care because his wealth will come form that primarily.
Wouldn’t this be a side effect of everyone buying only indexes funds or ETFs?
Me and other millions of people are investing in our pensions every month and buying ETF (S&P500 or global) and indirectly buying Tesla stocks even if we don’t want to.
The system would need a big shock to cause the ETFs to rebalance and reduce the proportion of Tesla stocks that are part of the index.
I wonder if some of it is because of Musk, not despite him. Yes, his actions and statements in the last year have been terrible, but he also demonstrated he is very close to one of the most important power centers on the planet. That might be enough for some investors.
Musk, the perception of. As always. Popular media drilled in that geniuses behaving like idiots is on point. So other idiots with money still suspect him of being a genius and singlehandedly turning things around at some point before the cliff.
Long story short --- it's a cult --- there is no logical way to explain it.
Musk is the leader selling his own brand of fantasy that he makes up as he goes along. A lot (if not most) of what he says never comes to pass but people still cling to every prognostication as if it is gospel.
For over two decades, he was all about taking over the auto business with full self driving EVs. Obviously never happened. So now he is off to take over ride sharing and robots and AI and whatever else comes down the pike tomorrow.
At some point you have to wonder if there's some manipulation going on? Do 100s of bots buy and sell these stocks at specific times to keep the price up? Maybe there's an institutional investor or few who secretly back Elon and are part of a scheme?
A bit speculative reply but would appreciate if anybody links any such analysis'/investigations.
From my limited knowledge, I know people have been shorting Tesla based on fundamentals for a while now but haven't been successful.
The billionaire class loves their crypto nazis--they won't let Musk fall from grace. Given the Epstein files, the Panama papers, and what we know about the elite networks, you'd have to be a sucker not to believe that the stock market is manipulated to the core.
They peaked around 2021, and even after posting multiple quarters of disappointing results, the stock is still trading above 2021 levels. For almost any other company, slightly lowering guidance or missing estimates by a few percentage points simply tanks the stock. But for Tesla, no amount of Musk’s idiocy seems to be enough to seriously move it.