Being innovative at small details of existing concepts isn't likely to produce huge gains in stock value, as opposed to being innovative at entire categories of new industry- and infrastructure-disrupting products. Ford does the former, Tesla does the latter, and the market is valuing them accordingly.

The market could be wrong, Tesla could fail to achieve their vision, Ford and other existing big companies could somehow turn themselves into organizations that aggressively pursue ambitious new visions.. but the market is betting not. You're welcome to make an opposing bet.

>Tesla does the latter, and the market is valuing them accordingly.

Suddenly we believe in a rational market when it comes to Tesla? Everytime I ask basic valuation questions in these threads, I get touchy-feely answers about "potential". And HackerNews is supposed to be a data/tech place. Imagine what average Joe thinks?

> The market could be wrong, Tesla could fail to achieve their vision, Ford and other existing big companies could somehow turn themselves into organizations that aggressively pursue ambitious new visions.. but the market is betting not. You're welcome to make an opposing bet.

I don't know about 'we', but I don't believe in an irrational market - the market may well be wrong, but it's not usually wrong for unreasonable reasons. And potential is all investors ever care about: they're looking to put their money where it has the most potential to turn into more money. Predicting the future is necessarily uncertain and involves ambiguous judgment; you can call that touchy-feely if you want to be dismissive, but there is no such thing as data on things that haven't happened yet.

Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent.

We could quibble about the meaning of "irrational", but I do agree that markets can be mistaken for longer than most people can financially back their conviction that it's mistaken.

In the case of Tesla vs Ford, there is probably a sense in which the longer the market is 'irrationally' convinced of the value of Tesla, the less irrational it actually is - it's a bet on Tesla's viability and vision, and the longer it seems like a good bet to most people, the more likely it is that it is a rational bet to have made.

Maybe that's part of it. I'm sure another part of it is that Ford is already big enough, that there isn't a lot of growth potential there.

That said, it's not like they are exactly just making small refinements to gasoline engines, while SV companies are the only real innovators, chasing electric and self-serving vehicles. We just tend not to talk about it as much on HN (compared to Tesla, for example):

https://www.google.com/amp/s/electrek.co/2017/01/03/ford-new...

Ford doesn't have much room to grow because they are a mature company in a mature field. Tesla is creating new fields. Ford doesn't know how to create new fields, therefore they're stuck making small improvements to existing things, and, once someone like Tesla makes it very clear that a new field exists and is viable, Ford will reluctantly follow the market trend.

Ford does normal science [0], Tesla does revolutionary science [1].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_...

I don't know what this is meant to mean.