Tesla is abundantly wealthy mostly on the back of it's delusional investors creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Sounds like crypto…

As was Enron...

Enron is making a comeback now: https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/02/business/enron-resurrected-jo...

as a crypto play apparently, so

> mostly on the back of [its] delusional investors creating a self-fulfilling prophecy

continues to hold true.

I'm not saying you are wrong, but GME is an interesting contrast. Despite delusional investors they didn't manage to make anything of it.

They're still around. Remember they were shorted because they seemed on the verge of bankruptcy..

More zombie than thriving though.

Fair enough. They were able to exploit it with a massive share offering at a high price, which not only got them in the black but set them up with considerable holdings sufficient to survive the next downturn. So they're not going anywhere. But yeah, I don't think they have any ideas for future growth.

They should have used that money to buy GOG and go into digital distribution competing with Valve & Epic, or something like that.

But then again, so many stable companies get pushed by their investors to make big ambitious bets, then go belly-up. I kinda got respect for them just focusing on a good brick-and-mortor game buying experience.

Tesla is a fraud just short of Enron. (Enron was a complete fabrication. Tesla is a real company with fabricated valuation.) The valuation is based on hand wavey gibberish. The company has repeatedly sold consumers products that don’t exist. The concepts of duty of care, loyalty, and obedience are foreign concepts to the owner of the company.

JP Morgan’s analyst position on the company really says it all: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jpmorgan-deeply-skeptical-wal...

The scary thing is that the lie is so big, everyone is exposed to it — TSLA is 2% of VTI’s holdings.

I don't know offhand what TSLA's stock price is, but I think it's fair to say that the speculative value is at least very high if you believe that Tesla Optimus is at all a viable competitor to Boston Dynamics Atlas. I see much more long-term potential value in that than the car business.

Robotaxi is also a pretty interesting bet. I'm skeptical that it'll pan out, or at least that it will ever reach the same level of safety as Waymo without lidar, but on the other hand AI has obviously significantly advanced and been significantly democratized compared to when Tesla first launched Autopilot over a decade ago. More significantly, I see the decentralized rollout strategy as a potentially viable path to beat Waymo to the punch of a full-scale deployment. Waymo might still get there first based on its headstart and massive warchest, but Tesla's strategy is essentially crowdfunding it while using the market to optimize geographic distribution. The downside is that allowing the Robotaxi to be used in arbitrary/novel locations might be significantly less safe and/or more computationally expensive than Waymo's approach, so it's a more uncertain bet than Waymo.

I'm also thinking that we'll have "cool" humanoid robots before we'll have fully autonomous cars.

It just seems that self driving is staying a "hard problem" (harder than expected!)

Both would be insanely economically valuable.

I do fear humanoid robots will face intense competition from Chinese mass manufacturing, undercutting them with cost while mostly matching features.

It’s about 180x earnings, just under $380/share today.

Elon dangles all sorts of bullshit to get you thinking about nerd nonsense. “OMG, a Tesla robot will do my laundry on Mars with my robot rocket ship!”

It’s all bullshit. They’ve been dangling the imminent $25k car for a decade. The Tesla roadster that people put huge deposits on is nowhere to be found.

People are figuring it out. My previous comment would have created a 100+ comment thread in HN 5 years ago.

Both Tesla and SpaceX are insanely profitable.

Tesla was very profitable. Gross Margin is 14% now of revenue now. 1/4 of their their $8B profit is emissions credits. That's not shabby and they have lowish debt ($20B).

But it isn't what I'd call insane. Google's gross margin is 58%, profit is $349B.

I'm not sure why you're comparing the gross margin of a car company to an internet company. General Motors has a gross margin of 10%. Ford's is 7%. Historically Tesla's was ~25%, but yeah it's fallen a bit since I last looked.

> I'm not sure why you're comparing the gross margin of a car company to an internet company.

Because the benchmark set was "insane". I agree no car company gets insane profitability levels. Tesla was never insanely profitable by most metrics.

SpaceX is not insanely profitable. Starlink might become so, but it isn't yet.

Only because they're funneling every dollar they earn into Starship. But as Starship contributes absolutely nothing to current revenue, excluding those costs is the only fair apples-to-apples comparison. We don't know their exact costs because SpaceX is still a private company, but estimates are on the order of 60% profit margin across their business lines.