Ah, but you missed the pivot, Tesla is no longer an EV maker, it's now a robotics company.

This fully explains the market valuation, of course! Never mind a swarm of retail investors driven by a news media that covered Musk as if he were Tony Stark for years, this market cap is fully based on solid fundamental analysis of expected future revenue.

This is an interesting take, considering several EVs from traditional manufacturers have been canned entirely.

The declining sales is a concern. Was curious though so I looked it up and Tesla is currently selling more than Volkswagen, Ford, Rivian, Mercedes, and Toyota combined. Interesting.

The big dog is BYD though. Twice as many as 2nd place Tesla.

Not to mention China heavily subsidizing BYD.

Model E?

> 1.5B net on $100B revenue is not great. 1.5%? If that's not struggling, it's uncomfortably close.

You're misreading. $100B annual revenue. 1.5B quarterly new income.

Q3 2025 was record revenue of $27B (up 12% YoY). Operating margin was 5.8% (down from 10.8 Q3 2024).

Why the lower profitability? Higher expenses for AI and R&D costs, lower EV prices (very strong competition), etc.

For comparison, GM brought in $1.3B on $48B.

Look at the free cash flow, and the situation looks maybe even worse. They're basically not worth much, if anything, from a free cash flow perspective.

> It has delivered a better ROI in the same way a ponzi scheme can deliver higher ROI.

It sounds like you're arguing that high valuation compared to fundamentals means buyers expect gains from future buyers paying more sounds like a Ponzi, but it isn't, it is speculation.

The comparison doesn't make sense. Some surface features of speculative markets can look Ponzi-like, but the underlying mechanics are very different.

A Ponzi-scheme returns to earlier participants directly from money contributed by later participants, with no real underlying business generating value. In a Ponzi-scheme, there is no real product (or it is irrelevant), the operator controls payouts, and investors are promised steady or guaranteed returns. None of that applies to Tesla stock.

Ponzi-schemes hide losses, smooth returns, collapse suddenly. Tesla stock is volatile, has had large drawdowns, and public reflects bad news, margin compression, demand shifts. Volatility is a sign of a market, not a Ponzi.

TSLA investors:

* don't believe the 67% will follow through with that after experiencing FSD

* don't need 67% of Americans to purchase the car. Robotaxi use is plenty.

* look beyond the American market and its pathetic 5% EV share.

Stock valuations are not a democracy of public opinion, they are the product of investors putting their money into the stock.

Musk is a shit human, but to an investor, everything he touches turns to gold. Whether his companies make anything useful doesn't matter, what matters is that the stock price in his companies goes up, so people give him more money. This works until it doesn't.

> Short it then

Just because stock is trading on memes, doesn't mean it can't keep doing so well past your solvency to short it...

Such as lazy excuse.

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

Meaning you also need to get the timing just right otherwise you'll lose big, even if Tesla crashes and burns to zero just after.

"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"

> stock value isn't rooted in reality

> "Short it then"

I can smell your personal finance through the screen.

Timing shorts is one of the hardest problems in human history.

It doesn't mean that Tesla stock won't crash unless it actually delivers a Holy Grail. Which is supremely unlikely

Can't win against irrational exuberance and fraud that isn't prosecuted in the capital markets ("voting machine vs weighing machine"). Just have to wait for failure of the enterprise, equity wipeout, and recapitalization under better human management (if you're optimizing for a company that actually manufacturers and sells a product vs a shell to pump a stock and enrich the board members who enable him with a lack of corporate governance). The factories and Supercharger network will remain intact under a reorganization.

Musk can move money around SpaceX/Tesla/XAI/whatever the next story to investors is to prop up valuations and share prices, but can he win against China's clean tech export machine? Long term, I think not (China is a third of global manufacturing capacity as of this comment, and the world is their TAM). So he'll do the tech bro thing, giving talks, going to demo days, spending his wealth on pet projects, etc, while innovators innovate and point the firehose of these products at the world. Are you going to talk people out of his religion? Unlikely. The faithful will remain so, because that's how the human brain sometimes operates.

Ember Energy: China Cleantech Exports Data Explorer - https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e... (updated monthly) ("In 2024, China produced around 80% of the world’s solar PV modules and battery cells, and 70% of electric vehicles.")

US warns China overproducing EVs, batteries, semiconductors for global dominance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41909869 - October 2024

China's Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954508 - July 2024

China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40933773 - July 2024

(as of this comment, ~50% of light vehicle sales in China are NEVs [battery electric of plug in hybrid] while exporting ~6M units/year, more than total annual US light vehicle sales)

That is certainly a contributing factor, which Matt Stoller has documented robustly in his newsletter "Big" [1] [2], as well as the More Perfect Union org [3] [4].

[1] https://www.thebignewsletter.com/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=thebignewsletter.com

[3] https://perfectunion.us/

[4] https://substack.perfectunion.us/

I don’t think self-dealing is new. Although it was eye-opening, when I learned that BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity all own 5-10% of every company and competition between the companies they hold is not meaningful. Everyone just has to have nice steady predictable returns and nobody is allowed to innovate too far ahead of anyone else for fear of devaluing the real bosses’ other assets.

I don’t even know what to call the kind of system we have.

In the US, which is due to policy, which is temporary. The rest of the world remains very hungry for affordable electric vehicles [1], which only China seems interested in producing at scale. Once that manufacturing capacity and distribution systems are spun up (BYD has its own car carrier for exports, the BYD Shenzhen, for example [2]), it will remain in production. "Can Tesla survive until regime change?" is an important question for those with economic exposure to it. Ironically, its peril is entirely self inflicted.

> BYD announced in 2022 its plans to launch a fleet of car carriers to build what it calls a “maritime bridge” to support its global sales growth and supply chain. The company said it would invest about $687 million to develop a fleet of eight car carriers. The first of the vessels, BYD Explorer No. 1 was delivered in January 2024 followed by BYD Changzhou in December 2024, and BYD Hefei, which was the company’s first owned PCTC. Each of the first three vessels has a capacity of 7,000 units. [My note: current BYD vertical integration marine fleet capacity is ~30k units when including the Shenzhen vessel mentioned above, but does not include capacity through third party charters]

[1] China EV Exports Worldwide Rise 87% Year over Year to 199,836 in November [2025] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-29/china-ev-... | https://archive.today/Q80Zs - December 29, 2025

[2] Chinese EV Manufacturer BYD Takes Delivery of [World's] Largest Capacity Car Carrier - https://maritime-executive.com/article/chinese-ev-manufactur... - April 24th, 2025

(think in systems; US light vehicle TAM is ~18M units/year, global TAM is ~90M units/year; Tesla US sales will finalize at ~600k units for 2025)

It feels like you already lost the whole point of this thread. Then why is the stock up?