For quite some time, Warren Buffett was a BYD investor via Berkshire Hathaway. If you tried to get into EV stocks after the Tesla exuberance started, you were already mostly too late.

> The filing by Berkshire’s energy subsidiary recorded the value of its BYD investment as zero as of the end of March, down from $415 million at the end of 2024.

> Buffett’s company began investing in Shenzhen-based BYD in 2008, when it paid $230 million for about 225 million shares, equivalent to a 10% stake at the time.

> It began selling those shares in 2022 after BYD’s share price had risen more than twentyfold.

Warren Buffett’s fund exits BYD after a 17-year investment that grew over 20-fold in value - https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/22/investing/warren-buffet-berks... - September 22nd, 2025

Anytime China targets an industry we get a situation where basically every major city has their own brand that they're backing. There's a lot more competition in China compared to western markets that tend to be dominated by a few major players. There's over 100 EV brands in China today, e.g. BYD (Shenzhen), NIO (Hefei), GAC Aion (Guangzhou), and SAIC (Shanghai)

There's been a lot written about China's "Fiscal Federalism"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01475...

BYD's self-driving is free and much more widely available. Not to mention it uses LiDAR. I'm not gonna get into whether or not their God's Eye is better or worse than Tesla's FSD but it's at least widely acknowledged that they are at least comparable.

Tesla is also not very transparent so it's hard to cite statistics but a recent study found that Tesla had the highest rate of fatal accidents of any brand in the US

https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study

The Shanghai stock exchange is still too heavy on insider trading, and consumer investors feel it is more like gambling than investing. Like, you could wager some money on a mahjong game, or you could blindly pick a stock and hope you can get some money by riding in the wake of a connected insider trader.

If you just want to invest money, there is real estate or investing in a family member’s business. Pensions and other institutions in need of safe (in aggregate) investments won’t go near the SSE yet.

China is doing more things right but still has a long way to go on other things.

The explanation that I'm finding more and more compelling is that this is because there's actual competition in China, whereas in the west conglomerates have been able to carve up the market into fiefdoms and feast, with increasing amounts of cash that they can funnel into dividends and buybacks.

From the NA vehicle POV it doesn't look healthy. Stocks of the major auto makers have done well this year, while product gets more and more expensive and limited. Barely seems possible to buy anything but a F150like anymore.

You could say that about the Chinese stock market in general. Neither the SSE Composite nor the Hang Seng correlate all that well with Chinese GDP growth.

Chinese companies are optimized to grow and build stuff. US companies are optimized to deliver returns to shareholders.

Do you own stock in them?

it's the only thing you ever comment about.

SpaceX’s success have no bearing on Tesla. And Tesla’s sales for the year are down for the second year in a row. Hardly a logical reason for the stock to go up.

Nice. Now take the car sales out of the vacuum and let’s see how great sales look year over across the world. Now let’s factor in how Elon’s government ended subsidies for electric cars. Should I go on?