I don’t know, I think at this point the Tesla stock doesn’t have a link with the company anymore and behaves like any meme coin or collectible token. Like in crypto there is some vague narrative about a crazy future but ultimately the point is only to drive further speculation ("buy it before you’re priced out/join the elite crowd that’ll own the future/etc."). The genius of Elon is having realized (I’d say around the time he tested the ground with pumping dogecoin) that in a stock market where investors don’t buy for dividends but only price speculation the underlying business doesn’t really matter, only the narrative does. Dividends are the only link with the real business, without them the price is only a function of the demand, and what Elon has achieved is maintaining demand through narrative, like in crypto, irrelevant of the company results.

You can laugh at it, and most likely it will crash and burn.

But at the same time, maybe they are doing the correct analysis.

"If we stay here and grow fat the others will eat us. To infinity and beyond!".

100 years ago your business was your warehouse or your locomotive. These days, maybe your business is defined by your rate of change?

You should probably compare revenue instead of profit because Tesla and Toyota are at very different places in their development.

But Toyota still makes 3x Teslas revenue.

I'm guessing some of the 9x difference is speculative and some is because Tesla is all in on EVs/etc, which are doing well, and Toyota is still very much in ICEs, which aren't doing as well.

> "Edit: Tesla is 3 times Toyota in valuation, not 5 as I said earlier, not that it changes the argument much."

Per Google finance, Tesla's market cap today is $1.42T. Toyota's is ¥48.72T, or $307B USD. So that would make Tesla's valuation about 4.6 times Toyota's.

Tesla and Space-X.

SpaceX and Tesla are just another form of the Star Citizen phenomenon.

They are a battery company. The cars are just a way to sell batteries.

It's sort of Tesla's core thesis that they want to attain the world's lowest manufacturing costs, by doing novel things with robotics and AI that automate away humans.

Everyone gets this backwards. Tesla isn't abandoning their low-margin auto manufacturing in order to switch to high-margin robotics tech; they want to capture the margin of robotics for themselves first. If their manufacturing half fails, that means their robotics half also failed at its primary task.

Techworld has an inductive bias towards expecting successful products to be luxury lifestyle products, because so much of past tech successes came from that. Most likely the first successful AI robotics aren't going to be iPhone-like consumer luxuries, laundry-folding novelties for bored techies. They'll rather continue the trend of robotics to focus on industrial processes in controlled settings, capturing value by lowering the costs of doing banal things.

Chinese cars are effectively excluded from the US market mainly to keep Tesla afloat.

Which begs a question: Is it really possible to compete with China on consumer products? The price and cost of labor advantage, indeed state sponsorship and support, would suggest that it's not.

Musk basically lost to China competitition, but can't assume it.