Charts of the Day: Tesla
Tesla is a trillion‑dollar stock priced like a world‑eating tech platform at the exact moment all the bad, boring car‑company things have finally caught up with it. The chip shortage lottery win is long over. And yet, and yet, and yet…
Is Tesla a company that is appropriately valued as worth $1.2T to its shareholders?
Consider that nearly every single bear-case process and event that you might as of the start of 2022 have worried might happen to Tesla has in fact happened to Tesla.
Perhaps the place to start the story is with the post-plague rebound. Auto companies had given up their place in the microchip line as they cut back on production, and so they were blindsided at first when demand for autos roared back in 2021. They could have have responded by changing course, and paying premium prices to those who had taken those places in the chip-distribution line in order to get back their allocations, and so produced more cars. But a light bulb went on in the greedy little minds of all the auto executives: if none of us are willing to pay premium prices to get back our chip allocations, then we have a very nice production limiting cartel, don’t we? And we can charge super premium prices, can’t we? And so we can rake in the money: profit! And so they did.
Except for Tesla.
Elon Musk was—to his great credit—willing to do whatever it took to get chips and make cars. And so Tesla’s revenue roared.
From $80B at the end of 2019 to $1.2T in mid-2021. That turned Elon Musk from the Green Enviro Hero of the Electric Anti-ICE Future into the Man with the Golden Touch, and the richest TechBro in the world.
And there the story stopped.