Tesla experts like the ones on this thread have been telling me to sell my shares since 2013. If I’d listened to them I would have missed out on 2 million in (paper) gains. (I know, I know, it's going to zero soon). The stock, the business and the founder are all lightning rods for various reasons. Lot of irrational hate out there. Then there’s also the multiple trillion dollar industries being disrupted and doing what they can to trash Tesla. Tesla traded nearly sideways for six years (2013-2019). During that time Tesla was nearly doubling production each year, rolling out more superchargers, innovating, building their FSD database from a fleet of vehicles, rolling out new models, lower the price of the vehicles, etc. During that 6 year stretch Tesla was the most shorted US equity and the stock was suppressed and heavily manipulated. So, in my mind, a large portion of the recent run was the Stockmarket realizing and catching up with all the progress and growth in the company the past six years (back payment). The other part of the recent take off is the S&P inclusion. This caused a lot of forced buying by both the S&P index funds and those funds benchmarked to the S&P (24% of the available float). When you have forced buying and few willing sellers among the institutions and retail investors holding the stock the price goes up. You can call that a bubble, but since these funds will need to buy and hold to be properly weighted to the S&P not sure you can call it a bubble. I'm sure the experts on here will disagree.
Keep in mind also that the auto “bigs" are still selling their compliance EVs at a loss or break even at best. To sell their EVs profitably, they’ll need to scale production, but to do that they need batteries. Batteries that don’t currently exist. Tesla is production constrained. And the production limiting factor is not so much how many cars they can build, but how many batteries they can produce in partnership with Panasonic and in house. It's very naive to think GM or Ford will simply flip a lever and switch from producing ICE vehicles to EVs. Its especially naive to think dealerships will want to sell these new EVs and put their profitable ICE maintenance and service departments out of business. The dealers don’t want to sell cars that don’t need oil changes, transmission fluid, spark plugs, mufflers, catalytic converters, radiator flushes, replacement belts, etc. GM and Ford stockholders want their dividends. They don’t want to hear how GM and Ford are going to have unprofitable quarters while they sink billions into developing new, ground up EVs, converting lines, lining up new suppliers, building charging networks, retraining employees, and most importantly, sink billions into building their own battery factories to compete with Tesla. Why would GM and Ford investors tolerate that? If they wanted to invest in an EV company, why would they suffer through the transition with GM and Ford when they could just buy stock in a pure play, industry leader, like Tesla right now. Maybe that’s why Tesla is on a tear. Smart money moving from oil and gas, utilities, and traditional auto to Tesla? Nah, couldn’t be...
Without spending a single dime on advertising or marketing, Tesla sells every car they make before it rolls off the line. They don’t have dealer middlemen. They occasionally offer free supercharging for a year or similar incentives but do not resort to rebates and other kimmicks to sell cars. The day Tesla has to advertise to sell a car is the day I’ll consider unloading some shares.
The energy business will be as big or bigger than the car business. The demand is there for Tesla storage products as well, but again Tesla is battery cell constrained and is currently prioritizing vehicles for the cells, though the storage business is ramping. Tesla is no more just a car manufacturer than Amazon just sells books.