this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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Tesla dealerships are getting protested and, in some cases, vandalized. Sales are down on 9 of the top 10 countries Tesla sells in. Yet Tesla stock is up. Twitter is a cesspool of nazi-themed bots, and somehow just pulled in $1bn and raised its valuation back up to $44bn.

How is any of this possible? It seems really artificial to me, but I don't really understand business.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 hours ago

When highly profitable companies are valued less than companies like Tesla just confirms that in the stockmarket the rules are made up, and the points don't matter

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 hours ago

It’s market manipulation of the highest order. It’s not legal but no one is going to do anything about it.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

He gave his stock on those companies as collateral for bank loans and he needs those stocks to hold value otherwise the banks will call the loans and will reduce Musk's ownership of his companies

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

That could just as well be the reasons those banks want those companies to have an inflated value.

If those companies lose much value there will be a lot of mess and no one involved is going to get richer of it.

These days a CEO is pretty much someone that markets a company towards the shareholders. Elon is a pretty good marketeer.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

A good marketeer? Are you fecking serious?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 hours ago

Musk is a threat to the integrity of the USA and is a dumpster of a human being but he knows how to navigate the circles of government, politics, and investors and gets those people to believe in him and let him do whatever he's been doing

[–] [email protected] 7 points 13 hours ago

The value of a private company is a number that can be pulled from their ass, right?

Before: there was an idiot that wanted to pay $54.20 for each of the 800 million publicly traded shares = 44 billion valuation even if the yearly earnings after all expenses (EBITDA) was only 680 million (data public, as required by sec) so the board sued that guy to force him to pay when backed down as that valuation was insanely high and the board would never get such a big golden parachute

Now: we don't need to publish financial data anymore but CEO says that the company is super profitable, valuation is back to 44 billion, trust us 😉

[–] [email protected] 9 points 14 hours ago

The PE ratio for most established carmakers is near 7. Tsla is near 120 last I checked. Some bubbles pop.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 18 hours ago

That's what we call the dead-cat bounce. The further and faster a stock price falls, the more people think it will go back up and buy in at the new low price, thus at some point there is a short-lived reversal of the decline before it continues as it was. Although much of Tesla's value recently was from a big jump in November (getting a fancy new oval-shaped office will do that for you), so this is likely as much a correction of that overreaction as it is some protest of or loss of faith in Musk.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

Because he is. Tesla has always been overvalued due to him making bullshit announcements that dumbass investors actually believe.

Adam Conover recently made a video explaining this very thing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 15 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 18 hours ago

Fascism. Once a p single private interest controls the government, they can effectively do whatever they want in the private sector, making them a sure bet for investors

[–] [email protected] 18 points 22 hours ago

Like when Tesla started lying about their cars fully driving themselves?

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 day ago

It is corruption and market manipulation at the highest possible level because americans elected an russian asset into the office. Shortly after a treaaonous judge claimed president can do whatever they want. And aparrently you are only allowed to stop crime when it's occurring, not treason.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's the largest pump and dump scheme in history and it's being done in the open.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, they are literally begging maga idiots to buy TSLA to keep the price up while executives are unloading shares. International sales completely gone. Domestic sales declining. Cybertruck flopped. Tariffs are going to cripple their production. Competing EV are making TSLA look like amateurs. Like, what's the upside?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

After convincing them that EVs were trash no less.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago

Nah. I have an ev and love it, but it's not a Tesla.

[–] [email protected] 94 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Yet Tesla stock is up.

Well, over what period of time are you talking about?

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA/

For the day, TSLA is up 5.27%.

For five days, down 0.51%.

For one month, down 26.37%.

Year-to-date, down 38.41%.

For six months, up 4.39%.

Like, depends on the start and end time that you're looking at.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 day ago (1 children)

For 1 year, up 45.59% (this is fucking crazy!) For 5 years, up 625.30%

This is not normal for any stock, even if the company was doing good. But the company isn't doing good.

Their market share is small and hasn't grown in ways promised. The Cybertruck was a disaster, with almost no customers, only legal in some parts of the world (parts without proper regulations) and a bunch of delays and technical issues. Demand has been decreasing, even before Musks latest public Nazi shit. Revenue is down. There appears to have been fraud in the numbers they did report and those weren't good to start with. The whole promised future of self driving cars has turned out to be total BS and only the very strict anti-sue terms has saved them on this point. Other companies in the same space are doing better on all fronts.

Yet somehow the stock is worth more than the rest of the market they are in? It makes zero sense and you can bet your ass illegal shit has been done to get it to this point.

Musk has been begging people to please hold on to their stock. And if I know one thing, if the big shareholders start saying shit like that, sell immediately! It's a sign they are going to sell and you need to get out before all the money is gone.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

My impression is that the stock market is not really interested in real-world value. It's interested in projections of future stock price. And those things should be coupled, but they can be very decoupled sometimes.

I don't understand enough to known why yet though.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 day ago (2 children)

People have the memory of a goldfish nowadays.

I was alive during the 2000 and 2008 market crashes, but also the 2020 non-crash.

It could be that Tesla really has cracked autonomous driving by summer, as Elon claims, and then they will recover a lot of market value.

But more realistically, as the saying goes, even a dead cat bounces.

Markets never go down in perfect lines. There are dead cat bounces along the way.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 17 hours ago

Checkout how good their fucking reduction to using only cameras, instead of radar or lidar, line everyone else, is working out

Here is a nice comparison between lidar and Tesla's solution with only using cameras:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ&t=491

You can clearly see the downsides and why those sensors are just not sufficient in any way for a self driving car

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Tesla really has cracked autonomous driving by summer, as Elon claims

He really says that??

He must be sooo desperate LMAO

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 day ago (5 children)

He's been saying "fully autonomous" by next year for literally like 10 years, lol. Short memories indeed.

I believed in him since like 2001. I stopped believing in him by 2015.

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

Something that is very easy to forget is that stock value is only very loosely tied to actual company value.

Stock value is based on what people are prepared to pay for the stock, not what the company is worth.

Say that I create a company that makes newspaper hats for tanks in Ukraine, something utterly worthless, I am the only employee and my inventory is just yesterday's newspapers that I found in the gutter.

My company has zero actual value, but I decide to create 50000 shares of my company, sell one to my friend for €2, and suddenly my company's market value would look like €100000.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago

You've just explained most Tech Startup unicorns, by the way.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

You'll need to have 500k shares total for the valuation to be 1M

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yes but 50.000 × 2 = 100.000, large numbers get confusing without dots

[–] [email protected] 3 points 22 hours ago

Sorry I should have been clear when I edited my post, the previous commenter was correct, I messed up the math.

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 1 day ago (1 children)

TSLA has been notoriously impossible to short the last few years. I firmly believe this DD from 5 years ago that Elon figured out a way to pump their stock value through gamma squeezing with OTM call options. The DD is 5 years old, but it was spot on and for a time, the stock just kept going up to where it was inexplicably worth more than it's next 10 competitors combined. I think the actual sell volume of the world was outpacing his ability to do this for a time, but he is going to continue to try.

https://www.reddit.com/r/options/comments/hk7nqe/tesla_infinity_call_gamma_squeeze/

Phillip Low fired him with cause for attempting to manipulate his company's stock in 2021.

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2025/01/27/elon-musk-booted-from-startup-neurovigil.html

https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1ib5792/philip_low_longtime_friend_and_peer_of_elon_musk/

Elon has repeatedly trolled the SEC and says he does not respect them. He's absolutely pumping it up to keep it afloat, and it may even return to ath.

Elon is a manipulative piece of shit, and that's why I do not put it below him to have used his vast wealth to have undermined the 2024 election and believe he had a part in hacking it. Hell, he can't even play video games fairly as we all already saw.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Good find. I am convinced Tesla is the Enron of our day.

The scheme only works as long as most people keep holding their stock. Once they start selling, it will be a very quick road down.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

And with the global outcry against the company, I don't think that day is far off. They know there's going to be reduced demand for their products, because even those who don't feel like they want to boycott Tesla out of principle might still reconsider buying one if they don't want to deal with the shame/risk they'll get from others.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago (20 children)

You are not wrong. Elon Musk is the PR man for the companies he either founded or have a majority of shares in. However, his companies's products and services are not actually superior to his competitors. Take Tesla, the cars are not road-worthy, they are expensive, the battery sets on fire more often, and uses inferior image-detecting camera when driving automatically. Meanwhile, Chinese competitors are cheaper, more safe and use better LIDAR technology for automated driving (but only because the Chinese government heavily subsidise in EV companies making their cars far superior).

So, as someone already mentioned, hype up your company and convince anyone to buy shares, then your companies's valuations increase tremendously. It creates the illusion that your company is productive and valuable when in reality it is not.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

Which is pretty much how Trump has lived his life, but less successfully. No wonder they're friends. It's a coop grift.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)
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