It's much better to buy Puts (limited downside). The problem with buying them now is that you're way too late. By now the premiums are quite high, even for huge declines. If you bought a few batches at different strike prices expiring 2026 in 2021 you would be sitting on some serious profit now.
Never underestimate hype in keeping stuff alive, and absolutely never underestimate the willingness of government to save companies that should go under.
I don’t much care for Keynes, but as I’ve gotten older, the “wild animal spirits” makes more sense as markets are seemingly never rational. Even when they are, the government now likes to “bail out” companies that the market has said ought fall.
For Musk, be he one thing or another, he has been a political animal from the start. He chose sectors where government money was available, where politicians could gain credibility with the public by supporting his companies (electric cars, solar, space), and he consistently got the hype running high enough to provide radical over-valuations. When the political winds began to shift, so did he. He immediately pivoted to position himself no-longer as center-left, but somewhere right-of-center when the majority of the USA went that direction. The primary issue with this is that to the US right… electric cars and solar aren’t too interesting, and space while admirable isn’t a priority.
I think that any prognostication on the death of Tesla is a bit hasty, but Musk’s usual strategy is certainly in question.
I struggle to understand what is Musk's endgame here. 95% of Tesla's client base is (was) upper-middle class liberal/left leaning professionals. He spent the last 4 years relentlessly trolling and ostracizing these people, and then seemingly went full loony with nazi salutes, re-tweeting far right accounts on X and to top it all off he endorsed the far right political parties in Europe, which really pushed the nail into the coffin.
The US admin who was championed by Musk wasted no time to cancel EV subsidies and investments into charging infrastructure and is currently pushing "beautiful, clean coal".
This seems like the most braindead, schizophrenic, and short-sighted set of blunders I've seen in my life. A child would've been able to predict what is going to happen. So I'm really stumped. He cannot be this stupid, surely? He cannot be this ignorant of the impact of his own actions? Is he really so deep in an echo chamber that he thought the Tesla gravy train will just keep going?
Tesla as a brand is basically dead in Europe - one of his biggest markets. There's no salvaging this. No comeback that he can engineer.
Maybe he saves his bacon in the US by enough government money grift to keep Tesla alive, but he'd have to do a ridiculous amount of it to keep the dream of >100 PE ratio valuation going.
Most people dislike Trump, Musk, and Vance. Musk is by far the least liked of the three.
People in the country very much dislike the status-quo, hence the dislike of the Democratic Party and voters going for ape-shit change over Biden.
I sincerely doubt working people will see their lives improves this term and change their mind on Trump; there wasn't a liberal shift to the right and we'll likely see a major reaction of everyone going to the left when they realize dismantling everything hurt everyone.
yea, all right is working on is fixing this shit for ya. feel safe already, just like I did in 2016-2020. those were the times… now I am already starting to feel safer too, it is unbelievable :)
At this point I'm largely surprised the Cybertruck didn't come with an accessory that allows you to roll coal from a separate diesel tank.
But I really agree, it feels like a guy with investments in solar and EVs could have got more out of working with the party that want to invest more in both of those instead of eliminating both of them. I guess when you reach a certain amount of money (combined with drug abuse) your incentives become hard to understand.
Twitter has algorithmically overfed his narcissism and sociopathy to the point where’s he’s detached from reality, and no amount of “smart” can get him out of this hole.
> absolutely never underestimate the willingness of government to save companies that should go under
This is my biggest worry. As Musk is now basically part of the government, I wouldn't be surprised for Tesla to be deemed 'of strategic importance' and bailed out by the taxpayer. It's compatible with the privatized profits - socialized losses policy we've all been accustomed to.
In a somewhat convenient turn of events for pro-Musk camp on HN: Musk is now deeply embroiled in politics. Thus, any discussion of him is inherently political. And of course, politics is largely "off-topic" for HN.
So in addition to the usual flagging and downvoting of Musk-critical comments and stories, they can also be flagged and downvoted for being "political."
I don't foresee it changing anytime soon. Not at least until enough techies finally understand that virtually everything is "political" to some extent, and I don't expect that to happen until we hit the riots-in-the-streets stage of Musk's current political project.
I realized that the stock market has a lot of gambling aspects for a handful of companies.
Tesla is/was hyped up and everyone said "but its not just a car company". But okay the Tesla Solar stuff is available for ages by now, the robot can't be bought yet and the first chinese companies sell them at 30k (i always assumed the first would hit the market with 100k and more) and from a robot taxi perspective, there are so many other companies doing it already...
Add 1 + 1 + 1 and you do not get the valuation of what tesla is valuated at all.
And then Musk. Holy shit Musk. The borring company was braindead and showed a very clear very ungenius brain fart. His way of selling but not deliverying is now omnipresent.
And his election interfering in usa and eu will catch up with him as everything else will.
the intuition behind boring company was that traffic could go faster in dedicated pipes.
it's actually the right company for the wrong reasons. there are more important reasons traffic should go underground. car roads are sewers; noisy, polluting, stink. any city will benefit when cars are removed from the surface.
for that reasons alone, from all his companies, i hope boring company would succeed the most.
Yeah the boring company doesn't seem a bad gamble to me even if it doesn't work out. They've even got a new project lined up doing a Dubai loop similar to the Las Vegas one.
It's the pivot to nazi salutes etc. that seems nuts.
You do understand that underground traffic already exists and is called public transportaion or sometimes more specifically like ubahn etc.?
The idea in itself is not new, the idea of him is to put cars under it in a very narrow tunnel because the narrower the cheaper.
And now comes the magic stupidity or ignorance of him: There is ar eason why tunnels and our underground looks like it does: Water (rain), Water (ground water), air (oxygen, co2) and emergencies need to be countet for.
There is a reason why he still doesn't reach the speed or anything he ever promised on it and there is a reason why 12 years later there is nothing of significance to be seen anywhere.
Btw. we could just use transportation technology like in star trek.
Couldn't have happened to a bigger dickhead founder, honestly. Elon's cult of personality has finally popped.
I've never seen such a massive waste of potential and reputation as that dude went through in the last few years. Was it the drugs? Lack of self-confidence? Just fundamental incompatibility with fame?
This article starts ok but then it just becomes a rant against Musk that does not make a lot of sense.
>SpaceX isn’t doing so well either, with Starlink being far from breaking even and Starship being a total mess.
I agree Tesla is pretty much a shitcoin but that bit about SpaceX is just not true. The author very clearly wants Musk to fail, for whatever reason, and in doing so loses all objectivity.
It‘s so sad that this happens all the time. People have valid arguments based on facts and then continue to tell stories based on their opinions and values.
Except none of this is new. Tesla has been overvalued for the better part of the last decade but it shows no signs of coming back to Earth any time soon.
Elon's individual reputation doesn't seem to have much effect on the company's value either. It's not like people only just started hating him recently.
Tesla's valuation will inevitably come crashing back down to reality, but something will have to change to trigger that collapse. My bet is the change will have nothing to do with Tesla or Elon. It will be some seemingly-unrelated change entirely outside their control.
> Elon's individual reputation doesn't seem to have much effect on the company's value either. It's not like people only just started hating him recently.
Unless the company fucked up something majorly in recent times, what is the reason for the stock price to fall so fast right now?
Large swaths of people who would have been perfect customer for Tesla, have committed to never buying anything Tesla, especially because of his very public nazi-salute and supporting far-right parties in Europe, and sales are already down across the world.
Did people stop buying Tesla because some new software update, or could it possibly be because of Musk's behavior as of late?
43 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] thread(not investing advice)
As a retail investor, I strongly advise against shorting. Can you make money? Yes. Is the game stacked and rigged against you? Also yes.
The best thing to do is redeem TSLA holdings and put them in other companies (or better yet, into a broad based index).
I don’t much care for Keynes, but as I’ve gotten older, the “wild animal spirits” makes more sense as markets are seemingly never rational. Even when they are, the government now likes to “bail out” companies that the market has said ought fall.
For Musk, be he one thing or another, he has been a political animal from the start. He chose sectors where government money was available, where politicians could gain credibility with the public by supporting his companies (electric cars, solar, space), and he consistently got the hype running high enough to provide radical over-valuations. When the political winds began to shift, so did he. He immediately pivoted to position himself no-longer as center-left, but somewhere right-of-center when the majority of the USA went that direction. The primary issue with this is that to the US right… electric cars and solar aren’t too interesting, and space while admirable isn’t a priority.
I think that any prognostication on the death of Tesla is a bit hasty, but Musk’s usual strategy is certainly in question.
The US admin who was championed by Musk wasted no time to cancel EV subsidies and investments into charging infrastructure and is currently pushing "beautiful, clean coal".
This seems like the most braindead, schizophrenic, and short-sighted set of blunders I've seen in my life. A child would've been able to predict what is going to happen. So I'm really stumped. He cannot be this stupid, surely? He cannot be this ignorant of the impact of his own actions? Is he really so deep in an echo chamber that he thought the Tesla gravy train will just keep going?
Tesla as a brand is basically dead in Europe - one of his biggest markets. There's no salvaging this. No comeback that he can engineer.
Maybe he saves his bacon in the US by enough government money grift to keep Tesla alive, but he'd have to do a ridiculous amount of it to keep the dream of >100 PE ratio valuation going.
Shitty cities filled with crime and weirdos after your kids will do that to you.
People in the country very much dislike the status-quo, hence the dislike of the Democratic Party and voters going for ape-shit change over Biden.
I sincerely doubt working people will see their lives improves this term and change their mind on Trump; there wasn't a liberal shift to the right and we'll likely see a major reaction of everyone going to the left when they realize dismantling everything hurt everyone.
But I really agree, it feels like a guy with investments in solar and EVs could have got more out of working with the party that want to invest more in both of those instead of eliminating both of them. I guess when you reach a certain amount of money (combined with drug abuse) your incentives become hard to understand.
Twitter has algorithmically overfed his narcissism and sociopathy to the point where’s he’s detached from reality, and no amount of “smart” can get him out of this hole.
This is my biggest worry. As Musk is now basically part of the government, I wouldn't be surprised for Tesla to be deemed 'of strategic importance' and bailed out by the taxpayer. It's compatible with the privatized profits - socialized losses policy we've all been accustomed to.
In a somewhat convenient turn of events for pro-Musk camp on HN: Musk is now deeply embroiled in politics. Thus, any discussion of him is inherently political. And of course, politics is largely "off-topic" for HN.
So in addition to the usual flagging and downvoting of Musk-critical comments and stories, they can also be flagged and downvoted for being "political."
I don't foresee it changing anytime soon. Not at least until enough techies finally understand that virtually everything is "political" to some extent, and I don't expect that to happen until we hit the riots-in-the-streets stage of Musk's current political project.
no. even if i agreed with that platitude, why does it even matter. its off topic. rant about nazis elsewhere.
Tesla is/was hyped up and everyone said "but its not just a car company". But okay the Tesla Solar stuff is available for ages by now, the robot can't be bought yet and the first chinese companies sell them at 30k (i always assumed the first would hit the market with 100k and more) and from a robot taxi perspective, there are so many other companies doing it already...
Add 1 + 1 + 1 and you do not get the valuation of what tesla is valuated at all.
And then Musk. Holy shit Musk. The borring company was braindead and showed a very clear very ungenius brain fart. His way of selling but not deliverying is now omnipresent.
And his election interfering in usa and eu will catch up with him as everything else will.
it's actually the right company for the wrong reasons. there are more important reasons traffic should go underground. car roads are sewers; noisy, polluting, stink. any city will benefit when cars are removed from the surface.
for that reasons alone, from all his companies, i hope boring company would succeed the most.
It's the pivot to nazi salutes etc. that seems nuts.
Thats clearly showing a ton of issues and that the original concerns from everyone who has any knowledge on building tunnels, mentioned.
And everyone who does't mind going into a tube, were if anything goes wrong, the hole tunnel becomes a death tunnel,...
The idea in itself is not new, the idea of him is to put cars under it in a very narrow tunnel because the narrower the cheaper.
And now comes the magic stupidity or ignorance of him: There is ar eason why tunnels and our underground looks like it does: Water (rain), Water (ground water), air (oxygen, co2) and emergencies need to be countet for.
There is a reason why he still doesn't reach the speed or anything he ever promised on it and there is a reason why 12 years later there is nothing of significance to be seen anywhere.
Btw. we could just use transportation technology like in star trek.
I've never seen such a massive waste of potential and reputation as that dude went through in the last few years. Was it the drugs? Lack of self-confidence? Just fundamental incompatibility with fame?
- people that bought it once
- people that bought it never
>SpaceX isn’t doing so well either, with Starlink being far from breaking even and Starship being a total mess.
I agree Tesla is pretty much a shitcoin but that bit about SpaceX is just not true. The author very clearly wants Musk to fail, for whatever reason, and in doing so loses all objectivity.
titles of recent articles:
(Tesla) This Is Just Pathetic. Talk about clutching at straws.
Tesla Can, And Will, Fall Further.
Starship Was Doomed From The Beginning
Starship Is In Deep Trouble
This Is How Tesla Will Die
Tesla Is Dying, And Polestar Wants To Kill It
Tesla Is So Screwed
Tesla's Downfall Is Imminent
Is Elon Musk A Groomer?
Elon's individual reputation doesn't seem to have much effect on the company's value either. It's not like people only just started hating him recently.
Tesla's valuation will inevitably come crashing back down to reality, but something will have to change to trigger that collapse. My bet is the change will have nothing to do with Tesla or Elon. It will be some seemingly-unrelated change entirely outside their control.
It's down almost 40% YTD
Unless the company fucked up something majorly in recent times, what is the reason for the stock price to fall so fast right now?
Large swaths of people who would have been perfect customer for Tesla, have committed to never buying anything Tesla, especially because of his very public nazi-salute and supporting far-right parties in Europe, and sales are already down across the world.
Did people stop buying Tesla because some new software update, or could it possibly be because of Musk's behavior as of late?
Would love some analysis on the numbers in this post. On the whole, do they have legs?