Tesla global sales by year compared to Ford and Toyota
The incredible thing isn’t the slight down tick in sales last year (on par with most international car companies), but that Tesla has a market cap that exceeds both of these mega-manufacturers despite being dwarfed in both assets and revenues.
On paper, they have so much farther to fall than what these short term sales shortfalls imply. But then this is a car company that’s defied gravity for a decade. Consider that each vehicle Tesla sells reflects $700k - $1M in market cap. On a $60k-$110k vehicle.
All their valuation is predicated on future predicted returns on the technology rather than current sales figures. And I don’t know when that will actually change.
I think the 3 things Tesla has/had going for them was…
Car sales growth. The had some pretty ridiculous growth in sales for a few years there.
Captive Market. Pretty much everyone I know with a Tesla charges at home, or at a Tesla supercharger. They’ve got the Apple ecosystem lock in for the “fuel” you put in the car. This walled garden approach basically lets Apple print money.
Technology. FSD, autopilot, and manufacturing. Tesla presented as a very tech focused company that was dumping money into R&D similar to how Amazon built up in the early 2000s. Investors love companies that are poised to control the entire market in the future.
Pretty much all 3 of these pillars have collapsed now. Their car sales are in a huge global slump. More cars are available that can charge on other charging networks, and those charging networks get bigger and better every day. Elon’s FSD is basically vaporware at this point, and the high degree of automation Tesla was touting in their factories came back to bite them in the ass.
This leads to my favorite recent quote about stocks though… “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” Let’s face it, Tesla stock is a bubble, AI is a huge bubble. The problem isn’t knowing that there is a bubble, the problem is knowing when that bubble is going to burst.
It’s very clear that at this point, insofar as there is any logic at all to the decision making of people investing in Tesla (and there’s very little evidence of that), they’re evaluating it as a software company, not a car company.
This seems to be largely based on the notion that Tesla is the world leader in self-driving, and poised to become the world leader in other areas of automation. And that would, admittedly, mostly justify their very high share price, if there was literally any evidence it was true. Of course, what they actually have is a self-driving system that is only number one in fatalities caused, and a bunch of faked demos of robots made using low paid remote operators.
Tesla is easily the single best demonstration of how fucked our economic system really is. That a company can so blatantly lie, over and over, about what their products can actually do, and somehow continue to see their share price increase tells you everything you need to know about how utterly fictitious the entire notion of the stock market is.
they’re evaluating it as a software company, not a car company.
That still doesn’t justify the valuation. Tesla’s market cap is 3x Oracle’s, ffs. It’s half of a Microsoft. No software they produce can justify this valuation.
Palantir and NVIDIA have the same hyper-inflated position. Nothing in their projected revenue figures can explain their company’s valuation, unless you’re just hand-waving and predicting 10-20x growth over the next decade.
Tesla is easily the single best demonstration of how fucked our economic system really is. That a company can so blatantly lie, over and over, about what their products can actually do, and somehow continue to see their share price increase tells you everything you need to know about how utterly fictitious the entire notion of the stock market is.
Warren Buffet definitely gearing up to print off another deck of “Fell For It Again” awards. Only question is when they get handed out.
unless you’re just hand-waving and predicting 10-20x growth over the next decade.
That’s exactly what they’re doing.
The problem is that hyper-advanced automation is essentially unpriceable. When your potential market penetration is “replace all human labour” your profit potential is infinite.
The real is issue is not how they’re pricing the potential upside, its that none of these companies have remotely demonstrated that they have the ability to actually produce that upside. It’s an entire industry shilling a fantasy on the back of some very impressive sales demos.
The problem is that hyper-advanced automation is essentially unpriceable.
I mean, I could point you to a few economics journalists who would argue otherwise. Ed Zitron’s been screaming about the downfall of AI for the last two years straight.
But the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, as the saying goes.
It’s an entire industry shilling a fantasy on the back of some very impressive sales demos.
Doesn’t hurt to have a bunch of tech-friendly goobers running state and federal governments who are turning out the taxpayer’s wallet to finance these hallucinations.
I mean, I could point you to a few economics journalists who would argue otherwise. Ed Zitron’s been screaming about the downfall of AI for the last two years straight.
I feel like you’re only reading every other sentence of what I say. In this instance, you seem to have fixated on this part, but sailed right past the part where I said that there’s zero evidence that anyone can actually produce hyper-advanced automation. I never argued that it was a rational decision to go all in on this possibility, and that’s entirely clear from my previous comments.
Ed Zitron is completely correct, but he’s also making exactly the same argument I am; that these people cannot actually achieve the technological revolution they are promising. That doesn’t change the fact that, if their wish granting genie was real, it would basically have unlimited upside. The problem is not how they’re pricing the outcome, the problem is how they’re evaluating the probability of achieving the outcome.
there’s zero evidence that anyone can actually produce hyper-advanced automation
There’s plenty of evidence (Waymo, for instance, or Xaiome) that companies can produce “good enough” advanced automation. Tesla’s just not the guy to make it happen. Same with AI. Very possible to produce useful tools (Alibaba’s Deepseek, Insilico Medicine’s Pharma.AI, etc) with LLMs. Sam Altman’s just not doing it.
Ed Zitron is completely correct, but he’s also making exactly the same argument I am; that these people cannot actually achieve the technological revolution they are promising.
Zitron’s heavily focused on the economics. Specifically, he’s fixated on the cost of running the American data centers relative to their prospective future revenues and profit horizons. He’s not even “anti-Tech” relatively speaking. He’s just reading balance sheets and doing basic math on depreciation rate of hardware to conclude the current business models won’t work.
This isn’t to say it can’t happen. It’s to say these businesses won’t make it happen.
The problem is not how they’re pricing the outcome
This is where we’re in disagreement. They’re pricing their outcomes totally wrong, even in their self-proclaimed “best case scenario”. That’s leading them toward malinvestment - heavy spending on hardware and brute force algorithms. Marginal investment on material applications and workflow integrations that benefit anyone.
This isn’t a probability problem where they can luck into a multi-trillion dollar windfall.
Kudos for mentioning Xiaomi, they recently showed off their newest car factory, and it’s insanely highly automated, with workers basically only doing quality control!
China is probably the new masters of mass production, which I suppose is natural considering they have a home market of 1.4 billion people, they can invest in mass production for China only, and have a scale that is 4 times the scale of USA!
No country has ever had such a massive home market before China, and I think it’s a huge advantage for China regarding mass production.
No country has ever had such a massive home market before China
glances at India
But then that’s just the BRICS in a nutshell. Five countries with enormous internal consumer demand, which can afford to develop domestically to meet the needs of their local populations without worrying too much about export markets.
Again, we’re still in that “reading every over sentence” mode. For example, I say “hyper-advanced automation” and you reply claiming that “Good enough” automation is perfectly achievable. Yes. I know. I never said it wasn’t. I never said anything about good enough automation at all. And that kind of thing goes on throughout your response here.
By all means continue your conversation with whoever you think is making all these arguments, but they bare little resemblance to anything I’m saying, so there’s really no point in my responding any further.
Here “Good enough” matches the quality of most car brands and AFAIK surpasses Tesla.
To get quality like BMW or Mercedes, is probably only a matter of the automation being more expensive, there is no reason to think for instance Xiaomi couldn’t make higher quality automated assembly on more expensive cars.
Tesla assembly sucks, I have often heard reviewers complain about noises you wouldn’t find in way cheaper European cars.
It’s very clear that at this point, insofar as there is any logic at all to the decision making of people investing in Tesla (and there’s very little evidence of that), they’re evaluating it as a software company, not a car company.
Nah, the logic to the decision is that other people are buying a lot of tesla stock and the price keeps going up. It’s very nearly a ponzi scheme. It has value completely detached to what the company is doing. It’s tulips, crypto, beanie babies. Most institutional investors realizes this, they also are trying to get in and get out without holding the bag.
It’s very clear that at this point, insofar as there is any logic at all to the decision making of people investing in Tesla (and there’s very little evidence of that), they’re evaluating it as a software company, not a car company.
For starters, SpaceX, which operates the Starlink satellite network, has purchased over 1,000 Tesla Cybertrucks as of late 2025.
Meanwhile, Police departments across the U.S. - particularly in California - are increasingly adopting Tesla vehicles (Model Y, Model 3, and Cybertruck) for patrol and administrative use. South Pasadena (CA) became the first U.S. city to switch its entire police patrol fleet to electric vehicles. Other departments, including Anaheim and Fremont, are using Tesla Model Ys for patrol. The Las Vegas Metro Police Department is introducing a fleet of 10 Cybertrucks for patrol and tactical use, specifically highlighting their safety features (bullet-resistant). A Texas school district created it’s own police force to be equipped with 9 Tesla cruisers two years back.
Tesla global sales by year compared to Ford and Toyota
The incredible thing isn’t the slight down tick in sales last year (on par with most international car companies), but that Tesla has a market cap that exceeds both of these mega-manufacturers despite being dwarfed in both assets and revenues.
On paper, they have so much farther to fall than what these short term sales shortfalls imply. But then this is a car company that’s defied gravity for a decade. Consider that each vehicle Tesla sells reflects $700k - $1M in market cap. On a $60k-$110k vehicle.
All their valuation is predicated on future predicted returns on the technology rather than current sales figures. And I don’t know when that will actually change.
I think the 3 things Tesla has/had going for them was…
Car sales growth. The had some pretty ridiculous growth in sales for a few years there.
Captive Market. Pretty much everyone I know with a Tesla charges at home, or at a Tesla supercharger. They’ve got the Apple ecosystem lock in for the “fuel” you put in the car. This walled garden approach basically lets Apple print money.
Technology. FSD, autopilot, and manufacturing. Tesla presented as a very tech focused company that was dumping money into R&D similar to how Amazon built up in the early 2000s. Investors love companies that are poised to control the entire market in the future.
Pretty much all 3 of these pillars have collapsed now. Their car sales are in a huge global slump. More cars are available that can charge on other charging networks, and those charging networks get bigger and better every day. Elon’s FSD is basically vaporware at this point, and the high degree of automation Tesla was touting in their factories came back to bite them in the ass.
This leads to my favorite recent quote about stocks though… “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” Let’s face it, Tesla stock is a bubble, AI is a huge bubble. The problem isn’t knowing that there is a bubble, the problem is knowing when that bubble is going to burst.
Tesla stock price is a load of crap, pushed up solely by Elon chuds.
It’s very clear that at this point, insofar as there is any logic at all to the decision making of people investing in Tesla (and there’s very little evidence of that), they’re evaluating it as a software company, not a car company.
This seems to be largely based on the notion that Tesla is the world leader in self-driving, and poised to become the world leader in other areas of automation. And that would, admittedly, mostly justify their very high share price, if there was literally any evidence it was true. Of course, what they actually have is a self-driving system that is only number one in fatalities caused, and a bunch of faked demos of robots made using low paid remote operators.
Tesla is easily the single best demonstration of how fucked our economic system really is. That a company can so blatantly lie, over and over, about what their products can actually do, and somehow continue to see their share price increase tells you everything you need to know about how utterly fictitious the entire notion of the stock market is.
That still doesn’t justify the valuation. Tesla’s market cap is 3x Oracle’s, ffs. It’s half of a Microsoft. No software they produce can justify this valuation.
Palantir and NVIDIA have the same hyper-inflated position. Nothing in their projected revenue figures can explain their company’s valuation, unless you’re just hand-waving and predicting 10-20x growth over the next decade.
Warren Buffet definitely gearing up to print off another deck of “Fell For It Again” awards. Only question is when they get handed out.
That’s exactly what they’re doing.
The problem is that hyper-advanced automation is essentially unpriceable. When your potential market penetration is “replace all human labour” your profit potential is infinite.
The real is issue is not how they’re pricing the potential upside, its that none of these companies have remotely demonstrated that they have the ability to actually produce that upside. It’s an entire industry shilling a fantasy on the back of some very impressive sales demos.
I mean, I could point you to a few economics journalists who would argue otherwise. Ed Zitron’s been screaming about the downfall of AI for the last two years straight.
But the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, as the saying goes.
Doesn’t hurt to have a bunch of tech-friendly goobers running state and federal governments who are turning out the taxpayer’s wallet to finance these hallucinations.
I feel like you’re only reading every other sentence of what I say. In this instance, you seem to have fixated on this part, but sailed right past the part where I said that there’s zero evidence that anyone can actually produce hyper-advanced automation. I never argued that it was a rational decision to go all in on this possibility, and that’s entirely clear from my previous comments.
Ed Zitron is completely correct, but he’s also making exactly the same argument I am; that these people cannot actually achieve the technological revolution they are promising. That doesn’t change the fact that, if their wish granting genie was real, it would basically have unlimited upside. The problem is not how they’re pricing the outcome, the problem is how they’re evaluating the probability of achieving the outcome.
There’s plenty of evidence (Waymo, for instance, or Xaiome) that companies can produce “good enough” advanced automation. Tesla’s just not the guy to make it happen. Same with AI. Very possible to produce useful tools (Alibaba’s Deepseek, Insilico Medicine’s Pharma.AI, etc) with LLMs. Sam Altman’s just not doing it.
Zitron’s heavily focused on the economics. Specifically, he’s fixated on the cost of running the American data centers relative to their prospective future revenues and profit horizons. He’s not even “anti-Tech” relatively speaking. He’s just reading balance sheets and doing basic math on depreciation rate of hardware to conclude the current business models won’t work.
This isn’t to say it can’t happen. It’s to say these businesses won’t make it happen.
This is where we’re in disagreement. They’re pricing their outcomes totally wrong, even in their self-proclaimed “best case scenario”. That’s leading them toward malinvestment - heavy spending on hardware and brute force algorithms. Marginal investment on material applications and workflow integrations that benefit anyone.
This isn’t a probability problem where they can luck into a multi-trillion dollar windfall.
Kudos for mentioning Xiaomi, they recently showed off their newest car factory, and it’s insanely highly automated, with workers basically only doing quality control!
China is probably the new masters of mass production, which I suppose is natural considering they have a home market of 1.4 billion people, they can invest in mass production for China only, and have a scale that is 4 times the scale of USA!
No country has ever had such a massive home market before China, and I think it’s a huge advantage for China regarding mass production.
glances at India
But then that’s just the BRICS in a nutshell. Five countries with enormous internal consumer demand, which can afford to develop domestically to meet the needs of their local populations without worrying too much about export markets.
Again, we’re still in that “reading every over sentence” mode. For example, I say “hyper-advanced automation” and you reply claiming that “Good enough” automation is perfectly achievable. Yes. I know. I never said it wasn’t. I never said anything about good enough automation at all. And that kind of thing goes on throughout your response here.
By all means continue your conversation with whoever you think is making all these arguments, but they bare little resemblance to anything I’m saying, so there’s really no point in my responding any further.
Here “Good enough” matches the quality of most car brands and AFAIK surpasses Tesla.
To get quality like BMW or Mercedes, is probably only a matter of the automation being more expensive, there is no reason to think for instance Xiaomi couldn’t make higher quality automated assembly on more expensive cars.
Tesla assembly sucks, I have often heard reviewers complain about noises you wouldn’t find in way cheaper European cars.
Nah, the logic to the decision is that other people are buying a lot of tesla stock and the price keeps going up. It’s very nearly a ponzi scheme. It has value completely detached to what the company is doing. It’s tulips, crypto, beanie babies. Most institutional investors realizes this, they also are trying to get in and get out without holding the bag.
What a beautiful way to present the situation.
It’s honestly quite unhinged when you look at how much each vehicle contributes to their market cap.
Remember WeWork? Lots of dumb people with money and if enough dumb people sustain their dumbness it doesn’t really matter. Stock goes up.
Boy howdy. You know Adam Neumann is still worth $2.2B?
Crazy how that happens.
Frustrating as hell. Losing a few mil means nothing to billions.
So if sales are down 50% or more in Europe, where are these cars sold?
For starters, SpaceX, which operates the Starlink satellite network, has purchased over 1,000 Tesla Cybertrucks as of late 2025.
Meanwhile, Police departments across the U.S. - particularly in California - are increasingly adopting Tesla vehicles (Model Y, Model 3, and Cybertruck) for patrol and administrative use. South Pasadena (CA) became the first U.S. city to switch its entire police patrol fleet to electric vehicles. Other departments, including Anaheim and Fremont, are using Tesla Model Ys for patrol. The Las Vegas Metro Police Department is introducing a fleet of 10 Cybertrucks for patrol and tactical use, specifically highlighting their safety features (bullet-resistant). A Texas school district created it’s own police force to be equipped with 9 Tesla cruisers two years back.
The Model Y is the new Crown Vic.
https://youtu.be/Ee_uujKuJMI