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The WTF stock chart of the year. And another WTF chart of just how tiny Tesla is compared to the top 10 automakers.
By Wolf Richter,
Tesla’s shares spiked another 20% this morning, or by $160, to $940 a share. Every time I write a few words, I have to go back and change the number again, because the price just keeps shooting higher. So far this year, TSLA has shot up 120%.
It could very well be that by this evening, shares are down by $300 or whatever, or that they’re at $1,100. They’re floating up high in the outer space or irrationality, and can go anywhere. So this the WTF chart of the new year with Tesla’s share price frozen at 9:51 AM Eastern Time (stock price data via YCHARTS):
A tiny automaker among giants.
The market capitalization of the company at that price was $165 billion, far ahead of the second most valued automaker in the world, Volkswagen, but still behind number one, Toyota. But in terms of the size of the company, measured by vehicles delivered, Tesla is a flyspeck.
Tesla delivered just 367,500 vehicles globally in 2019. Volkswagen delivered 10.34 million vehicles globally, according to Focus2move. That’s 28 times as many as Tesla. Toyota delivered 9.70 million vehicles. That’s 26 times as many. General Motors delivered 21 times as many. Ford delivered 13 times as many. The smallest of the top 10 automakers, Mercedes Daimler, delivered 2.62 million vehicles, or 7 times as many as Tesla. I colored Tesla’s bar in red so you can locate it without having to resort to your magnifying glass:
Tesla’s Annual Red-Ink Parade.
And Tesla isn’t a high-growth miracle tech company or data company or whatever. It’s an automaker in a stagnating industry. Tesla’s total revenues inched up only 2.2% in 2019 compared to 2018, and its automotive revenues edged up only 0.7% in 2019.
To top it off, Tesla reported a net loss of $862 million for the year 2019, despite selling $594 million in “regulatory credits.” These are tax credits that Tesla obtains from the US government and governments of other countries for building EVs. Tesla loses money every year and cannot use those credits, so it sells them to other automakers that are making money.
Tesla lost money every single year ever since it started disclosing its financials, from 2008 through 2019:
But I give Tesla massive credit for having put EVs on the map.
EVs have been around since the 1800s, competing with steam-powered vehicles. GM made an EV in the 1990s, its EV1, long before Tesla even existed. But there was no demand for EVs at the time, in part because battery-cell technology wasn’t up to the job (Tesla doesn’t own the battery-cell technology either, but buys it from Panasonic and now from Chinese battery-cell makers). And GM eventually threw in the towel. Here is GM’s EV1 from 25 years ago:
Tesla accomplished a big thing – putting EVs on the map and making them cool. And it spent many billions of investor cash to do it.
But the stock price is just nuts. But wait… just because it’s nuts doesn’t mean it cannot get even nuttier. Once something is totally irrational, there is by definition no rational limit to how much more irrational it might get.
I have been on record for years cautioning people to not short Tesla, no matter how fundamentally rational that idea might seem.
Short sellers are up against huge institutional investors that are stuck in the shares and cannot sell the shares without crashing the shares, and they don’t want to see the share price decline, and every time shares drop enough, they can jump in and buy more to turn them around.
There is little public float of the shares, and given the reality of Tesla’s business and financial performance and share price, it is one of the most shorted stocks out there. And these folks panic when shares rise, and when they panic, they have to buy back the shares that they sold short, this panic buying helps fuel these spikes in share prices.
So the jury is still out on whether $940 a share this morning was the moment of peak-insanity, or if there is an even higher peak-insanity coming. Meanwhile, I’m in awe of how Tesla has turned into a Supernatural Phenomenon.
Source: WOLF STREET.
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Something about the whole Tesla Company as well as space X doesn’t pass the smell test. We all know the whole car in orbit thing as well as self landing rockets on moving ocean platforms is complete bullshit!
David Wilcock states in a video released last year, I watched recently (and I did verify this with the web links he quotes):.
There was an ‘unclassified U.S. patent’ filed by the U.S Air Force mid last year, for a free energy device which takes in a small amount of electricity and outputs gigantic amounts of power something like a thousand to one or more if I recall correctly (there was also, a set of unclassified patents filed by the U.S. Navy, one for a “HAUC” – Hybridized Arial Underwater Craft which repels gravity, air, and water molecules, flying in air, water, or space equally well without resistance from the medium it flies through ie: ANTIGRAVITY, and a second unclassified U.S. Patent for a superconductor that operates at room temperatures not needing supercooling like requiring liquid nitrogen).
In other words, Tesla being at the forefront of the electric consumer vehicle industry, they,, are in the best position to take advantage of the superconductor technology at least, and derivative technologies for the long awaited “flying cars” (now using antigravity and the new superconductor, instead of high speed fans) amongst a variety of other related technologies. I’d guess,
My thoughts, opinion, if you will: Tesla could implement these technologies very quickly, being unlike Toyota GM etc., huge companies spanning the planet, Tesla could more easily I’d imagine, implement these kinds of amazing new technologies much faster than the big auto makers….this makes Tesla is the next Google Yahoo and Apple all rolled into one. But, WTF who can say right,, it might just be a fluke and no coincidence or unconnected but, I don’t believe so. Perhaps Tesla has a simple way to implement this new AF & Navy devices Patent’s in its cars, or some new applications of this or similar devices like batteries…
We just don’t know what’s in the weeds rustling but, apparently ‘someone does’.