> Tesla has plainly kicked the ass of the European and Asian auto giants

Tesla had 1.4% of all cars sold in 2021, by number of units. Going by revenue it's somewhere around 1%. It is kinda hard to see that as kicking the asses of the competition.

Kicking ass would be more like what happened with smartphones, where iOS + Android went from 0 to >90% market share in the space of five years, leaving Nokia, Palm, Blackberry etc. as brands nobody would assoviate themselves with. Nothing like that is happening in automotive.

Smartphone upgrade cycles are annual/biennial. Car upgrade cycles average 7-10 years.

Not that I expect Tesla to dominate like apple and android have, but I do think we’ll need to wait a few more years before we know the answer.

You're comparing apples to oranges. "iOS" market share is iphone market share, which is still very small but with a huge profit margin, android market share is the market share of dozens of phones brands. Nokia and Palm both sell android phones in 2022.

I don't see how that's comparable to Tesla VS old automakers

Palm and Nokia both used to sell hardware with their own locked in OS, and saw that as critical. Both were big names once.

It would be like if Ford was stuck selling rebranded ‘awesome edition’ Tesla Cybertrucks instead of F150s at 10% of the revenue.

Tesla gets a lot of press. But the flash is always bigger than the reality, except when it comes to stock price.

1.4% is massive for a car manufacturer built from scratch in just over a decade. You can’t really scale car manufacturing the way an existing computer megacorp could scale phone production.

Expensive cars in the emerging EV market. 1.4% is great.

Tesla has 14% of the EV market, VW Group has 12% - and closing fast.

They also have a much larger dealership network.

dealership network eats their margin, plus vw has to discount all of their own legacy sales they cannibalize

It eats their margin, marginally (typically 5% kickback if a dealership meets sales figures, per car) as they're almost entirely franchises.

But that dealer network means when you need your car serviced, or repaired, you're never more than a short(ish) drive away from one.

I don't like a world where the only way to assess someone is by how much money they make for investors. That's a bleak reality, so I prefer to act as though a person's behavior matters in the hopes I might create it by force of will. You can recognize the negative with the positive. Anything else is revisionism.

Other countries and economies have chosen not to reward value-creators for the value they create. So far this has not worked out well for these countries and economies.

The money they make for investors is a direct measurement of the value they create.

This is the mindset I spoke against. Did you reply to the wrong comment?

Not in the short run. In the short run markets can be irrational (which I believe they are with Tesla), in the long run sure

The question is not whether he's been successful. He has been, the question is whether this is the peak valuation akin to Cisco during dotcom and whether he is over leveraged at this point.

Some of that depends on whether Twitter can partially self-fund the acquisition itself over time.

Most likely it can, that much more so if Musk negotiates a lower price. Debt is very inexpensive right now, especially for large corporations with a strong balance sheet. If Musk owns all of Twitter, he gets their $6 billion in cash and their balance sheet has no consequential debt issues.

Twitter is operationally profitable, despite being very poorly run in terms of cost structure. Their margins on sales should be far greater than at present; they have a bloated employee count and have for a very long time. There's no reason Twitter can't spit off $1b in operating income on $5b in sales.

Further, Musk has ~$9b in cash (per Bloomberg), lots of very rich friends (eg Ellison, Google founders, VC billionaires, etc etc) that believe in him, and lots of assets in Tesla and SpaceX he can borrow $10b-$20b against if needed.

That said - I don't think levering himself to the moon is wise and I don't think paying $40b+ for Twitter is smart. Particularly at this point in time (with the global economy shaky, the US economy contracting in real terms, China's economy shaky, and financial markets sinking).

People have kept asking this question for the past 12 years. Meanwhile my TSLA shares bought in 2013 have been doing just fine.

Your shares did well in of the biggest untinerrupted market bull runs in history????

Survivorship bias is a hell of a drug. The real test to see whether it's wisdom or luck is to predict the next Tesla. I don't think many people who point to their Tesla stock performance as vindication could come up with a repeatable theory of investing. If they could, their TSLA gains would be nothing next to their next investments.

That's how I know people who make that argument don't actually know anything. It's like someone still talking about that great touchdown in high school at 50. Where's the next one?

You don't see Elon Musk bragging about his $22 million from Zip2.

Those companies don’t come often, but you don’t need many winners to be all set.

I saw Google before the rise, Amazon, Apple, Bitcoin and Tesla. I only acted on Tesla after seeing all the other ones before but didn’t put my conviction into action.

It’s not very hard: you read HN daily/weekly and listen to the trends. Pick one that keep coming and interest you and dig deeper, you are not in a hurry as HN is way early in the cycle, the danger is being too early and giving up before it catch up. (Bitcoin)

Pick one big potential winner, calculate the expected value as good as you can Good/Bad scenario, place your bet, let the time do it’s thing.

An example of a bet I didn’t do: Bitcoin was 1$, I knew that if it worked very well it could go to 1M$. Let say you think that the probability of success is 20%: (1M$/1$)*20% = 200 000 to 1. You then place let say 5k$ on bitcoin and forget about it for 10 years.

At the moment, I don't see a trend that catch my attention beside AI and for the moment I think Tesla will be the winner in that trend.

Look up the book: one up on wall street

When evaluating whether the shares "did well," you can compare to the rest of the market.

Since mid-2013, the S&P 500 is up ~150%, Nasdaq is up ~300%, and TSLA is up 3290%.