Thanks for the good points, De! As I try to tell myself every time I get an "itch" these days, I am not very good at stocks.
Why Tesla interests me.
(1) Musk; I want to be invested with Musk -- and, unfortunately, Tesla is his only publicly listed holding. And, unfortunately, I didn't buy and hold early enough with Tesla (I do have a few shares I bought a few years ago and I think I am about where I bought them...)
(2) Tesla is NOT a car company; it is a ROBOTICS company. Musk has said, himself, is that what makes Tesla distinct is that a Tesla is a commputer and a Tesla is a Robot. He has said, himself, that if Tesla was only an automobile company its real opportunity would be behind it.
(3) Tesla is NOT just a car commpany, and not just a robot company. It is also a ROBOTIC FACTORY, with amazing internal integration, at a scale the world has never seen. The Giga-factories spread around the world, including US, Mexico, China, and Germany. http://teslastir.com/tesla-gigafactories/ "With 65k manufacturing employees and 2M total annual production capacity, each Tesla factory is an impressive feat of engineering, with many boasting large solar roofs to promote energy sustainability." People don't understand what Musk has done and is doing.
(4) I used to think that if Musk bought one of his sub-companies with another of his companies it meant he was trying to hide his failure. That is what I thought when Tesla bought Solar City. And maybe there was some of that, also, but the evidence now supports the idea that, in fact, he actually sees a way to further integrate things to produce more value for all the components. So, Tesla substantially assumed, and utilized, what it absorbed from Solar City. THIS MEANS, if true, that there is a LOT more locked up in a merger between X and xAI than there might seem. And that a further merger to Tesla would only happen if it advantages the whole.
(5) The merge of xAI into X made financial sense already, I would say. Tesla needs, or can use, the same Ai -- arguably even more. Robots need to be smarter than they are today, by an order of magnitude to even do common jobs....such as be skilled construction workers. How the "social" network of X would benefit Tesla is less clear, and maybe less strong. Or it could just be that I don't understand. Tesla's need a lot of marketing power, no doubt. They could outsource that marketing expertise or INTERNALIZE it. Conglomerates, admittedly, don't have a great history of being maximally run. But maybe that is only because they didn't have proper management and tooling to begin with: Musk and AI.
(6) I've commented before that Musk has -- honestly -- been doing pretty nearly everything he's been doing towards a singular vision of creating the future: on Mars and on Earth. All his serious companies were built, from the beginning, to provide a necessary piece in that vision.
(7) If Musk goes to the Moon, or Musk goes to Mars, it will be BECAUSE IT MAKES FINANCIAL SENSE to go to the Moon or to Mars. There may be other motives, as well, of course, but the economics seem to always be there. So we must have some trust
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How might one make a trillion dollars by being first-mover DOMINANT in space; on the moon; and on mars? If you control all the companies Musk does? You are kidding me, right? ;-) Do I need to connect all the dots and color in between the lines? Simply: HEAVY MANUFACTURING OUGHT NOT TO BE ON THE EARTH, continuing to destroy the environment and ecology; continually subject to earth drama and politics; COOKING the entire planet toward heat death and noxious fumes, and costs of "safe" disposal of "environmental toxins".
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Well that is a short view, off the top of my head. Tesla is not AT ALL what it seemed to be. Normal valuations make no sense, because there is -- and cannot be -- any real competition in our lifetimes.
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