Still, it feels overall a bit weaker to me post-420 tweet. I had expected more strength following the 2nd profitable quarter...
I don't know that I an informed opinion on this particular subject, since I'm not an investor and since I treasure my ignorance of financial matters.
But one thing that I do see repeated a lot by those who seem (to my admittedly somewhat pro-Tesla viewpoint) reasonably well informed and at least
somewhat objective on the performance of Tesla's stock, is that the average level of the stock price, consistently so far above what the enterprise value would be, is less of a reflection of what investors think about Tesla's current corporate performance, and more a reflection of what they see as Tesla's potential market will, or at least may, grow to be over the next few years.
So if TSLA hasn't been as buoyed up by the turn to what appears to be solid profitability, perhaps that's because there is an increasing awareness that the window of time in which Tesla can rapidly expand its market without any real competition, is closing. It looks to me like Tesla won't substantially increase its production this year, because the Fremont assembly plant is more than maxed out (why else would Tesla put partial assembly lines under tents in the parking lot?), and neither the Shanghai Gigafactory nor automotive assembly lines installed to produce the Model Y at Gigafactory 1 in Nevada, will be producing in high volume this year. (There is a dark horse candidate here: In comments to IEVs news articles, Nix keeps pointing out that Tesla plans a major expansion at Fremont. Okay, but Tesla's own guidance for this year doesn't indicate the significant increase in production that Nix's remarks suggest.)
Next year is 2020, when reportedly, multiple legacy auto makers will be offering multiple plug-in EV models. And from the way they're talking, it seems reasonable to suppose that at least a few of those models -- from Volkswagen, if nobody else -- will be aimed at volume production and volume sales. So it
looks like Tesla will start getting some serious competition starting next year. As an EV advocate, I look forward to that! ...even tho it won't be good for Tesla's stock price.
Of course, Elon's somewhat erratic behavior isn't helping investor confidence. I don't mean Elon taking a single drag off a doobie offered to him by the host of a marathon late-night podcast; it amazes me that that story lasted more than a day. No, I mean behaviors which cause a reasonable person to seriously question Elon's fitness to be the day-to-day CEO of a large and growing multi-billion dollar company like Tesla Inc. -- make that multiple
tens of billions of revenue per year; most notably Elon's inability to filter his own remarks on Twitter, as well as disrespecting in a rather public way the SEC and disrespecting the agreement that he made
with the SEC, over the very ill-advised remarks about Tesla financing which he infamously blurted out on Twitter.
Still, reading remarks from various sources, I think most investors still think Tesla is better off with Elon than without him. I have to agree that with very nearly anyone else on Earth at the helm, Tesla would likely have gone bankrupt years ago, or at best would be a tiny boutique auto maker, with very modest plans for year-on-year growth. Under just about anyone else, Tesla would at best be dreaming of becoming as big as Porsche, instead of dreaming of becoming as big as GM or Toyota or Volkswagen... or even bigger!
