It's so hard to make predictions of Teslas value in today's political system! Musk is very very close to power, and it's impossible to say how that will play out. Will Tesla be the only car company without 25% tariffs? Will the government spend billions to buy Teslas? Or will Tesla die and Musk live of space-X?
Megacorp market valuations are extremely bizarre because they're in a sense self-fulfilling. If your company has a market cap in the hundreds of billions of dollars then it has lower capital costs than competitors. If you want to build another factory, you're paying less in interest. Which means you can undercut the competition on price, or expand into grid storage or data centers etc.
Obviously you then have to actually do those things before the value crashes, so whether it works or not depends on whether investors continue to expect you to.
The current value fluctuations have more to do with politics than the company. The media is writing a lot of negative stories right now, but they also have the attention span of a goldfish and ultimately some new Current Thing will replace the existing one.
Ahhh, I dunno, musk is pretty good at fucking his own companies with Nazi salutes and wreckless incompetent destruction. Doesn't really take any big bad media to see what a fucknut musk is.
The media is the thing that characterizes it as "Nazi salutes" and "wreckless incompetent destruction".
The guy is an eccentric with autism, not an angel or the devil. He's not always right. But everything is so polarized right now that people are barely willing to concede that it's possible for someone to be right some of the time.
Teslas have the positive characteristics that they don't run on petroleum and have good safety ratings. They have the negative characteristics that they have privacy issues and you can't get parts or documentation to fix them yourself. A strong heuristic to tell if someone is using motivated reasoning is if the thing they're complaining about is an unrelated political hot button well-known to produce outrage (e.g. allegations of somehow simultaneously secret and open fascist ideology) as opposed to a way they're actually screwing someone illegitimately but in a way that doesn't cause most people to experience an immediate visceral response (e.g. mass surveillance, right to repair).
You can also tell it's that when the target is actually doing a bad thing, but the people objecting only care about the target and not anyone else doing the same thing. This is extremely common with corruption allegations. All corruption is bad, you need systems in place to constrain government officials from bilking the taxpayer, but this is a process problem where you need stronger checks and balances to prevent the government from transferring money to cronies, not a "we need to somehow elect only infallible humans" problem where what people actually mean is that they just want their guy to get in so the money goes to their cronies instead.
Cool story buddy. But musk is still a Nazi salute throwing fuckwad fool. I'm not buying the smirking excuses. He also happens to control a company producing government subsidized garbage pail cars. And he lies about their self-driving capability... over and over and over again. Mainly because he was too big of a fool to recognize that multimodal sensors are a good thing so he's about half a decade behind.
I prefer cars that don't get recalled for glued on pieces falling off and CEOs that didn't pay a quarter billion dollars to buy a presidency.
Plenty of other electric cars being produced by the other manufacturers.
