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Comment by electrondood | Hacker News Reader

"Train wreck" according to one analyst, where analysts are reactive, frequently wrong, and only adjust their price targets to stay in line with everyone else.

They confirmed that they were ahead on 4680 ramp progress, announced that they'd be shipping their next-gen $25k "iPhone SE" by end of 2025, announced that they would be opening another factory, announce that FSD v12 is going wide in the next month, announced that energy storage deployments (which print money) are hitting the exponential part of the S-curve, etc.

The issue is that analysts misquote Tesla that they promised 50% CAGR every year. That's not true. Their target is 50% CAGR on average, across years.

Another issue is that analysts only see Tesla as a car company.

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spoken like a true Tesla investor.

I love the "Tesla is not a car company" defense. Makes everything possible. Tesla is actually an autonomous robot company. Tesla is actually a robotaxi company. Tesla is actually an energy storage company.

Ok but where is their revenue coming from, today?

Today's revenue is not tomorrow's, and companies are valued based off of the future. Where did Amazon's revenue come from (and still primarily, afaik) for most of its life?

> For the entirety of 2023, total revenues stood at $96.8 billion, of which $82.4 billion came from automotive revenues, a 15 percent increase compared to 2022. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/01/tesla-publishes-its-fin...

Yes, and 85% of Tesla's revenues came from cars, and it is increasing. It is part of why their profit margins have returned to auto industry norms. Tesla has two items that make them significant money: Model Y and Model 3. Nothing else is big enough to really move the revenue needle.

Tesla investors have been fed on this diet of “actually Tesla is a XYZ company” and they’ve learnt to copy it without thinking about it too much.

IMO from my viewpoint it’s obvious that Musk has made bets in places where he deliberately thought it would inflate the stock price - self driving and robots being two.

Tesla stans are great, they keep Tesla stocks high. But their conceptions of stock valuation reminds me of crypto.

Then something has happened for investors to not have much confidence Tesla is capable to avoid becoming just another auto/battery/solar manufacturer, and instead be some kind of dreamy corporation providing other "tech" products with much higher value based on the commodified products as a platform.

It looks like the commodified products are actually the products, the dreams are slowly fading.

Tesla isn’t a car company, it’s a conglomerate?

I don't think anyone who is paid to listen to these calls is ready to believe statements by Elon Musk about the imminent relevance of FSD. You only have to speak to literally anyone else to find out that Tesla has no legitimate self-driving technology whatsoever. The mere fact that Musk tried to hype FSD on the earnings call is a huge red flag. It means the core business is weak.

They talk about FSD because each release allows them to write down more of it as more features come online, its not a huge red flag its a fact the NN release is currently happening first release to customers finally went out..

The funny part is how much the growth in their fixed battery storage and production got overlooked by the investors.

I don't see it as a positive. There are a zillion established players, including LG and Tesla's own major partner, Panasonic, in the BESS market and going head-to-head with them just results in commodification. Moving capacity into zero-margin lines of business is not a growth story.

> the growth in their fixed battery storage and production

This isn’t a 50+x earnings business, though. It’s a great business. But not a high-margin high-scale big-ass moat one.

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