People are saying Tesla stock is falling due to Musk, but he has been an asshole publically since the Thailand incident where he called the rescue diver a pedophile.
It is falling because it is a bad stock with no ground in reality: it is clear that Tesla has lost all its positive momentum. When was the last time we heard about Tesla delivering something exciting?
Meanwhile, BYD just announced their 1000V platform this week, God's eye FSD for every car last month (and they are already selling those in China). On the other hand, Tesla has just been promising the world and delivering nothing but more promises and pushing deadlines.
Take that last demo they made in Universal Studios. Everything was faked, the robot was human-controlled, and the FSD was in a controlled environment with a human in the background, ready to intervene. Now look at that P/E. It sits at >100 in a company that is not growing anymore, 2x-3x more valuable than Toyota. You really can't justify it.
Exactly. Tesla's business performance may or may not be good, but OP's analysis is ignoring the huge elephant in the room. It's true that Elon has been an asshole for a long time, but his recent actions cross the line from asshole into something an order of magnitude worse.
that AND combined with his shadow presidency... its a scary combo. A nazi is bad, a billionaire nazi is very bad but a billionaire nazi in gov with no accountability is very very very bad.
(not to mention the building communications and mechanism to space travel monopoly. These things Plus the above are unfathomably evil villain bad)
> People are saying Tesla stock is falling due to Musk, but he has been an asshole publically since the Thailand incident where he called the rescue diver a pedophile
Absolutely true, but it's only relatively recently that he's been actively and publicly participating in the effort to destroy the US.
Alleging that white men who live in South East Asia are pedophiles is part of the wider pedo panic in anglophone countries. Nobody really cared. I feel bad for the rescue diver.
> People are saying Tesla stock is falling due to Musk, but he has been an asshole publically since the Thailand incident where he called the rescue diver a pedophile.
There's a visibility issue; that, and most of his antics, was largely only seen by Very Online people, but over the last few months the fact that he's stark raving mad has become increasingly obvious to the general public (via Nazi salutes etc).
Was that reference intentional? Well done either way.
I also don't appreciate that he's sheltering and excusing his behavior under self-diagnosed mental health umbrellas. That only harms the perception of those who legitimately have those conditions.
The financials have always been crap, though. A lot of his previous assholery was limited to very online people. Guarantee if you poll 100 people if they've heard of the "Thailand pedo guy thing with Musk", most will have no idea what you're talking about. Now it's on every news channel every night.
Your first paragraph says Elon has been an asshole forever so that's not why it's falling. Then you go on to say it's because they aren't innovating, but that's also been the case for a very long time.
Stocks go up and stocks go down and everyone tries to find a reason. It's just easy to find one for Tesla these days. The truth is it's selling off because the entire market is selling off, and the bigger the pump from 2020 till now, the bigger the drop is going to be. TSLA has to be one of the top 10 most overinflated stocks, so it's going to unwind in a similarly spectacular fashion. The actual fundamentals will come in to play later, when Elon's little high risk bet of joining the Trump administration blows up in his face spectacularly.
Tesla‘s valuation was partly stemming from what was projected on Musk: A whiz-„kid“ who was treated like he found cure for cancer. Many quickly realized that he could not deliver (a self driving car) or a refuge in space for when humanity will be killed by a mega-asteriod. Slowly he demystifies himself by coming up with crude far right ideas and by not delivering.
He also effectively dismantled one of the rarest and most coveted achievements in marketing: the transformation of a common verb into a universally recognized reference to a specific product.
By renaming Twitter, he erased the cultural shorthand of "tweeting," a level of brand entrenchment that most companies can only dream of attaining.
Tesla is absurdly over-valued. They're going to experience a correction eventually... Elon has been delaying the inevitable because he's over leveraged.
Laws only matter when people enforce them. The United States has been profoundly lax in holding rich white men accountable for basically a century now; while this should absolutely be seen as the baseless corruption that it is, it is extremely foolish to expect anybody to do anything about it. They have no appetite for punishing somebody from the elite classes.
> Federal ethics rules on conflicts of interest specifically exempt the president and vice president. But for any other executive branch employee, the rules prohibit using public office for personal gain, or “for the endorsement of any product, service or enterprise, or for the private gain of friends, relatives or persons with whom the employee is affiliated in a nongovernmental capacity.”
Thanks for posting this. My gut reaction was to say "no, this is a law: the Hatch Act." But the Hatch Act covers partisan political activity while on duty, which is distinct from commercial activity. As you noted, commercial activity is only 'restricted' via a rule.
Here's the ethics statement of Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce.[1] He's from Cantor Fitzgerald, where he was Chairman, and had to resign from quite a few boards to work for the Government. He has ownership in many businesses, but Tesla is not listed.
Remember this: it is illegal. People can claim it's not, people can claim "truth doesn't matter any more" or "they make the rules and control the media"
But you have your own eyes and brain and you know it is illegal. It is plainly illegal, which is why nobody had done it before this. They are doing illegal things because they are crooks.
They are trying to get you to give up and lose hope. Hacker News is far more of an echo chamber in that regards than other environments.
If Biden's Secretary of Commerce did this, they would've got sacked and it would be plastered over the news for weeks. Democrats should stop pretending that rules and decorum still matter. You can't claim democracy is at danger and then hold up a small paddle meekly and claim you did your job.
"It's unbelievable that this guy's stock is this cheap. It'll never be this cheap again."
Proof on multiple levels that the primary skills of this administration are con artistry and fascism --- which are more or less the same .
The PE ratio of the typical auto manufacturer is around 10 or less.
GM, Ford, Toyota --- all less than 10.
The PE of Tesla is 115 --- and they sell fewer cars than any of the above.
By any reasonable measure for an auto manufacturer, Tesla is outrageously overpriced. And before someone drops Musk's line that Tesla is something other than an auto manufacturer, allow me to point out 90% of Tesla earnings come from the manufacture and sale of autos.
ETTD --- Everything Trump Touches Dies. Tesla is working to become the latest example.
One other thing that hasn't been heavily talked about: What $/share on TSLA will trigger margin calls on the massive loans that Musk took out collateralized by his TSLA stock. Once those get triggered, the snowball effect of market sales by the loan holders will accelerate the downward price trajectory.
As much as I want his house of cards to implode, I'm worried about contagion.
I'll never forget how his Twitter mass-layoffs initiated that same practice to spread throughout the tech industry (yes, it was coming, but he did "cast the first stone").
For better or worse, what Elon Husk does today, the rest of the stock market does tomorrow.
Too late. Wall Street has been infected with MAGAtts.
The other day I read where some analyst said he maintained a "buy" rating on Tesla because he worried doing otherwise would hurt the administration's image.
Will banks have the balls to trigger margin calls on a key player in a cruel and vindictive administration? I kind of doubt it. “Cost of doing business.”
Expect this post, and any even obliquely critical of Musk or Trump, to be flagged into oblivion.
I've tried to not be cynical but it's bleedingly obvious that there are a group of Musk/Trump supporters here flagging these posts.
Various discussions claim that it's political (and thus "off topic") posts that are flooding HN but there has been very few appearing on the front page, even though they're sunk out of view these posts attract many upvotes and comments.
There are all sorts of off-topic and incidental posts on HN and that's always been the case. Now there is aggressive censorship of one type of post. Just skipping or hiding posts that you're not interested in is not enough apparently.
There is not much that can be done about it, dang has essentially shrugged, which is fine. But please lets not pretend its not happening and that it's not absolutely repugnant.
From the Hacker News guidelines⁽¹⁾ (emphasis mine):
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
You should not be surprised when "mainstream" stories are flagged. Folks come to Hacker News for stuff they won't hear about on TV.
These stories typically drop off /news pretty quickly, but /active has loads and loads of them. I also seem to see flagged ones, which is probably down to my settings.
On the first two pages of /active I see roughly one per day. Are the feeds different for different people? Or maybe the our definitions of "loads" are different in this case. It's true that if I were suddenly seeing so many posts about geckos I would find it a lot.
One way to interact with HN as a social media site, because it -is- a social media site, is to mostly use the site through it's search bar.
I've had a set of quick links to searches for topics I am interested in for quite a while, typically for the last 24H, sorted by time, usually comments. For instance, I have had a link to a search for "Musk in title" on my bar since the Twitter acquisition, which has made it a lot easier to see what actually gets flagged and what doesn't. Similarly, if you really want a pretty horrific set of opinions, a search for Hamas will reveal that there are plenty of vocal folks here okay with incinerating children.
On one hand, I understand that a lot of folks have a very specific idea about what they want to see on HN.
On the other hand, I'm mostly here because I want to get the opinions of "centrist" capitalists, VC folks, and aspiring tech folks about a wide range of cultural issues. I don't usually want to have those kinds of folks (who I believe are often exhibiting some kind of sociopathy) in my other social media feeds or, god forbid, meat-space life.
Anyhow, it's entirely possible to bend the site to ones' usage (it is a "hacking" space after all). There is much more on the site than what happens on the front page and it's much more useful to log in and see the flagged/dead content.
Press: "What about these 10 fatal accidents in the first week?"
Elon: "Cut the cameras, arrest that woman! If any news media reports this they'll be prosecuted, and I'll post your home address and where your kids go to school on X.".
NTSB: "We've been DOGE'ed so we have no information about any Tesla Robotaxi accidents. As far as we can see, 0 fatalities with Tesla cars!"
NTSB whisteblower: "Not mentioned is that they're being blindfolded so they can't see shit!".
Press release: "Austin city government has taken the option [totally not under duress] to use Tesla's robotaxis for transport of all government workers. The mayor said, reading from a scribbled note 'this will improve efficiency and save costs.'. The city will pay Tesla $50 million in the first year, increasing to $150 million in 5 years."
Stock market: "Sell, sell, sell!"
Elon: "These investors shorting TSLA are breaking the law and violating free speech. If they don't invest in TSLA we're going to send the IRS!"
Whatever you think about Musk or Trump, it's very strange that government officials are pushing each other's stock. It's a hard sell you'd expect from a boiler room:
"It's unbelievable that this guy's stock is this cheap. It'll never be this cheap again."
"I mean, who wouldn't invest in Elon Musk? You gotta be kidding me."
AFAIK with their serious issues with both social security numbers and voting implementations itself, I don't think they would be able to effectively enforce that.
Yeah, we don’t worry about TFNs or anything like that. We mark off our name with our address and roll, and just show our drivers license which is the best form of identification in Australia.
We vote on the weekend. We all go and buy democracy sausage and a drink for the local school we vote at and we respectfully queue up for a short time period and vote quietly. Nobody tries to arrest us for offering a water bottle to people in the queue.
We are kind of sane. I wish you guys could experience it!
Does that match surveys done before the election for people not likely to vote? Are those people really supporting Trump or are the supporting whomever was elected? (I don't know the answer, I just thought of the question reading your post)
Mandatory Voting wouldn't have saved us; the democrats are feckless and failed to provide a coherent counter-narrative to obvious fascist saber rattling.
No, we pay for it. Goes to the local school we vote at normally. We kind of like spending money on public schools :-)
Every so often someone brings in their dachshunds and everyone comments on the democracy sausage dogs, and the local politicians all pose for a picture with them.
They might. I don’t rule it out. I have a more cynical view of the capabilities of the electorate.
Another possible interpretation is Trump brought in a lot of uniformed voters. That group brings people who don’t care about policy or fall for his repeated lies or like his rhetorical style. It’s not about achieving good policy, but about feeling like you are winning a realty TV style game.
Bringing in more uninformed voters through mandatory voting, will exacerbate the treatment of policies and politics as entertainment. That evolution will attract worse candidates and generate worse policy outcomes.
What the heck?!? Has a president ever done anything like this before?
The only good thing is that while the president was selling cars is that he wasn't doing any other boneheaded thing at that moment. Let's keep the president selling cars.
So people who invade the seat of power are good people worthy of pardons, and people peacefully protesting are terrorists? I thought that "fascist" may have been slightly misused prior to this, but investigating peaceful protest crosses a very serious line.
You might want to check what happens woth the law company that sued Trump. Trump is now using his executive power to destroy them - and punish any company that hires them.
It’s even worse than that. The law firm capitulated and will now do pro bono work for the administration. So the administration rescinded their EO barring it from government work.
this here ^ is a common propaganda trick: we group all the people who do peacefully picket and exercise their freedom of speech (as well as free-market choices) with a small number of extremists who resort to violence, and so discredit the entire movement.
I've noticed when the Reds are targets of this, they fight back with paranoia and call the violent ones "plants", "paid instigators", or "false flag operation".
I'd like to believe people can still be reasonable and say "nah, I agree with the sentiment but I don't condone those methods. Nice try though."
No, this is a hold yourself to a higher standard "trick". Selling of stock, walking a picket line, setting fire to property. One of these things is not like the other. Being unwilling to admit that it is happening is not good either.
For all of the millions that support MAGA but did not invade the capital, it rightly brought criticism of the movement that those that did support. The same is true when people perform violent acts of protest for any group. The violent acts will always garner the most attention while diminishing the effectiveness of the non-violent acts. Doesn't matter red/blue/purple.
I just seem to be different because I'm willing to acknowledge the fact rather than trying to write some diatribe to sweep it under the rug
Doesn't matter that they are not. It is happening, and it is always going to be grouped together because the end goal is the same. Like it or not, that's what happens in the real world.
> France’s research minister said a French scientist was denied entry to the US this month after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration.
> “I learned with concern that a French researcher” on assignment for the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) “who was traveling to a conference near Houston was denied entry to the United States before being expelled”, Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister of higher education and research, said in a statement on Monday to Agence France-Presse published by Le Monde. “This measure was apparently taken by the American authorities because the researcher’s phone contained exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration’s research policy,” the minister added.
> US agents found messages about the treatment of scientists under the new US administration that "showed hatred towards Trump and could be qualified as terrorism", the same source said.
There's not much to see here I believe - Tesla's valuation is approximately where it was before the election, and that's generally true for tech stocks (Tesla generally moves with the NASDAQ). It made a big swing in the last month, but the news around this is classic post-hoc narrative.
Edit: I meant the crashing valuation, not this particular news, apologies for the confusion. I do think that government officials promoting stocks is a terrible precedent to set.
The president of the United States is now pushing individual stocks with his cabinet because his billionaire buddy is having a bad time, and the response is “nothing to see here, perfectly normal”???
The Trump administration's active and overt effort to prop up the stock suggests to me that they're worried. The president himself made a video advertorial. It's bizarre.
Sad to see Hacker News turn into Reddit, flagging the only informative comment because it does not validate the mob's hatred. This headline is meaningless, and by the way, $TSLA has shot up alongside the US tech sector and is now positive. Will we get updates on the front page every five minutes?
Whether the comment is informative or not it dismisses the news article without even tackling the actual issue which is the commerce secretary recommending the stick for which the presidents closest advisor is the CEO/largest shareholder.
I disagree with the downvotes but it is very close to distracting the actual issue at hand by dismissing the more minor issue which is the stock price movement.
That's certainly a more interesting topic of discussion, but this submission is not about the issue that you and I would rather discuss, it is about short-term movements in the price of a stock that moved in the same direction as the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ.
I’m going to be honest, I try to assume good faith from others on this forum but your comment makes that particularly difficult. By “issue that you and I would rather discuss” are you referring to the Secretary of Commerce’s unprecedented public endorsement to buy a specific stock, of which the President’s primary advisor is the majority shareholder? Because if that’s what you’re suggesting well, that’s pretty wild. Especially considering the second paragraph of the article highlights exactly what the article is about:
“Why it matters: Cabinet secretaries don't typically recommend individual stocks, much less those linked to the president's closest adviser.”
To whoever downvoted this. I used to come to hacker news years ago and see 90% programming related things: Type system abuse, extreme common lisp code, libraries and tools. It was pretty much all tech debate all the time. The worst days would be 70% tech. Today thats a good day.
Nowadays theres a lot more californians being mad at elon, poetic eulogies, paid articles about "how to write good" or how "you should write even if people dont read it."
People will try to say it hasnt changed but it has changed. It is about half as tech related, and about 10 times as reactionary in the same way the rest of the internet has become more dumb.
You can be mad if you want, but everyone can see it, and thats why some people I know in real life are referring to hacker news as orange reddit in a denigrating way. Reading hacker news doesnt confer programming street cred like it did ten years ago. That isnt because im cynical, or want it to be true. It just is true.
Well yeah, it's being shorted left and right. That's not because the intrinsic value has changed, except in the sense that people don't like Musk more and more every week.
That won't matter much next time Tesla releases some innovation that is 1 or 2 levels better than the rest of the market.
Musk's companies are the epitome of "be so good they can't ignore you, even if they hate you".
You are right that the intrinsic value hasn't changed, but wrong about the cause of the price movement. When an auto manufacturer trades at a 67 P/E ratio that's a sign that the stock is way overvalued. Competitors with far more successful and profitable operations trade at a much more reasonable 8-10 P/E. Plus the insane amount of debt that Tesla holds, and the inherent fragility of its financials (Tesla would not be profitable if not for Carbon Credits, which could be revoked by an act of government at any time), suggests that the valuation of Tesla is pure hype and hope. A correction was always inevitable.
Carbon credits might become a real problem for Tesla. They have all those credits to sell to other companies due to their own car sales. Fewer car sales, means fewer carbon credits, resulting in lower revenues.
Since they almost exclusively make money from auto sales and have never had substantial income from anything else, I sure do think they are an auto company.
A lot of tech companies make no money at all for the first years or even a decade of their existence. This one decided to make some money, giving themselves a longer runway to do very hard things (like building gigantic automated factories that can build automated things that can build automated things).
You’re right that a company that sells cars is a car company. But investors tend to invest in future prospects, and Tesla’s future is not as a car company.
The adage goes, “you can be right or you can be rich”.
I’m not saying Tesla will succeed or even that it’s a good bet.
I’m saying there’s a valid investment thesis that posits P/E for Tesla is a poor metric.
You assume they will innovate better than their competitors. Their cyber truck is shoddily built, can’t tow loads properly, can’t get certified for road worthiness in the UK or Europe and has a litany of safety problems.
In the meantime, BYD just announced an incredibly fast charge time on their new vehicles Tesla can’t match.
They just happen to have real problems to get profitable. The big difference is that other companies are expected to earn money while Musks somehow just don't have to.
Autonomous driving is being implemented with LIDA in many cars, Musk’s cars can’t see through fog.
Battery tech is now old news - every car company is doing this and making huge leaps in battery tech. Charging connectors are a dime a dozen now - at least BYDs don’t have flaws like the Cyber Truck where the plug literally gets stuck in the Tesla and majes it immobile.
Most car manufacturers have OTA updates in various models of cars now.
Ever tried to repair a “gigacasted” car?
But you were talking about recent innovations, which haven’t been taken up by other car companies. Could you name some?
I can list the opposite of innovation in Tesla cars: unreliable cars, unsafe features throughout the cars, no LIDA sensors and only cameras, large numbers of fatalities involving self driving Teslas, problems with sticking brakes, poorly fitting trim, wheels falling off at speed, tow bars that literally snap off taking out the back of the car, suspension and drive axle failures… want me to go on?
It is falling because it is a bad stock with no ground in reality: it is clear that Tesla has lost all its positive momentum. When was the last time we heard about Tesla delivering something exciting?
Meanwhile, BYD just announced their 1000V platform this week, God's eye FSD for every car last month (and they are already selling those in China). On the other hand, Tesla has just been promising the world and delivering nothing but more promises and pushing deadlines.
Take that last demo they made in Universal Studios. Everything was faked, the robot was human-controlled, and the FSD was in a controlled environment with a human in the background, ready to intervene. Now look at that P/E. It sits at >100 in a company that is not growing anymore, 2x-3x more valuable than Toyota. You really can't justify it.