This is The Takeaway from today’s Morning Brief, which you can sign up to receive in your inbox every morning along with:
All investing is, to some extent, faith-based.
Sure, you do your research on a company or asset. You look at charts of past performance. You read analyst commentary. And then you hope that it goes up.
But then there’s Tesla (TSLA).
It’s relatively unique in the extent of the faith its investors have. As we’ve discussed before, Tesla is still mostly an automaker. For some investors, however, it’s more than a company, but rather a symbol. Of what exactly depends on the believer, but a few contenders include innovation, trolling, audacity. And of course the company, perhaps more than any other, is synonymous with the man who leads it, Elon Musk.
If you need convincing, Alphabet’s price says its worth is 22 times its earnings. Meta’s is 27. Microsoft’s is 32. Amazon and Apple are at 38. Nvidia’s is 42. Tesla, meanwhile, comes in at 139 — and that’s after its 25% slide to start the year.
Which is why, as DataTrek’s Nicholas Colas calculated earlier this week in a note to clients, 89% of the company’s value comes in the form of future earnings.
Most of the bulls are bullish not because of Tesla’s ability to sell cars (and in fact, it’s selling fewer cars). They’re bullish because of promises of robotaxis, or humanoid robots, or harnessing and monetizing AI somehow, at some hazy point in the future. Elon Musk is a veritable Annie when it comes to all of the things he’s planning.
At close: February 27 at 4:00:00 PM EST
He’s definitely hoping for the sun to come out: As our Pras Subramanian has noted, the stock is in the dumps. Partly because, after all, faith can cut both ways, and a symbol of innovation to some is one of corruption to others.
As Musk sits atop DOGE, meting out cost-cutting directives and burrowing into the federal government, there have been a rising number of protests at Tesla dealerships. Longtime Tesla owners have slapped on bumper stickers disavowing Musk.
After the presidential election, which Donald Trump won with the full-throated (and funded) support of Musk, bulls assumed that the outcome could only be positive for Tesla. The stock rallied an astounding 90% between Election Day and Dec. 17, which ended up being its record-high close. Since then, it has plunged by 40%.
That’s as Tesla sales have slumped — in Europe’s case, by half. It’s also as the most optimistic case for the advantages Musk’s empire might gain from his being “first buddy” have failed to materialize. (So have the “tomorrow”-promised cheaper EVs and robotaxis, although there’s still time.)
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