<story><title>I&apos;m Betting on Elon</title><url>http://danielodio.com/im-betting-on-elon?</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cjbprime</author><text>My problem with the &quot;I&apos;m betting on Elon&quot; approach is that the market is clearly &lt;i&gt;already&lt;/i&gt; betting on Elon, to the point of somewhere between 10-40x a sensible company valuation.  If you buy now, you&apos;re betting on a clearly ridiculously-optimistic valuation being not quite ridiculously-optimistic enough.  You&apos;re not the first person to have considered that the company might be successful and grow exponentially in the future -- that&apos;s already priced in to the stock!&lt;p&gt;Talking about long-term bets, it would be interesting to read about how the electric car future might tie into the driverless car future.  My understanding is that we&apos;ll have many fewer cars around in the driverless future, even if the cars that we do have are electric.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sachingulaya</author><text>Investors are surprisingly pessimistic. I am heavily invested in TSLA. I got out right before earnings call because CEOs like Elon don&apos;t seem to care about meeting Wall Street&apos;s expectations. I&apos;ll buy more in a week or two when the market is more favorable.&lt;p&gt;Almost all of the criticism I read of TSLA is regarding their financials. There is a lot of room for sentiment and investor confidence to improve. Things I care about(like Elon&apos;s track record &amp;#38; ridiculous amounts of ambition, improvements in battery technology, not using dealerships, the supercharger network, etc.) don&apos;t ever get mentioned.&lt;p&gt;Wall street seems to care about whether they&apos;ll be able to meet production goals, the amount of cash they have on hand to continue operations, etc.&lt;p&gt;Most importantly, as more consumers take delivery of their Model S&apos; I&apos;m expecting investor confidence and awareness to improve. They&apos;ll &quot;see&quot; the demand with their own eyes. My father is already mentioning to me that his friends are seeing Model S&apos; pop up around town and people are talking about them. They want to know what it is. It&apos;s extremely common for retail investors to buy stock based on products that they see being used.&lt;p&gt;You&apos;re right in that I&apos;m betting solely based on investor confidence improving. In my opinion, there is no other metric on which to price a stock.</text></comment>
<story><title>I&apos;m Betting on Elon</title><url>http://danielodio.com/im-betting-on-elon?</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cjbprime</author><text>My problem with the &quot;I&apos;m betting on Elon&quot; approach is that the market is clearly &lt;i&gt;already&lt;/i&gt; betting on Elon, to the point of somewhere between 10-40x a sensible company valuation.  If you buy now, you&apos;re betting on a clearly ridiculously-optimistic valuation being not quite ridiculously-optimistic enough.  You&apos;re not the first person to have considered that the company might be successful and grow exponentially in the future -- that&apos;s already priced in to the stock!&lt;p&gt;Talking about long-term bets, it would be interesting to read about how the electric car future might tie into the driverless car future.  My understanding is that we&apos;ll have many fewer cars around in the driverless future, even if the cars that we do have are electric.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rthomas6</author><text>Exactly. Tesla being successful in the future doesn&apos;t necessarily tie in to making money on the stock, except over the scale of decades.</text></comment>