4mo ago

Why does it feel like Elon is artificially boosting his companies?

Tesla dealerships are getting protested and, in some cases, vandalized. Sales are down on 9 of the top 10 countries Tesla sells in. Yet Tesla stock is up. Twitter is a cesspool of nazi-themed bots, and somehow just pulled in $1bn and raised its valuation back up to $44bn.

How is any of this possible? It seems really artificial to me, but I don't really understand business.

73 comments

Yet Tesla stock is up.
Well, over what period of time are you talking about?
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA/
For the day, TSLA is up 5.27%.
For five days, down 0.51%.
For one month, down 26.37%.
Year-to-date, down 38.41%.
For six months, up 4.39%.
Like, depends on the start and end time that you're looking at.
- People have the memory of a goldfish nowadays.
  I was alive during the 2000 and 2008 market crashes, but also the 2020 non-crash.
  It could be that Tesla really has cracked autonomous driving by summer, as Elon claims, and then they will recover a lot of market value.
  But more realistically, as the saying goes, even a dead cat bounces.
  Markets never go down in perfect lines. There are dead cat bounces along the way.
  
  Tesla really has cracked autonomous driving by summer, as Elon claims
  He really says that??
  He must be sooo desperate LMAO
  
  Checkout how good their fucking reduction to using only cameras, instead of radar or lidar, line everyone else, is working out
  Here is a nice comparison between lidar and Tesla's solution with only using cameras:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ&t=491
  You can clearly see the downsides and why those sensors are just not sufficient in any way for a self driving car
- For 1 year, up 45.59% (this is fucking crazy!) For 5 years, up 625.30%
  This is not normal for any stock, even if the company was doing good. But the company isn't doing good.
  Their market share is small and hasn't grown in ways promised. The Cybertruck was a disaster, with almost no customers, only legal in some parts of the world (parts without proper regulations) and a bunch of delays and technical issues. Demand has been decreasing, even before Musks latest public Nazi shit. Revenue is down. There appears to have been fraud in the numbers they did report and those weren't good to start with. The whole promised future of self driving cars has turned out to be total BS and only the very strict anti-sue terms has saved them on this point. Other companies in the same space are doing better on all fronts.
  Yet somehow the stock is worth more than the rest of the market they are in? It makes zero sense and you can bet your ass illegal shit has been done to get it to this point.
  Musk has been begging people to please hold on to their stock. And if I know one thing, if the big shareholders start saying shit like that, sell immediately! It's a sign they are going to sell and you need to get out before all the money is gone.
  
  My impression is that the stock market is not really interested in real-world value. It's interested in projections of future stock price. And those things should be coupled, but they can be very decoupled sometimes.
  I don't understand enough to known why yet though.
TSLA has been notoriously impossible to short the last few years. I firmly believe this DD from 5 years ago that Elon figured out a way to pump their stock value through gamma squeezing with OTM call options. The DD is 5 years old, but it was spot on and for a time, the stock just kept going up to where it was inexplicably worth more than it's next 10 competitors combined. I think the actual sell volume of the world was outpacing his ability to do this for a time, but he is going to continue to try.
https://www.reddit.com/r/options/comments/hk7nqe/tesla_infinity_call_gamma_squeeze/
Phillip Low fired him with cause for attempting to manipulate his company's stock in 2021.
https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2025/01/27/elon-musk-booted-from-startup-neurovigil.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1ib5792/philip_low_longtime_friend_and_peer_of_elon_musk/
Elon has repeatedly trolled the SEC and says he does not respect them. He's absolutely pumping it up to keep it afloat, and it may even return to ath.
Elon is a manipulative piece of shit, and that's why I do not put it below him to have used his vast wealth to have undermined the 2024 election and believe he had a part in hacking it. Hell, he can't even play video games fairly as we all already saw.
- Good find. I am convinced Tesla is the Enron of our day.
  The scheme only works as long as most people keep holding their stock. Once they start selling, it will be a very quick road down.
  
  And with the global outcry against the company, I don't think that day is far off. They know there's going to be reduced demand for their products, because even those who don't feel like they want to boycott Tesla out of principle might still reconsider buying one if they don't want to deal with the shame/risk they'll get from others.
  
  And then he will be a dead Hopefully. Through Vanguard and Blackrock the Saudis and Qataris are said to have substantial investments in Tesla. And especially the former are not kind people when it comes to fraud to their disadvantage.
Something that is very easy to forget is that stock value is only very loosely tied to actual company value.
Stock value is based on what people are prepared to pay for the stock, not what the company is worth.
Say that I create a company that makes newspaper hats for tanks in Ukraine, something utterly worthless, I am the only employee and my inventory is just yesterday's newspapers that I found in the gutter.
My company has zero actual value, but I decide to create 50000 shares of my company, sell one to my friend for €2, and suddenly my company's market value would look like €100000.
- You've just explained most Tech Startup unicorns, by the way.
- You'll need to have 500k shares total for the valuation to be 1M
  
  Yep, good catch!
  
  Yes but 50.000 × 2 = 100.000, large numbers get confusing without dots
- From someone who doesn't know shit about finance, thank you for the explanation
- Something that is very easy to forget is that stock value is only very loosely tied to actual company value. Stock value is based on what people are prepared to pay for the stock, not what the company is worth.
  Which IMO is a real problem in Tech companies If I look at more traditional industries, A coca-cola stock gives me ~ 0.50 US$ per quarter, so with an expected yield of 3% I am ready to buy a stock at US$ 66. and the current market value is US$ 68, if I do the same exercise for Airbus with 2 EUR of regular divident and 2 EUR of exceptional dividend and that I expect a 3% yield, I would pay 133 EUR for an airbus stock, for a market value of 166. A worse investment than Coca-cola, but still a decent one especially considering the raise of the military companies.
  And then there is tech company giving no dividend and using stock buyback (How is that even legal) to keep the company value artificially high.
It's the largest pump and dump scheme in history and it's being done in the open.
- Yeah, they are literally begging maga idiots to buy TSLA to keep the price up while executives are unloading shares. International sales completely gone. Domestic sales declining. Cybertruck flopped. Tariffs are going to cripple their production. Competing EV are making TSLA look like amateurs. Like, what's the upside?
  
  After convincing them that EVs were trash no less.
Because he is. Tesla has always been overvalued due to him making bullshit announcements that dumbass investors actually believe.
Adam Conover recently made a video explaining this very thing.
That's what we call the dead-cat bounce. The further and faster a stock price falls, the more people think it will go back up and buy in at the new low price, thus at some point there is a short-lived reversal of the decline before it continues as it was. Although much of Tesla's value recently was from a big jump in November (getting a fancy new oval-shaped office will do that for you), so this is likely as much a correction of that overreaction as it is some protest of or loss of faith in Musk.
- Although much of Tesla's value recently was from a big jump in November (getting a fancy new oval-shaped office will do that for you)
  I don't think many people realize just how big a jump this was.
  
  Yeah, the price nearly doubled. But then it all came crumbling down again. I doubt it will go much below where it was before for long, but I could be wrong.
Like when Tesla started lying about their cars fully driving themselves?
You are not wrong. Elon Musk is the PR man for the companies he either founded or have a majority of shares in. However, his companies's products and services are not actually superior to his competitors. Take Tesla, the cars are not road-worthy, they are expensive, the battery sets on fire more often, and uses inferior image-detecting camera when driving automatically. Meanwhile, Chinese competitors are cheaper, more safe and use better LIDAR technology for automated driving (but only because the Chinese government heavily subsidise in EV companies making their cars far superior).
So, as someone already mentioned, hype up your company and convince anyone to buy shares, then your companies's valuations increase tremendously. It creates the illusion that your company is productive and valuable when in reality it is not.
- Which is pretty much how Trump has lived his life, but less successfully. No wonder they're friends. It's a coop grift.
- Why is the alternative to Tesla on here is always "Chinese EV" when traditional manufacturers exist and make better products? We don't want Chinese dumping their cars and leading to the loss of even more manufacturing jobs in North America and Europe.
  Fucking hell, the fight against globalization truly was for nothing, people these days are even defending it against their best interests...
  
  Normally I'd be the one to say this is an unfairly harsh take, but when BYD is continuing the proud Chinese tradition of using slave labor to make cheaper products than the competition, I'm inclined to say that maybe they should be off the table as well.
  Maybe EVs shouldn't be as affordable until the industry is actually sustainable. I'd rather buy a vehicle made by union workers who are paid fairly for their labor, even if it's more expensive.
  
  Chinese EVs are cheaper, unfortunately, so they are competitive.
  Fucking hell, the fight against globalization truly was for nothing, people these days are even defending it against their best interests...
  Globalisation is not bad, it is mismanaged.
  
  We don't want Chinese dumping their cars and leading to the loss of even more manufacturing jobs in North America and Europe.
  Who is this we, here? I want this. The people employed in these manufacturing jobs are not people I am concerned about.
  When China gets bored with subsidizing our economy, we can spin up new state of the art facilities.
  We are being sold a lump go fear, uncertainty and doubt around this stuff by the people who profit off these industries.
  
  The fight against globalisation? You're in the wrong fight, my man.
When highly profitable companies are valued less than companies like Tesla just confirms that in the stockmarket the rules are made up, and the points don't matter
- That could just as well be the reasons those banks want those companies to have an inflated value.
  If those companies lose much value there will be a lot of mess and no one involved is going to get richer of it.
  These days a CEO is pretty much someone that markets a company towards the shareholders. Elon is a pretty good marketeer.
  
  Was. He was a great marketeer. And then he crashed his brain and is ruining everything he built.
  
  A good marketeer? Are you fecking serious?
The value of a private company is a number that can be pulled from their ass, right?
Before: there was an idiot that wanted to pay $54.20 for each of the 800 million publicly traded shares = 44 billion valuation even if the yearly earnings after all expenses (EBITDA) was only 680 million (data public, as required by sec) so the board sued that guy to force him to pay when backed down as that valuation was insanely high and the board would never get such a big golden parachute
Now: we don't need to publish financial data anymore but CEO says that the company is super profitable, valuation is back to 44 billion, trust us 😉
The PE ratio for most established carmakers is near 7. Tsla is near 120 last I checked. Some bubbles pop.
The stock market is not the real economy.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/the-stock-market-is-not-the-economy
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/wall-street-versus-main-street-why-the-disconnect
https://www.schwab.com/learn/story/why-stock-market-is-not-economy
https://advisor.visualcapitalist.com/wall-street-vs-main-street-the-stock-market-is-not-the-economy/
Unironically also part of the reason why these fuckers are completely morally bankrupt.
It’s market manipulation of the highest order. It’s not legal but no one is going to do anything about it.
I'm of the opinion that we are on the brink of a facism that makes the previous ...
funny enough, fuck it
Russia, Saudi Arabia, North Korea pumping the stock.
If I'm not mistaken it was in 2020-2021, when Tesla stock prices when going gangbusters, Musk was saying it was overvalued. Given constant Cybertruck updates/recalls, general Tesla safety concerns, Ford and Rivian apparently doing well in trucks, and Mercedes apparently having the best self driving, all happening since then, I'm not sure why it should be valued exceptionally high. They had a good name in EV cars, now they have scary stories.
And that's not even getting into politics and dropping sales, so, I'm not surprised the stock is trending down
Feel ?
Every public company bolsters its' values as much as possible whenever possible unless they're planning to do stock buybacks or it's disassembling the business' assets for profit with the intention of bankruptcy and boardmember bonuses as the end goal (vulture capital).
However, it should be said that Elon Musk isn't just artificially boosting his companies. He is literally boosting them. His newfound government power and influence is helping him serve government contracts to himself and cancel them for competitors. The state department awarded him a $400,000,000.00+ USD contract just a short while ago for electric armored vehicles.
Because he is
- "created"

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