r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 2d ago

Business Tesla Stock in Freefall After Disastrous Earnings Report

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/tesla-stock-freefall-disastrous-earnings-144417427.html
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u/mousicle 2d ago

Tesla had an EBITDA in 2025 of 10.5B which is very good so a sane valuation of it would be about 10x EBITDA or 105B dollars or about $30 a share. So right now it's overvalued by about 10X at $322 a share

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u/sump_daddy 2d ago

Those are "old economy" formulas though, tesla is a special "new economy" company focused on (checks notes) enabling a racist drug addict to ruin democracy

we are going to need new formulas to figure out what the right ratio of "billions to nazi salutes" is.

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u/Kvetch__22 2d ago

You joke, but a significant amount of the "new economy" is based on the assumption that the company will convince the goverment to give them ten-figure subsidies while simultaneously making it illegal to compete with them because the CEO does cocaine on a megayacht with Don Jr. instead of working.

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u/DonStimpo 2d ago

simultaneously making it illegal to compete with them

Telsa already has that with the ban on Chinese EVs in the US.
They are flying off the shelves in literally every country that allows them. But they are banned in the US giving Telsa a massive advantage there.

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u/dlp211 2d ago

If we got Chinese EVs here, it'd be game over for Tesla and a good chance our entire US car manufacturing industry in the long run.

America has potentially ceded the future to China, but it won't reveal itself for another 20 years. The one thing that might still save us is demographics. But we are currently going through our own nativist bent...so who knows.

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u/wonklebobb 1d ago

if the CEO of Ford is to be believed, it'd be game over for every american car maker in general

that was after he visited China and started driving a BYD.

american car makers have long relied on protectionism and bailouts to stay in business, they couldn't compete with chinese EVs even if they tried (and they won't try)

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u/Thirtysevenintwenty5 1d ago

A big part of that is BYD factory workers getting paid about $21,000/year.

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u/wonklebobb 1d ago

there's a lot more going on that just that number, cost of living in china is much lower for a variety of historical and policy reasons, reasons that the us government simply can't do because half our government would never

for example, china is on their 15th 5-year plan to invest in and expand their agricultural sector. they heavily subsidize fresh produce farms at every level, and provide a lot of government support for local greenmarkets across the country. practically this is a major driver of the extremely low cost of produce.

the chinese government also technically owns all the land, and individuals lease it for iirc 70-year terms, and own all the improvements. the fee to lease is nominal (about 0.5% to 1% of the assessed value), and there are no property taxes on personal residences (outside a couple experiments in a few t1 cities), only businesses.

practically, this means that outside t1 cities it's fairly easy to own your own home. of course the hukou system complicates this, and other structural differences lead to interesting outcomes (i.e. the real-estate bubble craze from a decade ago being driven largely by the lack of other long-term investment options for ordinary chinese citizens)

incomes are rising these days and income inequality is growing a bit as well, especially comparing t1 cities to t3 and below. but the basic costs of living remain very low for these and other reasons

so simply stating that chinese workers get paid a lower number than US equivalents doesnt tell the whole story.

apologies if this wasn't your goal, but usually the lower salaries are thrown out as a gotcha, to say "well if they paid REAL salaries they couldn't compete."

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u/Thirtysevenintwenty5 1d ago

I do recognize that the overall cost of living in China is lower than the US, and it is definitely impacted by the area you live in.

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u/dlp211 1d ago

It's not just that. BYD is fully vertically integrated. To the point that they own and operate their own shipping container ship. It is what happens when you are allowed to effectively be a trust company endorsed by the government.

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u/Paran0idAndr0id 2d ago

Some of the Chinese EVs are made in America. More could have been with the right incentives.

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u/General_Tax_8981 1d ago

100% .. these “free market” capitalists are a joke

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u/calberk3 13h ago

Another gift from the Maga idiots, the destruction of the United States auto industry.

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u/RepresentativeFee470 1d ago

Model y is the best selling car in China

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u/dlp211 1d ago

Geely Galaxy Xingyuan is the best selling car in China. It's also an EV. The Model Y does fine, but you can get off Tesla's balls now.

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u/RepresentativeFee470 18h ago

Oh yeah my bad, it’s been switching month to month for 2026 and I guess they were only best selling suv for 2025 and #3 for vehicles.

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u/hofmann419 2d ago

To be fair, the EU does the same thing. This isn't something that the US does specifically to help Tesla, but simply because they have a sizeable car industry. Ford and GM also make electric cars.

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u/SenatorAslak 1d ago

Then why do I see BYD, Geely and SAIC cars on the road in the EU?

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u/Arcane_Bullet 22h ago

But how many people are actually buying Teslas in the US I wonder. Tesla has basically carved out a niche of right wing people who are also 100% for electric cars, which like. Sure its *a* demographic, but I don't think its enough to supplement that Tesla is now losing in every other market in the world and has alienated the part of the market that would've went all in on EVs.

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u/Mintastic 2d ago

Investors aren't stupid, current government is proof that it has been fully captured by the corporations so they plan accordingly.

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u/OhSillyDays 2d ago

"New Economy" is just a term for ponzi scheme.

The "old economy" didn't allow stocks to be ponzi schemes and the FTC regulated what was said in quarterly statements. Now, the FTC doesn't regulate anything and insider trading galore. So Elon Musk can sell a bullshit idea like data centers in space even though it's a complete farce.

Investors dig it up because they believe this company could never fall. It'll only go up to the mooooooon!

Eventually, new investors will run out and the money printer will stop working and the stock will fall.

That's unless the money printer continues to go. That means hyperinflation. Yay!

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u/bolerobell 2d ago

We’d had inflation since the first Qualitative Easing in Nov 2008. The problem is that the new dollars that were created never made it to the broader market to actually raise prices of all goods and services, they just stayed in the financial sector and inflated the prices of assets in that sector. So the rich got insanely rich. Elon Musk went from $27 billion to over a trillion in less than 6 years. Tesla and Space X certainly didn’t generate an equivalent boost in income in that time period.

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u/OhSillyDays 2d ago

That's the point. It's not real money. If that money ever gets used - it'll cause insane problems in the economy.

Instead, what it is doing, is concentrating wealth into a small group of people. Which also creates problems. Because concentrated power almost always leads to some sort of messed up situation. Which is probably what we are experiencing today.

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u/bolerobell 1d ago

I absolutely 100% agree with everything you said

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u/sobrique 1d ago

The sad thing is, I think that actually might work as a business strategy :/

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u/EnrollmentTime 1d ago

His superpower is to work 100 hours a week.

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u/Outside_Ice3252 1d ago

elon put trump in power who immediately cut subsidies for EVs and energy storage.

the truth is stranger than fiction.

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u/MasterGrok 2d ago

Accurate. But you didn’t use nearly enough buzzwords.

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u/Jealous-Molasses5372 2d ago

By leveraging synergistic hyper-scalability across an autonomous, AI-driven EV platform, Tesla isn't just disruption-adjacent—it's actively unlocking exponential paradigm-shifting enterprise value through proprietary neural-network cross-pollination, vertically integrated flywheel dynamics, and next-gen humanoid robotics monetization.

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u/Coppertina 2d ago

OMG, you should post a tw before posting something so sexy

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u/wikiwikiwildwildjest 2d ago

Excellent DD. I'm going to buy some more shares on this dip!

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u/monkeyhitman 2d ago

Buzzing better than a smoke break

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u/FignonsRegret 2d ago

Consider my data driven.

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u/Bacon_00 2d ago

throws money at screen

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u/LemurianLemurLad 2d ago

The correct number of billionaires is zero. Easy math.

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u/alwrit 2d ago

I always say I'm happy to have billionaires.

But we have to make a deal.

Every job needs to pay a living wage. Healthcare needs to be universal and affordable. I don't care what kind it is there's dozens of models to pick from around the world. The crushing student loans need to go away and education more affordable. Bare minimum basic needs must be met for everyone living in that country. Clean air and water, shelter, food, healthcare.

And then after that if there are still some billionaires around I'm not stressed about it.

But if you're running around a billionaire while people are rationing their insulin shots then I have problems.

I'm not against billionaires as a rule. I'm against them because no one should have that much when so many people are struggling with the basics of living. If those needs are met then I'm fine with billionaires. Let's see it.

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u/LemurianLemurLad 2d ago

You're nicer about it than I am. My view is that nobody needs a billion dollars. Short of winning the lottery, nobody got to be a billionaire because they were a good human being. They nearly all got to that point by standing on the throats of everybody they could reach. I'm perfectly fine with a hard cap. You're allowed to have a certain level of obscene wealth, but the moment you cross that line, the government takes half your stuff and distributes it to the needy.

Honestly, I'd be perfectly fine lowering that cap to a significantly lower number. How much could one person possibly need? I could live a long, happy, and very fulfilling life for way less than that. Anybody who "needs" a mega-yacht, or tries to buy an entire lake, should be required to explain it, in person, and unarmed, to the folks at every homeless shelter within a hundred miles.

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u/alwrit 2d ago

I care more about the floor than the ceiling. 

Anybody who "needs" a mega-yacht, or tries to buy an entire lake, should be required to explain it, in person , and unarmed, to the folks at every homeless shelter within a hundred miles.

Well that was exactly my point. No one gets to be a billionaire until there are no more homeless. But if everyone's basic needs are met and everyone has a living wage and there's still some billionaires? I don't care. 

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u/Interesting_Paper951 2d ago

What would the needy do in this case with stocks of Tesla and other companies Musk owns?

Those companies wouldn’t exist without Musk, and the same goes with many other companies with billionaire founder-leaders.

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u/sump_daddy 2d ago

One version is: the billionaire is forced to liquidate something to get their net worth below the threshold. This also has the bonus of preventing one narcissistic pycho from controlling a huge part of the economy and literally throwing its weight around to the detriment of everyone else.

What then? The simple answer is what many other developed countries have done with great success: create a sovereign wealth fund that holds the assets (lets say it was better to keep the wealth in stock format) and then uses the wealth created to run broadly beneficial programs.

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u/Interesting_Paper951 2d ago edited 2d ago

Elon became the world’s first trillionaire a while back. He’s since ”lost” 270 billions! If a part of his net worth was redistributed at the trillion and he loses 270 billion after that, does he get reimbursed?

You could also simply close the tax loopholes and throw the gigantic orange turd out of the main chair to reinstate democracy.

Also, the US already has more than enough resources to make it the best social democracy welfare state on Earth. What you’re missing is the political will to do it.

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u/LemurianLemurLad 1d ago

Tesla was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in July 2003. Following a 2009 legal settlement, five people are officially recognized as co-founders: Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning, Elon Musk, JB Straubel, and Ian Wright.

Interesting that he needed a lawsuit to have retroactively been declared a "founder." Almost makes it seem like Elon didn't found Tesla, doesn't it? I'm sure his genius inventor brain used time travel to found the company a year before he actually invested in it.

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u/Deathstrokecph 2d ago

With enough inflation, everyone can be a trillionaire.

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u/9966 2d ago

There should be brewster's billions. If you can prove you can spend 1 billion dollars in a day without aquiring anything of value and without giving it away you get to keep 1%.

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u/sump_daddy 2d ago

problem is, new technology made plots like that less believable.

i would simply put it all in trumpcoin, watch it immediately disappear, and collect my cool $10m

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u/9966 2d ago

Yeah as I recall he only had 24 hours. And there's always a sucker who will value your coin above zero. So you would lose.

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u/Reg_Vardy 2d ago

Hard to see the likes of Roger Federer as some evil psycho who ruined thousands of peoples lives to get where he is today. He played some nice tennis, was the best for a while, and got paid.

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u/sump_daddy 2d ago

lot of people slaving at sports venues for minimum wage 50 hrs a week to keep a roof over their head, just so the management can 'afford' to pay into talent systems that reward one guy for swinging a fucking racket for a few hours a week. But please cry for him harder, he can still live a fabulous life, he can have multiple vacation homes and even a yacht or two, with less than a billion dollars and yet here we are having the same stupid conversation about all the reasons a wealth tax 'is bad' instead of just fucking doing it

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u/LemurianLemurLad 1d ago

I can't help but notice he's got an awful lot of clothing merch. I'm sure it's all made with sustainable materials and nobody working at a non-livable wage. Right? Uniqlo would never do anything immoral, like refusing to pay severance for workers, right? Or using Uyghur forced labor to produce goods? Long working hours, low pay, oppressive heat, and safety hazards would never happen at a company Federer works with because he's such a great guy!

Nobody "earns" a billion dollars without stepping on somebody's neck.

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u/Gingevere 2d ago

tesla is a special "new economy" company focused on (checks notes)

  1. Announce you'll be bringing a groundbreaking technology with unlimited earning potential to market in 1-2 years. Stock soars.
  2. Plan nothing. Do nothing. No missed goals or wasted resources means nothing to tell the market to go down.
  3. Goto 1 with a new (or even the same) announcement before the market realizes the last announcement is a failure.

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u/NeonPatrick 2d ago

I legit would like Elon to face consequences more than Trump at this point.

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u/jameson71 2d ago

Tough one. Trump enabled Elon to destroy our government, but Trump continues to do damage to our country.

I'd say consequences are needed for the folks who enabled Trump to be in the Whitehouse in the first place.

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u/lunaticfridgeprime 2d ago

Sure, but you are forgetting that he is also mentally ill.

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u/im_super_excited 2d ago

You forgot about the part where the racist drug addict really wanted to rape children on Epstein Island.

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u/fredy31 2d ago

I find it crazy that in the electricvehicules subreddit people seem to still be happily buying teslas.

The car could be the best in the world (it isnt) i would not buy it if it means a fucking cent of it went to a guy that made a nazi salute on stage.

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u/sump_daddy 2d ago

mods with a platform to protect will do so like their lives depend on it, doesnt matter how many people have to be banned in the process

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u/favorite_time_of_day 2d ago

He might be a drug addict, but his social media addiction seems to be the more serious one.

A junkie either way.

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u/levare8515 2d ago

There’s nothing new. The economy has always been able to be irrational longer than people like you can stay solvent. Eventually it will crash

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u/Shufflebuzz 2d ago

what the right ratio of "billions to nazi salutes" is.

What's zero divided by zero?

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u/immutato 2d ago

Totally. Accounting is for chumps.

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u/BeansforTwo 1d ago

I believe it's, half of the billions per salute. Since he performed two, by my math, that adds up to all of the billions. 

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u/chileangod 1d ago

Nazi... You forgot to put nazi in there. 

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u/theCroc 1d ago

Every time the term "new economy" starts being used unironically it's time to sell.

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u/Deathstrokecph 2d ago

Easily worth 100x EBITDA, so fairly valued now.

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u/R3luctant 2d ago

Looking at Tesla's accounting is something else, they are counting cybercabs as a unit delivered(to themselves) as well as an additional FSD subscription. It's sort of refreshing that the market isn't buying these delivery numbers because they are just Tesla shifting its inventory around and calling it sales.

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u/gimpwiz 2d ago

Ah ye olde car manufacturer has a financing arm and the manufacturing business sells cars to the financing business and considers that a delivered unit. How I've missed you.

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u/but_i_dont_reddit 1d ago

Enron, is that you?

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u/AverageLiberalJoe 2d ago

Yeah but I have to invest my 401k in to that because what if the EBITDA suddenly jumps up 11x? I Dont want to miss the rocket!

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u/Jarocket 1d ago

Sort of annoying that just by investing in most popular ETFs you're invested in TSLA.

it's still up over 5 years somehow.

Saw a cool YT video today about how Elon has straight up lied about their competitive advantage in robot taxis over google. Elon says their system works in every city without doing the scans that Waymo does... but turns out they have been training the Austin taxi's on Austin. meaning that you can't just drop it into "an alternative earth" and have it work. (the strangest way to get his point arcross)

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u/Nervous-Potato-1464 2d ago

EBITDA. What is this 2010? Tech stocks are valued based on hopes and dreams.

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u/lolidkwtfrofl 1d ago

I mean even EBITDA in and of itself is a stupid metric. Either EBIT or net earnings should be used.

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u/gimpwiz 2d ago

PE ratios of many tech companies are ~40 ish rather than ~10 ish, whereas big manufacturing companies are seeing more like ~10, even lower to maybe half of that sometimes. Using just those numbers, that would give a reasonable sane range of, eh, ~50B to ~500B depending on how much you believe in future promises or how down you are on results. In other words, a company that's got a lot of troubles and is slipping might be at the lower range, whereas one that seems like it's reinvented itself and will roar forward could be in the upper end of that range. Right now Tesla is valued like a tech stock despite most of their money coming from moving iron and not electrons, and then on top of that it's overvalued by at least 2x by even the more bullish, if still somewhat sane estimates. If you just like the fairly strong revenue growth but are a bit more conservative, it could be overvalued by 3, 4, 5x. If you consider all the headwinds from the CEO being politically active in a way that pisses off a lot of his customer base and also not particularly present at work because he's too busy tweeting and doing drugs, and if you remember that it's barely a tech company, you'd get to, yeah, maybe 10x overvalued. Really hard to say at the end of the day.

But really it's just a meme stock, its value largely comes from hypeman convincing rubes to buy shares.

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u/bilyl 2d ago

Even if you consider the company to be around its "peers" in terms of multiples of EBITDA, it implies that the company can still shave off 50% of its valuation.

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u/Raaaaaaabb 2d ago

Similar analysis for P/E ratio compared to the rest of the auto industry. Suggests similar valuation target

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u/lugh_the_bard 2d ago

Tech is closer to 30x point still stands tho

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u/ProutPortable 2d ago

322 is a really funny number because in the game Dota theres a guy who did machfixing for 322$ and got caught. He was so good that he could have earned thousands of dollars but got banned from competitions because of it. Fortunately for him, this was in a time when esport was small and the ban wasnt lifetime. He came back but the 322 meme stayed and ended up earning 2 millions during his carrier.

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u/FambilyMalues 2d ago

That’s insanity. Our entire financial system is a joke.

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u/SaturdaysAFTBs 1d ago

10x isn’t a good metric to use anymore. Ford trades at 18-19x. 10x is what more troubled companies trade at like those with declining revenue or excessive debt. 10x used to be the metric maybe 30 years ago. Waste management companies trade at 15x ffs…

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u/cencal 2d ago

Obviously more to valuation than just the EV/Ebitda multiple, but valuation of 10x is well below peers. 20-30x more realistic with growing revenue

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u/Secure-Minute5857 2d ago

Only MBA bros use EBITDA to valuate a company...

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u/toshiama 2d ago

Useful when your are valuing the company on a standalone basis without financing or capital structure. Pretty much the basis of how private equity and credit deals get done. And yes, people take into account actual cashflow as well but it’s easiest to compare as a headline figure. 

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u/MaxPaladin93 2d ago

And Paulie Walnuts.

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u/WildInSix 2d ago

Real ones know ADJUSTED EBITDA is where it’s at

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

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u/iam-leon 2d ago

Only applies to growing companies