Musk is a disrupter and he is disrupting this industry turning it on its head. We've been stuck in the same boring recycled car designs and concepts for decades and here comes Elon with the promise of self driving flying cars on their way to Mars with SpaceX in the background making incredible strides forward everyday.
To be honest I think this valuation is too low. Elon continues to eat the competition's lunch on a daily basis with new ideas and approaches to just about every industry he touches. The competition will be left in the dust once he straps some rockets on his new model Ts.
All the incumbents are slow, fat, and happy with a lot of inertia and management layers from decades of success. They became too fat and too comfortable. They all look old fashioned by comparison to what Musk is producing.
EDIT: Top comment is disparaging Musk's success here. I think in all honesty there are a lot of people who are envious of Musk so they will always have something negative to say when he or his companies are in the news.
Correct me if I'm wrong (and I've been a Tesla fan for years, and invested back when they first IPOd), but isn't the Porsche Taycan superior to the Model S in every way (except for a slightly shorter range)? If Porsche can "catch up" and leapfrog the Model S in just their first iteration, I'm pretty sure Tesla's growth is going to slow down significantly going forward.
Slower (acceleration), more expensive, less range, worse software, no Autopilot, no supercharger stations. Who wants that?
The efficiency is so bad in the Taycan it' laughable. With similar battery sizes, the Model S gets 100 miles more range. Porsche is many years behind Tesla in understanding electric drivetrain efficiency.
For the fast version (Turbo S), the Taycan is $80k more expensive than the Model S Performance.
The two are pretty much comparable. Published numbers give the Tesla a slight edge[1], but they'll both sell well to the limited set of people who want to spend well-into-six-figures on a car boasting speeds they can't actually do legally.
That's not really Tesla's market, though. Tesla began there because it was a way to get large profits from a small number of vehicles. Porsche wants to stay in that market, but Tesla wants to sell larger numbers of mid-range cars at more modest profits -- partly because that's where the money is, and partly because Musk has bigger plans for electric infrastructure. They'll also continue to play in the performance range, because they can and because it makes good marketing -- even their low end models produce insane torque.
Does Porsche have domain expertise in launching vehicles into orbit? Do you not think that the cross pollination between Musk's ground breaking companies won't give him a competitive edge against incumbents?
I don't think anyone realizes just how significant it is to have Silicon Valley know how in this industry where the visionary is an engineer and not a traditional CEO salesman.
It defies common sense that people question this so much. It's so obvious that Musk is disrupting all of these industries at once and breaking new ground daily.
I think, judging by the downvotes of my above comment that people are jealous or envious of Musk and they will always have a negative reaction to his success.
Saab-Scania had expertise in building cars and jet fighters (and other types vehicles and planes) but it seems they didn't understand how this was giving them a competitive edge and got rid of the automobile division. A few years later Saab (planes) and Scania (trucks/buses) would also split, 25 years after the merger.
To be honest I think this valuation is too low. Elon continues to eat the competition's lunch on a daily basis with new ideas and approaches to just about every industry he touches. The competition will be left in the dust once he straps some rockets on his new model Ts.
All the incumbents are slow, fat, and happy with a lot of inertia and management layers from decades of success. They became too fat and too comfortable. They all look old fashioned by comparison to what Musk is producing.
EDIT: Top comment is disparaging Musk's success here. I think in all honesty there are a lot of people who are envious of Musk so they will always have something negative to say when he or his companies are in the news.