It's not a car company anymore, it's an energy company... Ahem, I mean self-driving... Er, maybe robots? ... Okay, that not going so well? How about quantum? That's probably a thing, right?
Tesla seems basically priced based on hype, rather than anything relating to its actual business.
It's a cult. Really. This is a stock devoid of any connection to reality, fundamentals, products, anything. All that matters is that Musk is on the nameplate. Do not bet against the ability of people in a cult to remain irrational in the face of overwhelming evidence. Do not touch the cult.
With entities like BlackRock. There is always on which part of money they manage they are simple followers. Index funds simply follow indexes. They can not decide not to invest according to set out rules.
And when you get to active management, those managers might not either be that good. And it works as long as market keeps going up.
Those profits have also gone down; the only year they made lower-but-still-positive profit than 2025 ($3794m) was the first year since their founding in which they made any profit (which was 2020 and $721m).
Tesla's total profits over its entire existence ($37,883m [0]) is about as much as Musk has personally made by selling Tesla shares ($40bn ish [1]), but of that profit I can find $12.8bn can be attributed to government incentives[2] that have now largely or completely gone away.
Not sure what relevance Musk selling shares has to do with profit they've made. That seems completely irrelevant.
That being said, yeah, profits were down a bit but a lot of that was stock compensation and other things. In practical terms they went from a cash position of 36 billion to 44 billion.
They are in a phenomenal position financially as they have very little debt. By comparison GM made 2.7 billion and Stellantis lost 20 billion.
Tesla is in such a great cash position that Apple only has about 10 billion more than them in cash.
> Not sure what relevance Musk selling shares has to do with profit they've made. That seems completely irrelevant.
Selling shares for more than the company made in its entire existence, demonstrates the shares are overvalued.
> By comparison GM made 2.7 billion and Stellantis lost 20 billion.
2.7/3.7 = 0.73; GM's market cap is $77.67bn, using them as your framing of the problem gets you to a Tesla market cap of $106.40bn, not their actual ~$1.5T.
And Toyota made 40-45 billion USD profit for each of the last few years, i.e. more than Tesla in its lifetime, while having a market cap that's currently $316.8bn.
Telsa, market cap $1551bn, about 5x that of a company which makes more each year than it did in total, is overpriced. Especially given how harshly both Tesla's profits and sales are declining even in otherwise growing markets.
Telsa could shift the decimal point on its market cap one place and still be overpriced.
Given what they are as a business, they are not in "a phenomenal position financially", they are in an OK position for a normal boring traditional car company and a terrible one for a trillion-dollar market cap club company.
(Numbers from companiesmarketcap.com, in case anyone complains those are out of date).
