No. of Recommendations: 1
If Tesla was just a car manufacturer with stagnant sales growth and significant reputational issues, I think your conclusion would be warranted. But it ignores the significant potential of full self-driving and robotaxis and personal robots, to name just 2 earth-shattering technological developments that are far from guaranteed to work, but if they do...
I'm too much of a chicken to buy the shares but I wouldn't bet against them.
I’ve given up on short selling after taking significant losses in the last few years, but I have two remaining shorts, one of them on the Canadian financial sector (XFN.to) and the other on XLG, an ETF based on the biggest 50 companies in the S&P 500. Both of these I consider to be hedges. XLG has weights of about 11% for the top 3 companies (AAPL, MSFT, NVDA) and smaller weights for thé next few companies (AMZN 6%, GGOG 6%, META 5%, AVGO 4%, TSLA 3%, BRK 3%, JPM 2%; 63% in these top 10, because of market cap weighting. The only 2 I feel uncomfortable shorting are BRK (for obvious reasons) and TSLA, because of its potential for explosive growth. So I bought a 1% stake in each, last week.
I never thought I would go from shorting TSLA to owning shares, and it’s not like any of my other investments, but I think it is true that they have a good chance of becoming the biggest company in the world. And if they can master full self-driving as they seem to be on the cusp of doing, they may be #1 sooner rather than later. I would not want to be an owner of UBER or any of the other car companies, with the possible exception of BYD, just in case regular cars have a few more years before being obsolete.
