FREE NEWSLETTER
FOR ELON MUSK, IT HAS—to use his own words—been a “very intense seven days.” Just over a week ago, Tesla demonstrated a new prototype product, a robot called Optimus. A week ago, it announced that it had delivered a record number of new vehicles in the third quarter. And, on Wednesday, a rocket built by SpaceX, one of Musk’s other companies, completed a successful launch from Cape Canaveral, carrying astronauts to the International Space Station.
At the same time, a cloud of controversy always seems to trail Musk. For most of this year, he has been in litigation with Twitter, which he offered to buy in April, reversed course and then, last week, said he was interested once again. This past week, Musk also proposed a peace plan for Ukraine that unleashed vitriol from around the world.
Not surprisingly, Tesla and its stock have been similarly unpredictable. Almost since its inception, Tesla has been a sort of Rorschach test for investors—including me. One conversation, back in 2014, stands out in my mind. After Tesla’s shares had jumped 344% the year before, I became skeptical. The shares seemed grossly overpriced. A friend, meanwhile, felt that the company was on to something and that its share price made sense.
Since that time, Tesla’s shares have gained another 2,000%, so it’s fair to say my assessment was incorrect. In recounting this story, I’m happy to eat crow because I believe it conveys key lessons—not just about Tesla, but also about the stock market in general. These are the five ways I misjudged Tesla:
1. Growth rate. The way most investment analysts value a stock is to extrapolate the company’s current revenue and profit figures into the future. From that, a projected future stock price can be calculated. Suppose a company is earning $5 per share today, and I think it’ll earn $7 in three years. Let’s also assume the company’s current price-earnings (P/E) ratio of 15 remains constant. That would allow me to project a future stock price of $105 ($7 x 15).
For a mature company, that’s usually a reasonable approach. But for companies that aren’t yet profitable, it’s much harder because you have to guess when they’ll turn the corner. That was the situation with Tesla in 2014. It was growing rapidly, but it was losing money. It wasn’t until 2020, in fact, that it produced its first full-year profit.
Investment analysts trying to value unprofitable companies have two less-than-ideal options. The first is to extrapolate from current numbers, as described above. In 2014, for example, Tesla delivered 32,000 cars, up from about 22,000 the year before. An analyst might project future growth at a similar pace. The second approach would be the “blue sky” method, whereby an investor would simply use his imagination to paint a picture of the future.
Each approach carries a potential flaw. With the extrapolation method, the risk is that an estimate may end up being too low. That was the mistake I made. But with the second approach—the blue sky method—the risk is that an estimate could end up being too high. Neither is a great result, and we’re really only guessing when we choose which way to go.
2. Valuation. Not only did Tesla grow faster than expected, but the stock market also put a higher value on those profits. I expected that, when Tesla turned profitable, its price-earnings ratio would be more in line with other fast-growing companies. But sometimes investors are willing to give a company a pass, allowing its P/E ratio to remain in the stratosphere for years. Even today, after a 30% year-to-date decline, Tesla’s shares trade at 47 times projected earnings. That’s about three times higher than the overall market average and double that of a more typical fast-growing company.
3. Plans. Suppose you or I had been able to sit down with Elon Musk in 2014, and suppose he had shared with us all the plans he had for the company. Would that have helped in making a more accurate projection for Tesla’s shares? I’m not sure it would have. That’s because Tesla has a track record of promoting products years before they’re released. For that reason, even if we’d received information directly from the CEO, it’s unlikely that would have led to a more accurate forecast of Tesla’s growth.
4. Competition. For years, Tesla skeptics have argued that competition would inevitably slow its growth. That was part of my concern back in 2014. After all, an electric car is simpler to manufacture than a gasoline-powered one, so the world’s major auto makers faced no real technical hurdle in challenging Tesla.
In fact, an oft-cited rule of thumb in business is that, in new industries, “fast followers” tend to fare better than first movers. Google wasn’t the first to create a search engine, Apple wasn’t the first to make cell phones and Facebook wasn’t the first to create a social network. Toyota, it was widely assumed, could put Tesla in its place if it chose.
What no one counted on, though, was that Toyota would go in the opposite direction. Just recently, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda reiterated his lukewarm view of electric vehicles. “EVs are just going to take longer to become mainstream than [the] media would like us to believe,” Toyoda said. He cited a lack of infrastructure, among other concerns. Whether Toyoda is right or wrong on this, the result is that he’s allowed Tesla more time—with less competition—to gain customers and build an infrastructure of its own.
5. Unforeseen factors. In assessing a company’s prospects, the factors discussed above are usually the most significant. But they aren’t the only ones. What else could have gone wrong for Tesla? Consider just a few potholes the company has avoided:
What can you learn from this story? As I’ve noted many times before, stock-picking is immensely challenging. That’s why, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I always recommend index funds. But it’s also instructive, I think, to see exactly why this is the case.
While Tesla may be unique, it’s also representative of the challenges that stock-pickers face. Look at any company, and you’ll observe strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately for investors, though, what we can observe represents just a fraction of what can potentially impact a company.
This story also helps explain another piece of research I’ve mentioned in the past: Finance professor Hendrik Bessembinder has found that just 4% of all stocks account for all of the stock market’s historical outperformance relative to Treasury bills. This strikes many people as an almost unbelievable statistic. But Tesla’s performance—a gain of about 11,000% over the past 10 years—helps buttress Bessembinder’s finding. That, too, is another reason to own index funds. Even if you dismiss a highflier the way I did, at least you’ll benefit from owning some stake in it.
Adam M. Grossman is the founder of Mayport, a fixed-fee wealth management firm. Sign up for Adam’s Daily Ideas email, follow him on Twitter @AdamMGrossman and check out his earlier articles.
Want to receive our weekly newsletter? Sign up now. How about our daily alert about the site's latest posts? Join the list.
This is a great article, thank you, it seems any young companies with expected growth potential are valued highly or very highly even when they aren’t even profitable yet, but if they don’t meet expectations, the share price will at some point get hammered….
The key phrase from the essay is “the stock market also put a higher value on those profits.” As is the case for every other megacap, retail investors are willing to overpay for a company that they think is cool. And, for the uncool among us, that’s a great reason to pay attention to the Bessembinder study.
I like the way you talk about these factors in outperformance using Tesla, a company now so well known. As a young techie, it was one of my son’s first individual stock picks. Already, ten years ago, he had various friends in Austin who were big fan boys.
I did not try to convince him that Tesla had bad prospects. Instead, I stressed that as someone with very few investments (other than himself,) it was a very risky pick, although perhaps not as risky as Fisker, a company now almost forgotten. As such, I questioned whether it was an appropriate stock for him to own.
After due consideration, he decided that it wasn’t, just as he chose to drive old Hondas and Toyotas, even though he could have bought a Tesla or a BMW like many of his peers.
With great risk (individual stock picking) comes great reward? As your article points out, sometimes. But the complexity of the factors that need to be assessed is substantial. Even if you can assess and predict future outcomes, you don’t just need to do it once, but on an ongoing basis over time as things change. Also, how many individual investors have held TSLA for the entire 11,000% gain over the last 10 years? Maybe a few. But countless others would have sold all along the way, thereby creating the need to once again find the next winner and correctly assess the future. Congrats to those few who have done this well over time. The stats on how few active managers beat the indexes shows how difficult the task is even for the “experts”. Thanks for another thoughtful article.