As I’m writing this, TSLA’s market cap is around $160 billion, with the stock up 50%+ over the past week and having more than doubled in a flat market over the past month.

I have no real idea what’s behind the move  …desperate short covering?  …glitchy trading AI feeding on positive price momentum?  It looks crazy, though.

My thoughts:

–conceptually at least, we’re now living in a post-fossil fuel world.  This is much more evident in, say, Europe than in the US.  (The current administration here is clueless.  It actually favors the most heavily polluting fuels and is fighting industry efforts to keep US-made auto relevant in world markets through increasing fuel efficiency.  If this were a century ago, we’d be backing firewood.)

–the trickiest part of a car to make and maintain is the internal combustion engine.  Substitute big batteries and suddenly building is easier, manufacturing costs go down and you don’t need an extensive dealer network for sales and service.

—Tesla is the leading brand name in electric cars.  There’s also some evidence that the manufacturing problems that plagued TSLA are now behind the company.

–we’re still in the “dream” or “concept” stage of TSLA’s development, so it’s very hard to gauge what the company is worth.  On the other hand, we can ask ourselves what the current share price implies must be already factored in, as follows:

—-let’s say that the market for automobiles is 100 million units/year, with 25% of those in China and 20% in the US.  Suppose TSLA can capture a 1% market share over the next few years.  That would mean manufacturing 1 million cars.  Let’s pluck numbers out of the air and say that they’ll sell for $40,000 each and have an after-tax margin of 20% (using margins is bad–never do it–but we’re just dreaming here).  That’s $8000 each, or $8 billion in total.

—-the point of this reverse-engineering is to see that the stock is now trading at 20x that annual earnings figure (market cap =$160 billion).  To buy/hold the stock at this point one would have to believe that the future for TSLA is better than I’ve just described.

—-how could that happen?:  the margin number I’m using is very high in conventional auto company history; there’s the issue of creating a network of charging stations to serve the cars; there’s also a (less important, I think) question of usability of electric cars in colder climates.  The biggest unknown, in my opinion, is how large a lead TSLA has on other would-be electric car makers.

Primary competition will likely come from Europe, where whose diesel emission cheating scandal has wrecked the market for conventional cars, thereby accelerating the move toward electric.   Their biggest impediment–ironically, a major point in favor of TSLA, is the backward-oriented posture of the administration in Washington.

On the other hand, given that TSLA has manufacturing operations in the two largest markets, maybe a 1% market share is too low.  Again, I have no idea.  But I think that’s the bet buyers today will be making, whether they realize it or not.