I always considered myself a super bull on Tesla, but the stock has gone up considerably faster than myself and pretty much everyone else imagined. I have several thoughts around this topic, but my general idea is that we have a massive conservative bias with our Tesla predictions.
Take a look back at some of the old super-bull predictions, which now seem like bear predictions:
Super Bulls Only
Or take a look at ARKs 7000EV (1400) by 2024 target... starting to look kind of low, especially with FSD looking much closer now than people thought.
I think the reason for having a conservative bias is:
* Unconscious absorption of FUD
* Expecting the past flat period from 200-300SP to repeat, instead of realising we are on an S curve of ramping
* Struggling to imagine the scale of Tesla/EVs/renewables
* Struggling to imagine the new tech, and the changes they bring
* Underestimating FSD and more specifically the effectiveness of computation scale on AI (
May 2020 news & 'On GPT-3' · Gwern.net)
* Not wanting to sound crazy
I think the most accurate predictions of Tesla will be top down based on total addressable market, across all the markets they are touching, with massive margins, growth and market share. From EVs, to AWS for AI and all 15-20 or so industries in between. In this regard you can think of Tesla as 15-20 companies, all which can end up leading their fields. 550B might seem like a lot now, but really it's just 20 companies undervalued at 30B each. Some of those startups perhaps could be valued at 550B alone... most notably FSD.
It has been on my todo list to attempt sizing up these markets and assigning a large percentage of them to Tesla. For now though, I can say the potential upside is so much higher than I see anyone putting numbers to.
I would like to see an analysis where:
* Tesla gets to FSD in next 2 years with high probability and has 5 years with no competition in FSD
* Tesla batteries/energy/EVs grows 20% faster than predicted at battery day
* Solar scales at similarly rapid rates
* Tesla's DoJo supercomputer and NN training farm has a bigger value than Amazon's AWS
* Decade long predictions take into account acceleration change:
Accelerating change - Wikipedia
* And comprehensive valuation of all the other startup components like insurance, chip design, seats, etc.
Taking all this into account, I can see a case for a current SP of 2000-3000. I may sound crazy now, but check back in 5-10 years and see whether I was crazy, or perhaps even bearish in my outlook. Perhaps even 1-2 years will prove me right. I should say I am not 100% confident on any of these super-bull predictions, they are complete guesses and I haven't done the top down analysis which I think is needed to most accurately predict the 10 year stock price. It's not really necessary for a buy and hold investor like me.
However, I did want to point out a historical collective bearish shortcoming in predicting Tesla and TSLA.