I first invested in TSLA during late summer of 2013. The amount was only about $10k, but as a high school teacher who hadn't yet stacked my final two degrees yet, this amount was a pretty big deal. I wasn't new to investing, but TSLA was my first investment in a non-blue chip company whose earnings reports had been mostly negative. I teach AP Micro and Macro, and used to listen to NPR's Marketplace Morning Report on my morning commute, and in April (I think?) they had a little blurb about a company called Tesla that had surprisingly shown a profit, albeit mostly due to the selling of carbon credits to other automakers. For the next few months, I dove into researching the company and Elon. This led to discovering TMC, but almost as valuable was the discovery of TSLAQ on Twitter. TMC was (and still can be) prone to some irrational (or maybe just mis-timed to the early side) exuberance but TSLAQ ran the spectrum from logical to absolute looney tunes. Anyway, this led to my initial investment decision: the #1 ranked investing decision of my life.
Then for five years or so, nothing happened. To be sure, a lot happened with Tesla (Model X, various unveilings, increased volumes, Nevada Giga, Model 3 ramp). Just not much, zooming out, had happened with the stock. By this point, I had probably doubled my investment amounts. My investment in TSLA was doing fine, but from 2013-2018, TSLA was far from my biggest gainer. Everything was up during this time period. My initial thought was "I'll invest in TSLA and use the gains to purchase a Tesla". That hadn't happened yet but I was still confident it would happen eventually because Tesla the company appeared to be doing great. I felt confident enough in letting my oldest kid attend college out-of-state because TSLA and the market overall looked so promising. Go Hoosiers!
Then came a dark period between 2018-2019. The beginning of this dark period was the $420 tweet. We were on the road to Bloomington when it happened and the stock price was (I might be off a little) in the low $300's. Well I was pretty disappointed, but still saw the opportunity for a $120/share gain so I sold some other stock and invested another $5k or so in TSLA. This ended up being the #3 smartest investing decision of my life. I didn't realize this back then, however. In fact, within a few months I thought this might have been one of my worst investing decisions. This was due to the Great Model 3 Ramp Debacle of 2019. I remember the low point because it came at the very end of the 2018-19 school year. I went to the gym thinking "Well, I invested $25k and I'm about to sell for $17k. $17K is still a lot of money." By the time I got home, I not only didn't sell, but cleaned out the cash in my account buying 6 more shares at $180. This is my 2nd best decision ever. HODLing ain't as easy as it looks. Again, thankful for the existence of this forum, various podcast, YouTubers, TSLAQ, and even the financial media.
By the end of the late 2019-2021 explosion, we had bought a 2021 M3 Long Range, quit borrowing for my eldest's college, and sent my middle child off to college in-state (Go Dawgs!) and my youngest to his dream school (Go Griz!) on the other side of the country. We sold a few shares between splits, but surprisingly few because I knew TSLA was going to end up even higher within the next decade.
Which leads us to inflation/bad macros/Elon selling/Twitter purchase/disagreeable (to some) Elon behavior. We'll see if this dark period winds up being my 4th best decision or not, but I've been buying in dribs and drabs steadily from about $250 down to near $100. I am still way, way up but I've been a net loser on almost all lots bought during 2022. Most recent events, in my opinion are simply noise. I could be wrong, but I'm betting that negative opinion of Elon among liberals is an effect far more than a cause of the flagging stock price. In other words, once the stock price starts rising (and it might take a minute), we'll see those opinions of Elon improve or, more likely, they'll just stop being reported on.
More than any other factor, Elon's presence is what keeps me on board. His vision and the way he thinks is the only moat that matters. It brought us all the other moats that people hang their hats on now: superior engineering talent, big leads in autonomy and battery innovations, supercharging network, gigafactories. Elon's vision and way of thinking are the only things Tesla has that other companies cannot eventually attain. Do I wish he'd shut up at times? Absolutely. It's been a slight negative for sure. But I've known for a long time that the good comes along with the bad and the positive outweighs any negative by orders of magnitude. It's a free country and Elon is as free as anybody else. More power to those who use their freedoms to be critical or sell their shares if they see fit. Elon has done the same thing. But the only thing that would get me to sell my shares is Elon being forced out at Tesla.
Anyway, sorry for the text wall but getting contemplative today. Cheers to the longs!
communityimpact.com
