TSLA Goes Up and Down
by Tom Scocca
Back around the end of 2022, I began keeping a browser tab open to check the price of Tesla stock. I thought it would be fun to follow what was then a solid downward trend of the auto company's valuation. The whole enterprise was basically a fraud—a boutique carmaker somehow valued more than all the actual major leading carmakers on the planet combined, despite its dependence on selling clean-car credits to those other companies for revenue; a tech-forward company whose signature self-driving system was a complete and lethal sham. Eventually, I trusted, reality would assert itself. At the time, Tesla’s stock price was around $120, having dropped by 65 percent in the year, costing Elon Musk $200 billion on paper.
As I type this, TSLA is around $268. Yesterday morning, the company reported the worst quarterly sales dropoff in its history. By that afternoon, after an initial dip, the stock price was up 5 percent for the day. Maybe it was lifted by news reports that at some unspecified time in the nearish future, Musk would be stepping away from his current hobby/job of demolishing the federal government to pay attention to the companies, including Tesla, that he's supposedly in charge of. Maybe a bunch of Musk fans got together to bid the price up. Maybe the price of Tesla stock is set by a random-number generator slightly tilted toward the positive.
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