[SmileyRedBall]

Would being continously shorted by Wall Street have anything to do with this? For example, take yet another short position in Tesla and then trash it in the financial press, like this article is doing.

It is curious that since 2013 Tesla sales have jumped from approx 20,000 per year to approx 30,000 per month and yet the stock price hasn't shown an equivalent increase. If I were of a cynical nature I would suspect the rest of the US car industry (what's left of it) of punishing Musk for being sucessfull. Despite this, an increase of 1,889 percent on an initial investment in the IPO in 2010 is not too bad.

[AndrewBissell]

The financial press has gone very easy on Tesla & Musk. They will routinely write "Elon Musk says" articles which are little more than stenographic regurgitation of some statement by Musk or Tesla. Longs and Tesla touts like Ron Baron, Cathie Wood, Gene Munster, and even the utterly inexperienced Galileo Russell are routinely given long CNBC segments to hold forth with their bullish theses. And even if it can temporarily push the stock price one direction or another, press coverage has little to nothing to do with their audited financial results.

Netflix attracted a ton of short interest back when the stock was around $100. Somehow that didn't, in and of itself, hold back the company at all.

> It is curious that since 2013 Tesla sales have jumped from approx 20,000 per year to approx 30,000 per month and yet the stock price hasn't shown an equivalent increase.

Yes, it's almost as though the company has a complete lack of operating leverage and is losing more money the more cars it sells.

[jkachmar]

> It is curious that since 2013 Tesla sales have jumped from approx 20,000 per year to approx 30,000 per month and yet the stock price hasn't shown an equivalent increase.

For the Nth time that this conversation has to be had on the internet: That’s Not How The Market Works.

Tesla’s stock has been _very_ optimistically valued for quite some time because the market collectively determined that the company was likely to do very well. If a company does well and that performance isn’t surprising then there wasn’t an inefficiency and the market doesn’t need to correct for it.

Likewise, if a collection of market participants believes that Tesla’s valuation is overly optimistic then the can short the company. In doing so, they will be incentivized to show evidence that the valuation isn’t realistic and hopefully validate their short position.

There is an argument to be had over which incentives may or may not be good for society here, but that is completely orthogonal to the discussion of market valuation and short/long positions.