[schmidtleonard]

PE isn't a cheat code to rational stock valuation, it's the "nothing ever changes" assumption dressed up in a formula. PE looks at past earnings, while the price of a stock buys its future earnings. A modest PE on NVDA says "I expect datacenter revenue to continue" while a modest PE on TSLA would say "I expect robotaxi to fail." These are fair opinions to have, as are their opposites, but if datacenter revenue collapses then today's modest PE won't save NVDA and if TSLA can pull off robotaxi then today's high PE will be vindicated. Stocks are all about Future Earnings, but you can't put that in a column and sort by it so we have PE.

You can certainly have success while avoiding high PE stocks, but you are on a site about startups and your name suggests you work in the tech sector, which are both places where high PE often does make sense and it pays to be familiar with the reasons.

[marcosdumay]

> a modest PE on TSLA would say "I expect robotaxi to fail."

No. Just having competition is enough to destroy the expectations on TSLA.

And realistically, they are abut last on that race, being thrown out of track about a decade ago and never managing to make anything work since then. So, yeah, betting on no competition is a very weird option.

[JKCalhoun]

Good point. With BMW, Lexus, Audi, Mercedes, Porsche — all with luxury EV's — Tesla really is looking like an also-ran.

I'm not in that circle of clientele though so I don't know: are any of these now seen as the luxury electric car?

[marcosdumay]

I'm really not in that market :)

But the market of luxury cars isn't enough to sustain a company with the valuation of Tesla. If interest rates ever stay non-zero, they will need to take almost the entire cars market worldwide, or something else with similar size.

[Yossarrian22]

Even if they can get robotaxi to work on a level better than Waymo currently is shouldn’t they just be valued as if they were Uber with $0 paid out to contractors? The labor is not that significant a cost to what’s fundamentally a taxi business

[coredog64]

Full FSD would theoretically allow vehicle owners to rent out spare capacity with no hassle.

I saw the low-tech version of this in Honiara: Western expat buys a cheap car. Driver is hired to take kids to/from school, but in lieu of payment, driver is free to run a taxi service as long as he makes his school commitments.

[comte7092]

When you don’t have a driver anymore you quickly run into an issue with keeping the vehicle clean.

One time having a drunken stranger puke in your car while you’re not using it will be enough for a lot of people to determine it isn’t worth the hassle.

It’s pretty easy to imagine a number of scenarios that disabuse the nothing of ever renting your car out “no hassle”. Low hassle maybe, but your framing implies you’ve never worked in a job that required engaging the general public.