I’ve always felt Tesla is one of the strangest stocks I follow. Every few weeks the headlines turn super bearish or sentiment feels awful, and somehow the price just refuses to die. Since October it’s actually held up better than I expected: it was around $456 back then, dropped into the high $380s in November, bounced back to ~430, and now it’s sitting in the mid-440s. After all that noise, it’s basically only a small step down from October.
What’s weird to me is that the news in the same period hasn’t sounded great. I remember a bunch of pieces about “margins getting crushed” and “Tesla losing its EV lead” as cheaper EVs (especially from China) grabbed share. In places like France and Sweden, sales were down something like 40–50% YoY, and I just saw another article saying that in the UK, November sales were down about 19%, yet TSLA still roughly up 4%.
After Q3, the stock did sell off for a bit, which kind of matched the mood: GAAP operating income down ~40% YoY, operating margin ~5.8%, total gross margin ~18%, auto gross margin ex-credits only mid-teens vs close to 30% at the peak. Revenue hit a record, but net income was still down ~35–40% YoY. The one real bright spot was they printed almost $4B in free cash flow and have over $40B in cash, so the balance sheet doesn’t really scare me.
Personally I still see Tesla as a genuinely “very good” auto + energy business, I just can’t really call it cheap here with a big margin of safety. For me to get more comfortable, I’d want either a clear trend of margin recovery, or the AI / FSD / robotics story actually showing up as a visible line on the P&L instead of just keynotes and hype.
So I’m honestly curious: if Tesla mostly stays a really good auto + energy company for the rest of this decade and robotaxis / robots aren’t huge before 2030, what kind of PE would you put on that? Under that assumption, is today’s price cheap, fair, or just straight-up expensive to you? And if I butchered any of these stats, feel free to correct me in the comments. aslo anyone wants to dig into the UK stuff, this was the dashboard I was looking at: [Tesla UK sales down ~19% in November, New Automotive data shows.](https://www.moneyai-app.com/share/session?shareUuid=ce50f4a2-46d5-48a8-b729-64407f3ca018)
