The mystery I can wrap my head around is how Tesla has avoided getting hammered despite being hit from a hundred different directions. What exactly is the market pricing in? They peaked around 2021, and even after posting multiple quarters of disappointing results, the stock is still trading above 2021 levels. For almost any other company, slightly lowering guidance or missing estimates by a few percentage points sim…
The market discounts future returns but it is unclear and shifting what proportion of those returns are from the operations of the company in the market it sells products in and what proportion comes from the operations of traders in financial markets. More plainly, traders discount returns from buybacks and dividends financed by the operations of the company and returns from selling their shares to "greater fools".
As long as the music is playing they will keep dancing. Musk is a master of DJing that party. We might wake up tomorrow and find that his house of cards has fallen apart, but we might wake up to learn they really have solved FSD. That ambiguity keeps the price from collapsing.