Tesla's stock performance has something almost poetic about it—a financial physics-defying ballet that's been running for years. But as we inch toward the company's July 22nd earnings call, there's this nagging feeling in the market that perhaps gravity is finally getting its due.
I've been tracking Tesla's sales figures across continents, and let me tell you, the trajectory doesn't inspire confidence. "Controlled descent" is what pilots might call it, though the "controlled" part seems increasingly questionable. European deliveries are softening like week-old bread. And China? That market was supposed to be the golden goose that justified a thousand breathless analyst upgrades. Now it's showing cracks.
Meanwhile, competition has evolved. Remember when rival EVs were laughably inadequate? Those days are gone. They're merely "playing catch-up" now—which, when you think about it, represents a seismic shift in Tesla's competitive moat.
Yet TSLA stock hovers stubbornly around $300.
Weird, isn't it?
The market has this uncanny ability to maintain prices precisely at levels that cause maximum headaches for both bulls and bears. It's like it's designed to make everyone second-guess themselves.
Look, valuing Tesla has never been straightforward. It's the financial equivalent of a Rorschach test. Bulls see a world-changing technology company with infinite addressable markets. Cars today, robots tomorrow, Mars colonies by... what, next Tuesday? Bears see an increasingly ordinary automaker with good software and extraordinary PR. Your valuation model probably reveals more about your own biases than about Tesla itself.
I've developed what I call the "Enthusiasm Gap Theory" after covering this stock for years. The price represents the delta between true believers (who genuinely see a $4,000 share price as inevitable) and absolute skeptics (who've been predicting Tesla's demise since Obama's second term). As that enthusiasm gap narrows—believers becoming slightly less evangelical, skeptics slightly less apocalyptic—the stock finds equilibrium.
And there are signs the enthusiasm is waning.
The Cybertruck? Once heralded as the next great growth catalyst, it's proven to be simultaneously too weird for mass adoption and not weird enough to maintain the Tesla mystique. Full Self-Driving remains perpetually 12 months from completion (a timeframe that's been remarkably consistent for about seven years now).
Then there's Musk himself. His attention seems increasingly fractured between Twitter/X, SpaceX, and whatever shiny object captured his imagination during his morning shower.
The bear case for sub-$250 isn't crazy. Traditional automaker valuations would put Tesla dramatically lower. But here's the thing—and I've seen this pattern repeatedly since covering the company in 2016—TSLA has never traded on fundamentals alone. It trades on narrative, and narratives die hard.
Just when you think the story is finally changing, Musk takes the stage, announces some new product with holographic flair, and suddenly the stock is climbing again on promises of robotaxis or home HVAC systems or... neural implants? Sure, why not.
Should you bet against it? Man, I don't know.
(Plenty of brilliant investors have been financially eviscerated shorting Tesla over the years. It's the investment equivalent of bringing a spreadsheet to a religious revival.)
If you're thinking about puts ahead of earnings, consider this: disappointing results are increasingly baked in. The real surprise would be Tesla dramatically exceeding expectations, which could trigger one of those face-melting rallies that have bankrupted a generation of Tesla bears.
The perfect time to short Tesla is never today. It's always tomorrow, or next week, or after the next disappointment. Until suddenly, it was yesterday.
Will the market eventually price Tesla like a normal company? Probably. But "eventually" is doing Olympic-level heavy lifting in that sentence, and normal companies don't have Elon Musk tweeting at 3 AM about their limitless future.
Tread carefully, is all I'm saying. The laws of financial physics have a way of reasserting themselves—just not necessarily on your timeframe.
