2d ago

Why does it feel like Elon is artificially boosting his companies?

Tesla dealerships are getting protested and, in some cases, vandalized. Sales are down on 9 of the top 10 countries Tesla sells in. Yet Tesla stock is up. Twitter is a cesspool of nazi-themed bots, and somehow just pulled in $1bn and raised its valuation back up to $44bn.

How is any of this possible? It seems really artificial to me, but I don't really understand business.

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75 comments

Something that is very easy to forget is that stock value is only very loosely tied to actual company value.
Stock value is based on what people are prepared to pay for the stock, not what the company is worth.
Say that I create a company that makes newspaper hats for tanks in Ukraine, something utterly worthless, I am the only employee and my inventory is just yesterday's newspapers that I found in the gutter.
My company has zero actual value, but I decide to create 50000 shares of my company, sell one to my friend for €2, and suddenly my company's market value would look like €100000.
- You've just explained most Tech Startup unicorns, by the way.
- You'll need to have 500k shares total for the valuation to be 1M
  
  Yes but 50.000 × 2 = 100.000, large numbers get confusing without dots
  
  Sorry I should have been clear when I edited my post, the previous commenter was correct, I messed up the math.
  
  Yep, good catch!
- From someone who doesn't know shit about finance, thank you for the explanation

75 comments