I like Elon. But I happen to
I like Elon. But I happen to have studied the Auto biz pretty closely. My father in 1970 started a company in his garage called Electric Motion Control with a local CalTech professor R.D. Middlebrook, and his invention was intended for electric vehicles. He thought gas was too expensive at 30 cents a gallon… anyway fast forward to 2021, and there is a worldwide surplus of car factories. There is no way that Elon will take more than 20% of the world auto market. There are too many national interests which will prevent his dominating this industry. Yes, he will be a big player in the car biz, but that will only be worth so much. Electric cars are easy to make. It's a battery, motor, controller, and chassis basically.
Elon has bungled the Solar City firm. SpaceX which is his pet project, is filled with great engineers stolen from NASA and other aerospace firms that never did anything. He is doing great work there. But that is a separate company, and as it is his pet project, he will give it more attention, and his car firm may stumble.
Elon's management style is not one based on delegation, and we all know that there are limits to a dictatorial style. In Germany which is the largest car market in Europe, Tesla model 3 is down to #3 in the EV sales charts. The other countries of the world will conspire against Tesla and limit his market share. You are delusional if you think his success in California is going to be repeated everywhere. The NIU company in China will in all likelihood become a bigger firm than Tesla. They have Chinese government backing; Tesla will never be permitted to take big share in Asia, due to politics alone. The auto biz is the crown jewel of Japan's industrial empire, do you honestly think that they will just roll over and surrender? That Toyota is asleep at the wheel?
So if you consider their endgame to be 20% of the market, their current stock price is not justifiable at all. Telsa has 3% of the global passenger car market and about 18% of the EV market. Have you seen the Ford electric transit van? the VW ID Buzz? There are dozens of well-funded startups, using the same technology.
IBM had the first mass-market PC, and they ended up getting squeezed out of the industry when it became a commodity. Regardless of how good an American product is, it is discriminated against across the world. I lived in Brasil, and imported cars there have a whopping 100% import duty. So you either build in Brasil, or write off their 200 million person market. By the end of 2021 Tesla will have 3 factories: Berlin, Fremont, and China operating, with Texas under construction. In the meantime there will be probably 20 competing factories cranking out electric cars operating by end of 2021 by his competitors: Kia Soul, VW Id.4, Buzz, Ford transit (2022), Mercedes, Porsche, etc.
It's entertaining to imagine that an American firm can conquer the world, but I have done business in NL, Japan, and America, and the rest of the world doesn't like Americans very much and are certainly going to do their best to throw some monkey wrenches into Elon's grand plans.