Why Tesla

Tesla Model S

I'm not a professional investor. I don't look at the earnings report and compare the numbers. With the exception of 'profits' and a few other sensible words, I don't even know the right words to use to discuss how I don't know the numbers. However, I'm one of 'those people' who have gone heavy on Tesla stock. Tesla is a bubble, the shorts say. This very well could be the case, but the thing that gives me the most confidence actually isn't a thing. It lots of individual things, many of which, if taken in isolation, do not lend themselves to a booming, sky-is-the-limit company. But they aren't isolated.

Tesla is unique in the variety of showstoppers they command all under one roof. In no particular order;

1. Tesla is the iPhone of cars. Tesla owners love their cars. Consumer Reports ranked Tesla the best US car, and 8th best in the world. This Fidelity guy described driving Tesla for the first time along the same lines as using the internet for the first time.
2. Elon Musk. The brand has a certain musk to it that you can smell a mile away[eh?]. The Steve Jobs comparisons are ample and appropriately parallel considering the excitement Musk elicits down in your bones when he presents. Even you shorts out there, you know what I mean. Of course, considering the great-man principle, this may be the biggest potential downside. The car and the brand prestige was built by, and arguably sustained by one man. I hope Musk has a good security detail.
3. Mechanically simple. No transmission (there is only one gear), and no a lot of other stuff that a gasoline powered car has that will wear out and break. It's the reason a Tesla can have a trunk and a frunk – there's just not a lot going on. Once they get a few years of mass production under their belt, it's so simple (simple is a relative term) it should break less than a gas powered car.
4. Battery production. With the Gigafactory, Tesla will, by end of 2018, produce more lithium ion batteries than the whole world produced in 2013. And since the brand depends on it, they'll surely invest so much in R&D and not let someone else discover other leading battery tech first and leapfrog Tesla's fuel source.
5. AutoPilot. This perhaps deserves to be much higher on the list. There are many compelling reasons Tesla will likely win the auto-pilot race, but to me it really boils down to these two;
1. Tesla is constantly collecting millions of miles of real world data to learn from.
2. Tesla is like Apple in that they completely control the hardware and software, allowing them to seamlessly integrate, quickly innovate, and push out OTA software updates.
6. Shared technologies. from SpaceX, SolorCity, The Boring Company, Zip2.
7. Supply Chain. Tesla makes their own secret sauce parts; battery pack, electric motor, etc. Granted, they also purchase a lot from around the world, (see Musk's ICBM joke from Model 3 launch).
8. Infrastructure. 6,118 supercharger stations as of writing. Who else can touch this kind of charging capacity? Plus if you own a shopping mall, what charging stations would you prefer; a Tesla charging station, or a specialized Chevy Bolt charging station? Note though, the potential coming downside, which could be a decade away, is the creation of a universal standard charging station that, oops, Tesla won't plug into.
9. Motivation. Elon Musk does not have the standard human motivations. At least in the realm we're interested in. Stock price? meh. Prestigious brand? only inasmuch at it builds toward saving Earth and colonizing Mars. Because Musk is so long-sighted, it enables him to glide (if not always smoothly) over the bumps that come with, oh you know, starting a car company from scratch even though no one in North America has in 3 decades.

Tesla seems to have it all. We'll see.