A Do-It-Yourself Valuation of Tesla: Building Your Own Investment Thesis
This article presents a comprehensive DIY valuation framework for Tesla, breaking down the company's value into four key levers: growth (revenue projections), profitability (operating margins), investment efficiency (sales-to-capital ratio), and risk (cost of capital and failure probability). The author provides industry benchmarks across automotive and technology sectors, allowing readers to construct their own valuation scenarios and explicitly acknowledges that valuation is story-dependent rather than deterministic. The article emphasizes disciplined value investing over momentum trading and cautions against cherry-picking optimistic assumptions without considering their internal consistency.
Metrics in this report
7.58percent
median
All publicly traded companies globally at start of 2020
6.94percent
median
Auto industry globally
8.86percent
median
Technology industry globally
2.46trillion USD
Collective 2019 revenues of all publicly traded auto companies worldwide
19.87percent
average
FAANG stocks (Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix) plus Microsoft in 2019
260billion USD
Apple 2019 annual revenues
129billion USD
Microsoft 2019 annual revenues
3.5percent CAGR
average
Global auto industry over last decade (2010-2019)
1.37ratio
median
Global auto companies at start of 2020
2.42ratio
top-quartile
Most capital-efficient auto companies (75th percentile)