特斯拉的股票自從騰訊入股后，就開始大漲，目前市值已經(jīng)超過美國通用、福特這些百年汽車企業(yè)，成為美國市值最大的汽車公司。

所謂人紅是非多，正是因為股價大漲，特斯拉成為投資者和新聞記者們討論的熱門話題。紐約時報的這篇文章深度報道了這個新聞熱點，新聞標(biāo)題似乎在諷刺特斯拉公司在賣故事。
看完這篇新聞也許會讓癡迷于特斯拉的人，理性看待特斯拉真正的價值，和故事后面的風(fēng)險。

特斯拉給人們講的故事就是，利用太陽能驅(qū)動自家生產(chǎn)的純電動汽車。

這一個故事就會讓人們高潮，因為在電動車和太陽能領(lǐng)域特斯拉已經(jīng)是行業(yè)的主導(dǎo)者了。

就像蘋果公司主導(dǎo)了手機(jī)市場一樣，而且手機(jī)是這個時代里人類最重要的產(chǎn)品，所以蘋果公司目前是全球市值最高的公司。

我們再回到特斯拉身上，目前全世界的人們都相信未來的汽車一定是電動化、智能化的產(chǎn)品。正好，特斯拉目前是電動化的絕對領(lǐng)導(dǎo)者，因為他們是構(gòu)想是利用太陽能驅(qū)動電動汽車，這給美好的故事加了一個很生動的背景。（BYD汽車只是技術(shù)好，但是沒有一個打動人心的故事。）在智能化方面，特斯拉在智能輔助駕駛方面也是最強(qiáng)的，因為該公司已經(jīng)開始出售別人家還在測試的產(chǎn)品了。

以上原因，所有人都看好特斯拉是一個潛力股，人們預(yù)想他會變成10個蘋果公司（一輛汽車的價值是手機(jī)的100倍喔）。就像20歲的大學(xué)生和8歲的小學(xué)生參加數(shù)學(xué)競賽，20歲的大學(xué)生沒有做出來的題，而小學(xué)生做出來了，你說老師會不會加大對8歲小學(xué)生的投資呢！因為小學(xué)生還年輕，天資聰慧，還有很大的發(fā)展?jié)摿Α?/p>

這篇文章給我一個啟發(fā)，那就是就算這個小學(xué)生是真正的聰明，但是世界上不可能就只有一個聰明的數(shù)學(xué)家呀！數(shù)學(xué)神童高斯，是各式各樣的天才里最出色的一個，不幸早逝。但是作為一名律師出生的費馬，后來半路出家變成了數(shù)學(xué)大師。

這里我想說的是目前人們都知道了未來汽車行業(yè)的發(fā)展趨勢，現(xiàn)在很多人都在投資像特斯拉一樣有潛力的公司，也就是像特斯拉一樣具有發(fā)展?jié)摿Φ墓驹絹碓蕉唷?/p>

大家只是看見了一個表像，就是相信特斯拉一定是未來汽車行業(yè)、能源行業(yè)的老大，因為他從小就被看好，人們像神一樣相信他。但是世上并不缺這樣的公司，中國一年可以冒出上百家電動汽車創(chuàng)業(yè)公司和無人駕駛汽車公司。所以未來電動汽車行業(yè)和智能汽車行業(yè)有很多，但不一定特斯拉會笑到最后，一切皆有可能。

目前人們還著迷于故事里的美好愿景，不斷抬高特斯拉股價，但是這同時也給后來者足夠勇氣去超越特斯拉。更會讓通用和福特這樣的權(quán)威人物所嫉妒，所以特斯拉要小心了。

故事已經(jīng)賣出去了，人們也信了，故事的結(jié)局是怎樣的呢？請看下一節(jié)。

原文來自《紐約時報》：Tesla Has Something Hotter Than Cars to Sell: Its Story

As Tesla shares surged past $300 this week and the company’s market value surpassed Ford’s, even its founder, Elon Musk, acknowledged on Twitter that the company was “absurdly overvalued if based on the past.”

By “the past,” he presumably means old-fashioned valuation measures like price-to-earnings or price-to-sales ratios, the traditional benchmarks for evaluating stock prices. By those measures, Tesla — a company that lost $773 million last year — is indeed off the charts.

Tesla’s market value of nearly $49 billion is not only higher than that of Ford, which earned nearly $11 billion in profit last year, but is within easy striking distance of General Motors, which earned $9.4 billion.

In contrast to Tesla, Ford and G.M. shares have dropped recently on fears that auto sales have hit a cyclical peak. Ford and G.M. executives wouldn’t comment on Tesla’s stock surge, but it’s easy to imagine they’d be tearing their hair out in frustration.

“It’s nuts,” Bruce Greenwald, a professor at Columbia Business School and an expert in value investing, said of Tesla’s stock price. “Investors believe it’s going to dominate a market that no company has ever dominated before.”

But Tesla is not a stock, or a company, that is measured by the past, as Mr. Musk is well aware. He also wrote on Twitter that stock prices represent “risk-adjusted future cash flows” — and Tesla is about nothing if not a utopian future of safe, reliable, powerful, self-driving electric vehicles powered by solar-fed batteries that are easy on the environment.

In that regard, Tesla has ascended into a rarefied realm of so-called story stocks — companies that have so bewitched investors that their stock prices are impervious to any traditional valuation measures because their stories are simply too good not to be true.

And to the dismay of short-sellers, who believe they have ample rational reasons to bet against such stocks, their share prices can stay in the stratosphere for years, even decades.

These story stocks — the term was coined by James Montier, a value investor and a member of the asset allocation team at the investment management firm GMO — are relatively rare, but hardly new.

Amazon’s stock surged for decades even without any meaningful profits. A more recent example is Snapchat’s parent, Snap, which is racking up large losses while its stock trades at an astronomical price-to-sales ratio of nearly 50, far higher than Tesla’s 7. (Ford’s, by comparison, is 0.3.)

Amazon and Snap both have stories that are compelling for many investors: Amazon has transformed retailing and is destined to dominate it. Snap is reinventing communication, at least for millennials and those even younger.

Early investors in Uber and Airbnb, though they remain private companies, have valued them at stratospheric multiples based largely on the notion that Uber will transform and dominate local transportation and Airbnb will revolutionize the hotel industry.

For story stocks, any development that lends credence to the story can cause a surge in already high valuations. This week Tesla reported quarterly sales that were modestly above expectations, and the stock surged 7 percent in a day. Tesla shares are up nearly 40 percent this year, even though many investors considered them overvalued in January.

Ron Baron, the billionaire investor and founder of Baron Capital, disclosed last year that he owned about 1.6 million Tesla shares. He predicted on CNBC in February that Tesla shares would quadruple by 2020 and triple again by 2025. By then he expects Tesla to become the largest company in the world as measured by market capitalization.

For all the excitement and promise surrounding such companies, there are many cautionary tales.

“Stories are great before bed, but are disastrous as a stock-selection technique,” Mr. Montier wrote in his 2009 book “Value Investing: Tools and Techniques for Intelligent Investment.” If something is expensive based on traditional valuation metrics, he said, “you had better believe its story, as that is all you have.”
(A Tesla spokeswoman said Mr. Musk could not be reached for comment.)

Various studies have shown that stocks with high price-to-sales ratios, on average, significantly underperform market averages. For every Tesla or Uber, there’s a Valeant Pharmaceuticals or Theranos — two story stocks that seduced an astounding array of prominent investors and supporters based on stories that did turn out to be too good to be true.

And while many investors’ memories tend to be short, the so-called dot-com bubble in the late 1990s spawned scores of story stocks, nearly all of them now worthless and forgotten.

Still, Mr. Montier acknowledged, “Stories are compelling.” They appeal to intuition rather than reason. “But perhaps investors would be well advised to follow Odysseus’s example of putting beeswax in his crew’s ears and tying himself to the mast in order to avoid the disastrous, but oh so desirable, call of the Siren song.
Will Tesla be one of the rare exceptions and, as Mr. Baron has predicted, emerge as the world’s most valuable company?

The company has won over many skeptics with its near-flawless execution, so far, and the high quality of its vehicles and high levels of consumer satisfaction. It is no longer a start-up: It delivered 25,000 vehicles in the last quarter. It is on track to achieve economies of scale, and the company says the gross margin on each vehicle is above 20 percent, far higher than the industry average. That could drive enormous future profits.

But that’s not the Tesla story — or stories — investors are betting on.

Adam Jonas, a Morgan Stanley automotive analyst who is hardly a starry-eyed optimist about the industry, upgraded Tesla shares to overweight in January. He singles out the company’s new autonomous driving technology as a compelling safety feature that will significantly reduce occupant and pedestrian injuries and fatalities. This week he said he expected “vehicle safety to be the primary differentiator in Tesla’s upcoming product offensive,” referring to the eagerly anticipated introduction of Tesla’s new, lower-price Model 3, which will be equipped with the new technology.

That Tesla is an all-electric, environmentally friendly, nonfossil-fuel vehicle — the story that once excited investors — is barely mentioned anymore.

Even more futuristic is the idea that Tesla cars will be entirely self-driving, able to cruise streets nearly full time (except when they are being charged at Tesla’s high-speed battery-charging stations). In this vision, Tesla owners will share their vehicles with Tesla when not using them, and during that time they will ferry other passengers, serving as Tesla’s version of Uber. Thus Tesla will disrupt Uber’s nascent market dominance.

And Tesla is no longer seen just as a vehicle manufacturer. With its solar and battery technologies, it is in a position to dominate two other enormous industry segments. Tesla “is reinventing the electric grid,” as Mr. Baron said on CNBC. “That’s a bigger opportunity than cars.”

Even if all that comes to pass, it may not be enough to justify Tesla’s valuation unless it can sustain a competitive advantage over time, as Mr. Greenwald, the value investing expert, put it. Tesla is spending heavily on research and development, and perhaps its technology will be difficult or impossible for others to replicate. The established automakers have had years to catch up to or overtake Tesla’s Model S, with a conspicuous lack of success.

But for committed value investors, the writing is on the wall: “Is Tesla going to dominate its industry? That’s the key question,” Mr. Greenwald said. “When it comes to the global auto industry, no one ever has, and in all likelihood, no one ever will.”