Wrong Place, Wrong Time, Wrong Everything Else 2022 has been the year of Elon Musk. To be fair, he and his shenanigans have been a pretty big deal basically every year since about 2015, but this time it really was different. And while the attention he's garnered this year is largely due to his completion of the most overpriced acquisition maybe ever, taking a look at Musk's day job as CE-*ahem* Technoking of Tesla provides maybe the clearest lens into the 2022 zeitgeist that you can get. Right off the bat, we know that 2022 has been crazy, and who, I ask, is crazier than Mr. Musk himself? Exactly, almost no one, and certainly no other S&P 500 CEOs. But, of course, it goes deeper. Let's take a peak and see if we can find out exactly what the f*ck I'm talking about. Tesla's stock price in 2022 began right around $400/sh. 12 months and -72% later, shares trade right around $112, essentially summing up the brutality of this year's stock market. With Tesla being the high-flying growth name that it is, this downfall shows that simply being big no longer cuts it for surviving a market downturn with little in terms of losses. It wasn't just a stock getting cut, it was the growthiest growth name in Growthville, and shares got absolutely shlacked. Further, in years past, investors have poured money into megacap tech to take cover when markets aren't on their best behavior. The duck-and-cover trade into big tech names provided absolutely no shelter from the bombings of 2022, suggesting that finding safety in markets may now only be accomplished by finding safety in actual safe investments like treasury bonds. But Tesla isn't just a growthy-ass tech company, is it? No, kinda the opposite in a traditional sense. At the end of the day, it's still a car company, and boy, did those have their fair share of problems these past few years. C-19, macro headwinds, and supply chain meltdowns have all slammed into Tesla like a Model 3 slamming into a highway guardrail. While far from specific to the Austin-based car maker, Tesla sits at the top of the list of companies that got f*cked by all of the above, and maybe that's largely due to China. Zero C-19 really pushed the pause button on production in the nation for a while, not to mention deteriorating demand caused by weaker consumption trends and new competition. Plus, Tesla isn't even close to being out of the woods yet. Just this week, the firm had to close the doors of its largest plant, based in Shanghai, for *hopefully* only about a week or so. So what we see here in Tesla isn't simply a car/tech titan controlled by a madman. We see a car/tech titan controlled by a madman that's also a helpless victim of the times, taking on forces like mangled supply chains, EV competition, economic headwinds (not to mention rate hikes), and so much more. For a microcosm of the state of macro and markets, look no further than to Elon and his homie Tesla. |
Comments (2)
Patrick for CEO of the year! :)
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