特斯拉的股票自从腾讯入股后，就开始大涨，目前市值已经超过美国通用、福特这些百年汽车企业，成为美国市值最大的汽车公司。

所谓人红是非多，正是因为股价大涨，特斯拉成为投资者和新闻记者们讨论的热门话题。纽约时报的这篇文章深度报道了这个新闻热点，新闻标题似乎在讽刺特斯拉公司在卖故事。
看完这篇新闻也许会让痴迷于特斯拉的人，理性看待特斯拉真正的价值，和故事后面的风险。

特斯拉给人们讲的故事就是，利用太阳能驱动自家生产的纯电动汽车。

这一个故事就会让人们高潮，因为在电动车和太阳能领域特斯拉已经是行业的主导者了。

就像苹果公司主导了手机市场一样，而且手机是这个时代里人类最重要的产品，所以苹果公司目前是全球市值最高的公司。

我们再回到特斯拉身上，目前全世界的人们都相信未来的汽车一定是电动化、智能化的产品。正好，特斯拉目前是电动化的绝对领导者，因为他们是构想是利用太阳能驱动电动汽车，这给美好的故事加了一个很生动的背景。（BYD汽车只是技术好，但是没有一个打动人心的故事。）在智能化方面，特斯拉在智能辅助驾驶方面也是最强的，因为该公司已经开始出售别人家还在测试的产品了。

以上原因，所有人都看好特斯拉是一个潜力股，人们预想他会变成10个苹果公司（一辆汽车的价值是手机的100倍喔）。就像20岁的大学生和8岁的小学生参加数学竞赛，20岁的大学生没有做出来的题，而小学生做出来了，你说老师会不会加大对8岁小学生的投资呢！因为小学生还年轻，天资聪慧，还有很大的发展潜力。

这篇文章给我一个启发，那就是就算这个小学生是真正的聪明，但是世界上不可能就只有一个聪明的数学家呀！数学神童高斯，是各式各样的天才里最出色的一个，不幸早逝。但是作为一名律师出生的费马，后来半路出家变成了数学大师。

这里我想说的是目前人们都知道了未来汽车行业的发展趋势，现在很多人都在投资像特斯拉一样有潜力的公司，也就是像特斯拉一样具有发展潜力的公司越来越多。

大家只是看见了一个表像，就是相信特斯拉一定是未来汽车行业、能源行业的老大，因为他从小就被看好，人们像神一样相信他。但是世上并不缺这样的公司，中国一年可以冒出上百家电动汽车创业公司和无人驾驶汽车公司。所以未来电动汽车行业和智能汽车行业有很多，但不一定特斯拉会笑到最后，一切皆有可能。

目前人们还着迷于故事里的美好愿景，不断抬高特斯拉股价，但是这同时也给后来者足够勇气去超越特斯拉。更会让通用和福特这样的权威人物所嫉妒，所以特斯拉要小心了。

故事已经卖出去了，人们也信了，故事的结局是怎样的呢？请看下一节。

原文来自《纽约时报》：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.”