Tesla’s stock is up 485% this year – from $86 to a whopping $498- making it the most valuable car company in the world.

It’s so highly valued, in fact, if you combine the value of all the other US automakers together Tesla still eclipses them by far.

Some have excitedly described Tesla as bigger than the iPhone. While that is debatable, it looks as if Tesla has disconnected from being looked at as a car company. Instead, it’s now really being valued as a kind of software proposition.

Musk has been stoking this kind of thinking. In a capital raise  last spring the CEO went on a conference call and said, ‘We will have one million Robo-taxis on the road this year, pending regulation.’

But Tesla are still a long way off coming up with the technology to really have a car literally drive itself around.

So is Tesla a battery company instead then? Well, Panasonic makes the batteries, and Tesla uses them.

What Tesla is really good at is getting more range out of a battery than anyone else. And at the moment that is really their secret sauce. But Lucid Motors, an upstart competitor from the US, just debuted a car with a 500-mile range. Tesla’s most expensive luxury car, the Model S, can only go 400 miles.

Norway is a really important market for Tesla, just because the country has had very nice electric vehicles subsidies for the past decade. In 2019, Norway accounted for five per cent of Tesla’s entire sales. So far through to August, the Model 3’s market share has been just 4 per cent in the electrical vehicle space.

And what’s replaced it? A whole bunch of cars from the car companies you might not expect to make electric cars, including Audi,  Volkswagon e-Golf, Renault, Hyundai, and even Jaguar. Meanwhile, the high end Model S and X have been outsold by Porsche’s new Taycan.

So what accounts for the big stock price? Take a look at Robinhood, an app that says users can trade stocks commission free.

Robinhood has been very successful at attracting users. In fact, RobinHood’s user-ship has exploded since 2018 from 6m back then to 13m now.

Three million new  users have joined Robinhood since March 2020, at around the same time as Google queries on How to trade stocks also peaked.

Since then, Tesla’s stock price started rising in tandem with the number of Robinhood users holding the stock.  Or, put another way, if you want to find out what Tesla stock will do tomorrow try to find out how many day traders living in their parents basement signed up for Robinhood accounts today.

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