Tesla Is Now Bigger Than Daimler, BMW, GM And Ford, And Is About To Catch Up To The World’s Largest Automaker

With Tesla stock rising by $200 in three months, and more than doubling from its summer lows to hit a new all time high of $433 and sporting a record market cap of $78 billion, it’s time for a quick sanity check. 

At $433/share, TSLA’s market cap is now $77.8 billion. This makes it bigger than OEM giants Hyundai ($22BN), Ford ($37BN), General Motors ($52BN), BMW ($52BN) and Daimler ($60BN). Said otherwise Tesla, which sold 350,000 cars in the past 12 months, is now “bigger” than Hyundai, which sold 4.6 million cars in 2018, and General Motors, which sold 3 million cars last year, combined.

In fact, there is now just one OEM that is bigger than Tesla: Germany’s carmaking giant Volkswagen (which employs roughly 270,000 workers in Germany alone), and which recently overtook Toyota as the world’s largest automaker in terms of sales. 

So how did Tesla, eclipse OEMs which combined have sold about 20 times more cars between them? The answer remains simple: as S3’s Ihor Rusaniwski points out, despite the recent massive short squeeze, Tesla still remains the world’s most short automaker (with a couple of tiny exceptions such as BYD, Aston Martin and Nio), and as such what we are seeing now is a slow motion replica of the short squeeze that briefly made Volkswagen the world’s most valuable company in 2008, if only for a few hours.

As such, the question is when will the positive feedback loop of shorts covering, inspiring further bullishness, a more optimistic narrative, higher prices and even more short covering finally stop. Perhaps if more investors actually did some more sanity checks such as this one, the answer will come sooner rather than later.