And then the whole circus started all over again. Since March 18, the stock has re-skyrocketed 163%, and Tesla’s market capitalization has re-skyrocket by $110 billion, which brings us to the new-and-improved Double-WTF chart of the year.

Discussions of Tesla’s fundamentals are an exercise in futility, because they never matter. Tesla builds cool cars and it builds solar panels. The US solar panel industry has gotten crushed by China’s state-supported solar-panel industry. And the US auto industry is not a growth industry either. Unit sales in the US peaked in 2016, at just a tad above where they’d peaked in 1999 and 2000. Auto sales in the EU are even worse. And even in China, the biggest auto market in the world, auto sales declined two years in a row, not counting the fiasco in 2020.

Tesla’s Double-WTF Chart of the Year | Wolf Street