I believe you, you would have a better handle on it then me if that's your field. I think TSLA's powerwall will be a huge benefit and I would bet on Elon Musk. You are also comparing a new company, with new tech to an old established company. I wonder if you look at the first initial years of GM how they would compare?
The thing is the market cap on TSLA has gotten FAR ahead of itself - Musk even said so himself.
Market cap = (number of shares) x (stock price per share)
I did buy a little TSLA a couple of years ago when it got a little over $100 and Musk disclosed that he personally had pretty much all of his money in TSLA. That's always a plus when a CEO puts his money where his mouth is. But once it got above $180, I just couldn't justify holding it anymore. When it got past $200, and on to $250 and $275, I felt compelled to incrementally take small bets against it.
Another good thing is that their revenue growth is very high - currently ~ 150%. But revenues overall are still relatively low, and far, far too low for the company to currently be worth nearly $30 billion. If they were suddenly a $10 stock with the same fundamentals, I'd buy tens of thousands of dollars worth. If they were between $20-30, I'd still buy quite a bit. But as long as they are in triple digits with current fundamentals, I won't buy and hold them for any length of time.
They could certainly continue to go up, just as Amazon and Netflix have gone up very high on little or no earnings and even pretty modest revenue in the case of NFLX. But both AMZN and NFLX are pretty unique within their industries, and they aren't limited to any sort of niche market - you don't need tens of thousands of dollars or more to buy something off Amazon or watch movies on Netflix. But I did recently sell what little I had left of both of those.
I think they're all 3 frothy these days, and TSLA is quite "bubble-ish" IMO. Markets in the short term are nowhere near 100% efficient, and I believe that TSLA is a perfect example. But over the mid to long term, markets do seem to pretty much always correct inefficiencies pretty well overall.
I do invest a few bucks in other alt energy companies - First Solar, Ballard Power, Daqo, etc.
This is from my journal, written on 2/25/14 on a rare TSLA day trade when it got an analyst upgrade just before the open:
It opened higher at $230 and kept going up on high volume. I grabbed 100 shares five minutes after the open at 8:35am for right at $235 at the market. I held on until about 10am when the volume started to dry up a bit and sold at the market again at just under $250.
Made nearly $1500 there. Those don't come around too often these days.
I also have puts on it.