I don't think I have ever seen articles about a company's financial reports so consistently playing up the non-GAAP numbers like what has been done with Tesla.
Worthless reporting is not limited to Tesla.
Back in 2000, they said PE ratios on stocks don't matter. They said dividends don't matter. They said profits don't matter. Almost nobody was pointing out how overbought the NASDAQ was in 2000. Why was Yahoo worth more than New Zealand's entire stock exchange? Why were people coming up with really stupid metrics based on page views and clicks rather than dollars earned? Using non-GAAP earnings is just another example of trying to justify an extremely overpriced stock. These are the same idiots who lost their life savings buying things like pets.com. Since Tesla has no PE ratio due to lack of earnings, try comparing it to other car companies using the Price to Sales and Price to Book.
Honda's price to sales is 0.45, Tesla is 15.10 (33x as expensive)
Honda's price to book is 0.89, Tesla is 45.62 (51x as expensive)
You could say Tesla is better than Honda, but is it 33x better?
We saw the same bullshit during the housing boom.
Nobody in the media pointed out that real estate's true value is based on cash flow. You generally don't buy a rental property then lease it out for less than the mortgage payment. Add in maintenance and taxes on top of that. Of course, you don't want to only break even. You could get about 5% on a government bond during the housing boom, so the total ROI for a piece of real estate should be at least 10% per year to justify the amount of risk and effort involved. This is so plainly obvious. Why did nobody bring it up? Why did nobody in the media talk about things like securitization of NINJA loans? Why did nobody mention that real estate prices are directly tied to interest rates and how much money people can borrow? All of the information was out in the open and the media chose to ignore it. They intentionally screwed millions of people.
I'm happy for the people who made money on Tesla's stock, but you guys seriously need to get out right now. You don't want to be stuck holding the bag on this one, and it really looks like the market is about to crash (not just Tesla). As you can see in my sig, I made some stock predictions in September. I watched the gold and silver stocks go down until taper was announce in mid December, and they've been rising since then. I decided to jump in with real money, and my gold stocks are up about 40% since December. At the same time, interest rates have stopped increasing since taper was announced. It's very clear what the market is doing here. People are getting out of equities and into gold or bonds. George Soros just bet 1.3 billion on the market crashing, and he's generally right about things like that.