| Unless you happen to work for Tesla, the company's announcement that it will soon join the NASDAQ-100 stock index isn't earth-shattering news. It's not that a committee of top-hatted men emerged in a cloud of cigar smoke from a rosewood-paneled office and said "We've reached a consensus: Tesla is in. Also, monocles are now mandatory on the trading floor." The NASDAQ-100 is just a list of the 100 largest, most-traded, non-financial companies (in other words, stuff besides banks) traded on the NASDAQ exchange. It became the NASDAQ-99 this month when the software company Oracle said it was moving from the NASDAQ to the New York Stock Exchange. Tesla moves up and in. Analysts call this Tesla's step into the big leagues. You want to talk big leagues? Tesla has a market cap of $12.8 billion; Oracle's estimated worth is $147.97 billion. All the largest banks and insurance companies in the world use Oracle products; so do nine of the 10 largest securities firms (banking, not alarms), and yes, even four of the five largest stock markets. Tesla, on the other hand, can't sell cars in every state in the U.S. Even when it comes to the important our-CEO-is-an-eccentric-billionaire metric, Oracle blows Tesla out of the water. Elon Musk is a billionaire who sold PayPal and eventually started Tesla and Space X, the private space-exploration company. Oracle's CEO and founder, Larry Ellison, recently purchased Lanai. As in, Lanai, the sixth-largest island of Hawaii. He then bought an airline to ferry tourists there. Ellison's California home is a 23-acre compound with buildings and landscaping designed to resemble feudal-era 16th-century Japan.
This is a completely apples-to-orangutans comparison, and it says nothing about Tesla's ripeness for the NASDAQ-100 index. What's relevant to us, as lovers of cars big and small, is that Wall Street remains firmly in love with Tesla. In essence, it's a small company, unable to sell cars where it pleases, with sales and profits that are a drop in the ocean compared to Goliath firms like Volkswagen or Toyota. Electric vehicles might be the future of cars, and Tesla might delight its stock-trading fans by becoming an automotive Apple. It might not, too. But what happens in the future is immaterial to what happens now: Tesla is thought of as the real deal, at least by investors. Even without a Japanese-style compound in California, Elon Musk will be able to raise small fortunes to fund the development of products like the "Blue Star" compact sedan, the Model X crossover, and the second-gen roadster we've been promised. Tesla's image as a "real" company, rather than a shaky, government-funded start-up like Fisker, will carry weight when its lobbyists petition state governments to allow it to sell cars directly to consumers. That proposed nationwide network of Supercharger stations—or even 90-second battery-swapping stations—seems all the more plausible. So, Mr. Musk, can we have a real lease program now?  from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com | |||
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