Why Jim Chanos Thinks Tesla Stock Is ‘Ridiculously Overvalued

Jim Chanos confirmed he still has an active short bet against Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) and said the stock is “ridiculously overvalued.”

The Tesla story keeps changing, Chanos, the founder and President of Chanos & Co., said in an interview with Bloomberg.

“Every every few months the Tesla faithful trot out a new [theme] – it’s batteries, it’s irobo taxis, now it’s AI,” the short seller said.

“I’m a little bit bemused having followed the company as long as we’ve been following it, that Tesla sort of admitted just recently, with its full self-driving effort, that it had been pursuing sort of the wrong avenue for seven years,” he said. It’s now going to a different type of software development for the next iteration of full-self driving beta, he added.

“And I am just sort of wondering this technological leader told you that they basically were…. doing the wrong thing for seven years,” Chanos said.

The problem now is that the FSD the company has been selling as a product since 2016 doesn’t exist, he said, adding, “This is a company that has gotten a wide berth from regulators in all facets.”

Early this year, Chanos warned that good times are over for Tesla bulls, premising his view on his expectations that the company’s profits would be under pressure permanently amid the price cuts.

“Ultimately it’s still just another cyclical car stock, not to be confused with a tech stock,” he had said then. 

In July, Chanos aimed at Tesla’s FSD and said, “The current value of the Tesla ‘Full Self-Driving’ package is probably close to zero in the retail market.”

“Remember that Musk has said that owning an FSD package will increase the value of your $TSLA vehicle by multiples of the FSD package cost itself. Yet ascribes almost no value to it upon repurchase. In fact, over time it depreciates faster than the vehicle itself,” he added.

In premarket trading on Friday, Tesla rose 0.42% to $277.19, according to Zenger News Pro data.

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