Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s “Mad Money,” just admitted on CNBC why so many supposed experts have been getting it so wrong about Tesla, saying, “we are too old.” That’s what happens the older we get–we look more and more to the past and therefore can’t see the future.
I get amused listening to, or reading statements by, some of these experts about the gasoline-powered car industry and giving their prognostications about electric vehicles. For example, Bob Lutz has been either the president, CEO, or chairman of the board and all three of the USA’s so-called Big Three in the automotive industry–General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. He said this week concerning Tesla, paraphrasing it, “we don’t know why its stock is going up so much,” referring to himself and U.S. auto executives. In response to the notion that electric vehicles are the future, Lutz said they won’t even have 15% of the U.S. market by 2030. Bob Lutz is stuck in the past and therefore can’t see into the future.
However, if Trump wins another presidential term, and he grooms his successor, maybe Lutz will prove right about the 2020s, at least in the U.S. Trump is a so-called climate denier, meaning he doesn’t believe in man-made global warming.
Lutz and other such auto executives are not alone. Of 37 securities analysts who now research and rate Tesla stock, well over half have been rating it “hold” or “sell,” with only seven now saying “buy.” And regarding hedge fund managers and some investors, Tesla has been the most shorted U.S. stock for years. Yet Tesla shares have gone from $178 per share in June to over $900 presently. So, it has climbed over five times what it was just over seven months ago. That is a staggering, astronomical ascent for a stock! I believe Tesla is poised to become “the Apple of the twenty twenties.”
Because of this, Telsa founder Elon Musk said last week, “I do think that a lot of the retail investors . . . have better insights than many of the analysts.” He was criticized last year when he said in response to an analyst’s question to him, “boring, . . . bonehead questions are not cool.” Genius Elon Musk speaks his mind.
I think Catherine Wood, analyst and CEO of ARK Investments, knows more about this subject than perhaps any other analyst. She predicts Tesla shares will reach $7,000 per share by 2025. A year ago, she predicted electric autos would cost less than ICE autos by 2025. This week, she said that has changed and that the year will be 2022. The main reason is the continuing development of batteries, which are just about the whole thing about electric cars. The gas-powered car industry can’t improve the combustion engine hardly anymore. Yet, already it costs over 2.5 times more money to put gasoline in an ICE vehicle than to charge an electric vehicle at an electric charging station in order to get the same range of distance from the fuel for both types of vehicles.
Both NASA and NOAA say earth’s surface temperatures have risen an average of about two degrees Fahrenheit the past century. Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla, believes very strongly, as almost all climate scientists do, that almost all, or all, of this global warming is caused by the increasing burning of fossil fuels during the past century. That is why Musk pursues his goals with Tesla Inc. and Tesla Energy, which reduce emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. Musk has amassed his net worth of nearly $50 billion at the age of only 48 years, and he started with nothing by moving from South Africa to Canada at age 17 and then to the U.S.
It’s mostly young people who are fans of Elon Musk and Tesla. It’s mostly young people who believe in man-made global warming. People like Donald Trump, president of the USA, who is 73 years old, is a dinosaur about the future. When he campaigned for the U.S. presidency, he exclaimed, “we’re going to bring back coal.”
No we aren’t. National governments are restricting the use of coal-fired electric utilities because the burning of coal is the worst culprit creating emissions that get trapped in our atmosphere and thereby raise atmospheric temperatures. Coal is on the way out, at least in advanced countries. It is still used more in China and rural areas. Some places, such as Mongolia, have no viable alternative for staying warm during winter cold than to rely on coal furnaces.
Not only that, oil is like chicken little–falling. Oil prices have plummeted in recent years and are staying there. A barrel of oil used to cost over $100; but now it has teetered for some time below $50 per barrel. We used to think that the world would run out of oil and therefore the price of a barrel of oil would skyrocket, like it did back in 1973. That’s when OPEC reacted to the Arab nations being defeated by Israel in the war that year by refusing to sell its oil to nations that traded with Israel. The main nation that did that was the USA. OPEC therefore created an oil embargo against the U.S. I remember well the long lines of cars at gas stations, waiting to fill up the gas tanks because there wasn’t much gasoline to go around. And the price for it shot up as well. Indeed, the price of a barrel of oil quadrupled in six months.
Now, certain nations have declared that they eventually will phase out transportation vehicles that have an internal combustion engine (ICE). Nations that have said, or even legislated, that they will no longer permit the construction and selling of new ICE vehicles by no later than 2040 include Norway, the UK, and France.
The young Saudis, whose country has so much of that liquid gold buried in their ground, see it coming and are trying to do something about it. They realize they should not depend totally on their petroleum to keep them wealthy. Thirty-four year old crown prince Mohammad bin Salman is trying to get his nation weaned off oil, directing the country to diversify its economy that is so dependent on petroleum output and sale.
I believe that the study of Bible prophecy can help people get unstuck in the past by envisioning the future. Likewise, studying Bible prophecy changes your worldview. It causes you to see into the future, to realize more readily that change is going to happen, that things are not going to stay the way they’ve been. That’s why biblical prophets were sometimes called “seers.” They metaphorically saw into the future.
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