Tesla shares do not care if you hate them. You may think their eye-popping ascent, which this week dragged the company up to a $1tn valuation, represents the final death throes of a foolish, cultish trading culture that treats favoured shares like loyalty tokens, and you have a point. But it doesn’t matter. The punchline: doubters are now at the stage where they are almost forced to buy.
The trigger for the latest burst higher in shares of the divisive electric carmaker was news that car rental business Hertz intends to buy 100,000 of its vehicles. Even the company’s founder, Elon Musk, described the rally as “strange”.
At that kind of valuation, Tesla is worth more than the next nine biggest carmakers in the world combined, or roughly half of Germany’s entire Dax index. It has slapped on the equivalent value of an extra four Fords this month. The stock has gained 45 per cent this year.