Mihir Dissai, a law and business professor at Harvard, wrote an op-ed earlier this month

on how Elon Musk's business empire may be starting to wobble.

Now while a lot has been made of Tesla's stock price halving in value since it hit its

all-time high in December, if we zoom out a bit, the stock price is still up more than 50%

over the last year.

Stock price alone doesn't necessarily tell us much about how a business is doing.

As what Demodron of NYU has long argued that company valuation shouldn't be approached

as purely number crunching exercises.

In his book, Narrative and Numbers, he argues that valuation

is instead a bridge between stories and numbers, where every story becomes a number in the

valuation and every number in evaluation has a story behind it. Matt Levine has argued in the past

that Tesla investors don't value Tesla or any of Musk's

companies on what they actually do. Instead, they think of them as venture capital funds run

by a guy with a strong record of investing in whatever's the hot new thing. If the company's

profits don't match up with the stock price today, that doesn't

really matter to them, as next year a great new product will be unveiled, solar roof tiles,

a robot, a tunnel to Europe, a sports car with rockets on it, artificial general intelligence,

and everything app based on Twitter or a colony on Mars.

And this business, which is just around the corner, will be so profitable that the naysayers

will be proven wrong.

Now of course, I'm no naysayer.

Long-term viewers know how positive I've been about the Hyperloop at the heart of the

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