It’s not easy to make Tesla, a trillion-dollar stock trading on 350 times earnings, look cheap. Nevertheless, fellow electric vehicle outfits Rivian and Lucid Motors are doing their damndest to do just that.
Electric-truck start-up Rivian more than doubled barely a week after its November 10th initial public offering (IPO), driving its market capitalisation above $150 billion (€133 billion) – not bad for a company with no revenue. Rivian was worth more than Volkswagen at last week’s peak; in fact, it was worth more than almost 90 per cent of S&P 500 companies, according to Bloomberg data.
Meanwhile, luxury electric vehicle maker Lucid’s valuation topped $90 billion – almost as much as General Motors and more than Ford, a company whose shares have more than doubled over the past year.
Not long ago, sceptics complained about low-revenue Tesla’s multibillion dollar valuation. The recent action in Rivian and Lucid make such complaints seem “laughable”, says Bespoke Investment.
It took Tesla 10 years from its 2010 IPO to hit $100 billion in market capitalisation, says Bespoke, but Rivian managed it in three days. When Tesla’s market valuation first topped $100 billion in January 2020, the company had reported quarterly revenues of $7.4 billion. Rivian and Lucid, in contrast, “are still considered ‘pre-revenue’ companies”.
What can you say? The electric vehicle bubble is getting bubblier.
