FX168 Financial News (North America) — On Thursday (May 2), UC Berkeley economist J. Bradford DeLong believes that Tesla's market success depends on CEO Elon Musk (Elon Musk)'s ability to make continuous promises, and has nothing to do with the products the company actually delivers.

“From the perspective of suppliers, employees, and customers, it's a source of revenue and production,” he said. “From a Wall Street speculator's point of view, this is a bouncing ball in roulette: a tech bubble casino game.”

In a column in Project Syndicate, DeLong notes that Musk has cheered for technologies Tesla can achieve, such as battery development or electric vehicle breakthroughs.

However, DeLong said that since Musk unlocked the full value of the compensation plan agreed with Tesla in 2018 (which can be realized when the company reaches a certain market capitalization threshold), he has instead begun peddling ideas that the company has yet to deliver. These include fully automated driving, humanoid robots, and artificial intelligence supercomputers.

“For all Tesla's current shareholders who plan to sell their shares in the next few years, everything depends on the company's success as a meme stock (meme stock), and Musk is working hard to achieve this goal,” DeLong said. “Since Tesla has few long-term shareholders, the market isn't particularly concerned about the company's lack of a CEO trying to turn it into a long-lasting profitable organization.”

For example, he mentioned Musk's recent earnings review, where he said that treating Tesla as a car company is a fundamentally wrong framework; instead, the CEO called on investors to view it as an artificial intelligence or robotics company.

However, for DeLong, this is not in line with the actual results of the first quarter, as “automobile revenue” accounts for more than 80% of the company's sales.

He wrote, “Although automobile manufacturing does have huge economies of scale, its value proposition does not reach the level of information technology. In information technology, you can 'write once and run anywhere' at zero marginal cost.”

Despite this, recent earnings reviews have boosted the confidence of many on Wall Street. Prior to that, Tesla's growth story suffered a severe setback this year due to executive disputes and uncertainty about demand for electric vehicles, and many people are concerned.

But DeLong isn't the first to compare manufacturers to meme stocks. Last month, investor Roger McNano warned that if shareholders think Musk isn't at the core of its narrative, the stock will begin trading like a car company.

Similarly, short selling legend Jim Chanos (Jim Chanos) called Tesla a “hope-and-dream” stock whose deal depended more on Musk than on fundamentals.