Bill Gates vs Elon Musk? I know who my money is on

Is Bill Gates shorting Tesla? He certainly didn’t deny it in an interview with the Today programme. The suggestion is that he has upset Elon Musk, who has complained that he couldn’t take Gates’s philanthropy on climate change issues seriously if he was betting against the share price of the world’s biggest electric car-maker.

But Musk’s outburst rather evades the issue: is Tesla’s share price destined to fall? You could be the most ardent climate change campaigner, the biggest enthusiast for electric cars in the world – and still think that Tesla is overpriced. The trouble with Tesla’s market valuation is that not only does it assume that electric cars are the future – which is still not entirely certain, especially given the soaring prices of rare metals which are going to make it increasingly difficult to produce electric vehicles that achieve price parity with petrol and diesel models. The share price also seems to assume that Tesla is pretty much the only car company in the world which can make electric cars.