Sacerdote: Whale Rock bought Tesla at 4x three-year forward earnings
Alex Sacerdote · Top 5 of 2025: #4: Alex Sacerdote · Dec 22, 2025 · at 18:51
Alex Sacerdote, founder of Whale Rock Capital, explains how his S-curve framework guided Whale Rock's investment in Tesla.
0:00 / 0:34exact quote · 34.4s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“When we first bought Tesla at the end of 2019 and 20 20, when the EV S curve really took off because Elon got the price Of the model three down to 40,000. And then we saw they had very good competitive advantages. We said, wow, they can do two million cars at a 50,000 ASP with an X gross margin. And we knew what the OpEx would be. And so we calculated the earnings and looking back at it, we were buying Tesla at literally four times the earnings they did three years later.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Alex Sacerdote
Sacerdote: Cloud Computing Has Another 5 to 10 Years of Growth
“We have another five Maybe even 10 years to go on this, and it's still growing.”
Sacerdote: AI infrastructure is only 14% penetrated on the S-curve
“We're only about 14% penetrated on the AIS curve for infrastructure. Within the cloud, it's only three or four percent.”
Sacerdote: Inference-time reasoning will be adopted by all AI models
“And now deep seek is basically solidifying this inference time reasoning is going to be adopted by all the models.”
Sacerdote: Tesla S-Curve Collapsed to Zero as US Adoption Matured
“Tesla and the EVS curve was amazing, and they had a great competitive advantage, and they had underappreciated earnings power. But then that S curve went from being a 10 out of 10 to a zero out of 10 because it was mature in the USA. And the underappreciated e…”
Sacerdote: AI Adoption Has Driven $50B to $70B in Extra Sales for Meta
“And we think that's driven fifties to seventy billion of extra sales to Meta by adopting AI.”
Sacerdote: Blockchain is a technology looking for a problem and a false S-curve
“It was always a technology looking for a problem. The use cases were few and far between. Also, there was an element of it where there were all these meme coins, and it wasn't solving any true productivity gains. We thought that was somewhat of a false S curve…”