Tesla is an automobile manufacturer. Its stock price, therefore, deserves to be in the same ballpark as GM and Toyota. It’s not doing anything magical.
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I think Krugman is out of his depth here. I have never seen that bitcoin is something worth investing in, but it’s possible it is a useful means of value store and exchange.
Not a Musk apologist at all, but as for Tesla, didn’t Musk say he was stimulating the electric car industry and that other manufacturers would take over? Didn’t he deliberately not patent his Tesla stuff so other people could compete? Isn’t that happening now?
He’s usually out of his depth.
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Lithium scarcity is a myth. Current lithium production is insufficient for future demand, but terrestrial lithium production is nowhere near tapped out and we haven’t started using the ocean as a lithium source, where it is prevalent.
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And turns it into one where hackers and scam artists are the ones stealing it.
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Iceland pretty much abandoned hydrogen when their economy went to crap in 2008. There used to be a Shell hydrogen filling station on Miklabraut in Reykjavík, but that’s been gone a few years now. The bus fleet that ran on hydrogen was switched over to biogas and the hydrogen trawlers never materialised.
Like Norwegians, Icelandic car drivers are switching to electric cars in increasing numbers. Compared to most of Europe, energy is still ridiculously cheap thanks to all that hydropower. And here’s where Tesla had an early win, their electric cars had enough range to take you beyond the greater Reykjavík metropolitan region to places where settlements get sparse really quickly. There’s now a pretty good national network of charges along the ring road, so using electric cars makes perfect sense. And now that companies like VW and Hyundai are shipping cars with comparable range but with actual build quality, you don’t need to worry about coming back using an electric car in Iceland.
Hydrogen had its moment, but that time has been and gone in Iceland. There might still be a market for it in the massive fishing fleet which is a big consumer of imported diesel, but as soon as the electric pick up trucks arrive, even the superjeeps will go electric.
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OMG, I had totally forgotten about the Undertaker’s manager… he was hilarious…
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Well, we’ve all been very happy with the convenience levels of gas/petrol stations for a century or so… 
(To say nothing of gas/petrol fill-ups taking a fraction of the time a recharge takes.)
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Bitcoin is only useful for money laundering? Bullshit.
It has plenty of other uses. Like ransomware!
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Apparently it also has an underappreciated function in pyramid schemes. Such utility!
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… you can “store” a lot of “value” in a pyramid 
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Leave the money launderers alone. Someone’s got to buy those megayachts.
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“To complement its innovation, Tesla patents its inventions and it is highly likely that some intellectual property is protected by trade secrets. Musk states that at Tesla they “felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales, and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla”.
In essence, Tesla has used the patent system in the past for exactly the reason it has been developed: to protect its hard work and innovation from being utilised by others without Tesla’s consent. A quick patent database search will find around 900 results for patent applications where the applicant is Tesla Inc., or Tesla Motors as they were formerly known. One of the first of the published applications (WO2006/124663) back in November 2006 was for a method and apparatus for mounting, cooling, connecting and protecting batteries. Others, like WO2007/145726, published in December 2007 relate to efficient rotors for an electric motor. Many early applications also relate to thermal management of cells and batteries or to detection and prevention of a thermal event, as well as charging systems and cell designs.
This large portfolio of applications in an area that few companies were working at the time gave Tesla an advantage over the competition. Not only was Tesla further ahead in innovation and development, but its patents, a list of which can be found on Telsa’s website, granted Tesla a monopoly on the patented technology and therefore the right to prevent anyone from infringing their rights by using Tesla’s technology without permission.“
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Well, anything is possible. In a parallel universe.
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see also North Korea
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All the best value stores are things that can’t be created without burning large amounts of energy on something with no other purpose, ensuring scarcity, since nobody would ever want to destroy our only habitable environment just to get rich off them. It could never possibly happen. 
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Yes, the government likes to periodically tweak the definition of money laundering-- because hey, free money…
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