Better Buy: Ford Motor Co. vs. Tesla Inc
Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) has been a revolutionary force in the auto industry, pushing aged giants like Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) to change with the times. I'll concede up front that Tesla CEO Elon Musk is a brilliant visionary, and that Tesla's Models S, X, and 3 are beautiful vehicles. But let's ignore all of that for a moment and do a quick analysis of Tesla versus Ford the way Benjamin Graham might have in his investing classic The Intelligent Investor. This fun little exercise is more telling than many investors would like.
Tesla has been around as a public company since the middle of 2010, so it can't possibly live up to some of the expectations of what Graham called a defensive investor. For instance, it hasn't been around long enough to have a long history of paying dividends and years' worth of positive earnings. Tesla has never paid a dividend or turned an annual profit, and its only black ink thus far came in the third quarter of 2016.
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Source: Fool.com