Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Won’t Invest In Tesla Now Because Of “Exuberant” Valuation

The Saudi Arabian billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal recently made some interesting comments concerning the stock prices of the electric car pioneer Tesla, arguing that the company’s valuation was “too exuberant” for him to invest into. Yes, he was queried on the subject.

While Prince Alwaleed bin Talal certainly isn’t the first person in recent days/years to question Tesla’s valuation (Tesla CEO Elon Musk even said something similar fairly recently and a few years ago), and it’s easy enough to argue that he has bias that would prevent him from speaking accurately on the subject, the comments were still pretty interesting.

Here’s the full quote (from an interview with CNBC, via Reuters): “I would rather not comment on that because maybe some people think the valuation is right but it’s not for me to enter that price obviously. It’s too exuberant for me right now.”

While that’s certainly a position that can be argued for, it’s still an open question how high the stock will climb before it crashes — with how inflated the market as a whole is right now, that seems an inevitability, but we’ll have to wait to see what happens exactly.

Notably, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal also made some interesting comments about valuation of the on-demand taxi service Lyft at the time that his investment firm Kingdom Holding bought in.

The comments were: “We thought Lyft was a better entry point for us because at that time Uber’s price was at the high side.”

All things considered (with how things have fared for Uber over recent days), that was probably a good call anyway, as Lyft seems to be better positioned.

For a perhaps more surprising statement from a top man in Saudi Arabia, be sure to also catch CleanTechnica‘s exclusive from earlier this year: Saudi Arabia: Fossil Fuels Are Cleaner … Wait, What? (Exclusive Video).