Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, April 4

• Tesla Passes Ford in Market Value as Investors Bet on the Future: The record pace of auto sales in the United States is slowing down, leaving investors increasingly bearish on auto stocks. But there is one exception. Tesla, the electric-vehicle upstart, continues to surge. On Monday, Tesla surpassed Ford Motor in market value for the first time and moved within striking distance of General Motors, starkly illustrating the growing gap in investors’ optimism over its future versus the prospects for the traditional carmakers from Detroit. While G.M. and Ford may have strong profits and healthy balance sheets, Tesla offers something Wall Street loves much more: the potential for dramatic growth. “Investors want something that is going to go up in orders of magnitude in six months to six years, and Tesla is that story,” said Karl Brauer, a senior editor at Kelley Blue Book. “Nobody thinks Ford or G.M. is going to do that.”At the end of Monday’s trading, Tesla reached a market capitalization of $48.7 billion compared with Ford’s $45.6 billion, according to Bloomberg. General Motors was at $51.2 billion. Tesla’s market milestone came at the intersection of two countervailing trends. On Sunday, Tesla said its first-quarter sales were up 69 percent from the same period a year ago. On Monday, monthly sales figures for the conventional automakers showed them struggling to meet last March’s performance.

• Trump Cracks Down on H-1B Visa Program That Feeds Silicon Valley: The U.S. administration began to deliver on President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to crack down on a work visa program that channels thousands of skilled overseas workers to companies across the technology industry. Fed up with a program it says favors foreign workers at the expense of Americans, the Trump administration rolled out a trio of policy shifts. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency on Friday made it harder for companies to bring overseas tech workers to the U.S. using the H-1B work visa. On Monday, the agency issued a memo laying out new measures to combat what it called "fraud and abuse" in the program. The Justice Department also warned employers applying for the visas not to discriminate against U.S. workers. The new guidelines released Friday require additional information for computer programmers applying for H-1B visas to prove the jobs are complicated and require more advanced knowledge and experience. It’s effective immediately, so it will change how companies apply for the visas in an annual lottery process that begins Monday. The changes don’t explicitly prohibit applications for a specific type of job. Instead, they bring more scrutiny to those for computer programmers doing the simplest jobs.

• Cloudera’s IPO will test unicorn valuations: Cloudera filed to go public mid-day last Friday, releasing a set of financial numbers that were the locus of anticipation: How would the company’s recent performance stack up to its $4.1 billion valuation set three years ago? Before Cloudera published its S-1 document — detailing its recent quarterly results and several years of financial data — reports indicated that the company would pursue a $4.1 billion valuation in its IPO, flat from its last private round when Intel poured $740 million into the company. That Cloudera might aim for a level valuation with a dozen or so quarters of additional growth under its belt was notable. (Crunchbase News reached out to Cloudera regarding the valuation figure. The company declined to comment.) The situation raises an obvious question: Did Cloudera’s investors incorrectly estimate the potential future value of the company in 2014 if it intends to secure a flat valuation today? It is likely fair to say that Cloudera’s investors were at least partially incorrect about where the company’s value would end up by the first quarter of 2017. No one alive deploys three-quarters of a billion dollars in capital for a flat return over a multi-year period. And doubly, Cloudera may in fact still be overvalued at the proposed $4.1 billion valuation when compared to certain public market comps.