Tesla shares soared on news that its celebrity CEO Elon Musk escaped the ultimate wrath of regulators and wasn’t booted after his infamous tweet about privatizing the electric-car maker.

But even the most diehard, fan-boy investors shouldn’t really be celebrating a company so intrinsically linked to a single person, much less to this person. In fact, these same investors might’ve preferred to see Musk gone, if only to see if the company can live up to its hype and make it without an erratic, celebrity CEO hooked on government subsidies (and who knows what else).

Tesla under Musk has always been a bundle of contradictions. Wall Street analysts paper over those anomalies, blinded by his halo (visionary, progressive billionaire tech entrepreneur), lucrative investment-banking fees and promise to save the environment via electric cars.

Consider: Musk may be a visionary, but he didn’t create Tesla. He was an early investor and took it over from its founder after a brutal internal fight.

Musk may also be liberal media’s model of the modern capitalist — progressive, green, wonky on all things tech — but reports suggest Tesla’s assembly line is rather robber-baronish: It’s 100 percent non-union with work conditions sometimes bordering on abusive (i.e., workers reportedly have to wade through raw sewage and gulp Red Bull to work late and meet production goals).

And for all Musk’s happy talk of electric cars saving the world from global warming, the carbon footprint created to actually build one is enormous.

If Musk is such a great capitalist, why is Tesla unprofitable, despite inhaling billions of dollars in government subsidies? Maybe, just maybe, Americans aren’t ready to give up gas guzzlers because electric cars are still inefficient (they need more frequent refueling, and there aren’t many refueling stations) and expensive (the latest model for the average person, the Model 3, is slated to cost $35,000 before subsidies.)

As most fads go, these hurdles barely made it into many of the business-media accounts and analyst reports. The glass-half-full scenario allowed him to sell his vision of Tesla almost unimpeded by logic.

The result is Tesla is now a car company that loses money (despite repeated promises that profitability was around the corner) and makes just a fraction of the vehicles of established carmakers.

Yet its stock value exceeds that of the very profitable General Motors.

As with most fads, reality eventually set in, fueled by short-selling (profiting off a stock that falls in value). Yes, some short-sellers badmouth a stock to drive down its shares. But the vast majority of analysts in this case are among the best — traders like Jim Chanos, a financial legend who helped uncover the Enron fraud.

Chanos isn’t putting Tesla into the Enron basket just yet, but he has been rationally and methodically raising issues with Tesla’s numbers: production targets, the odds for profitability, executive turnover, increasing competition and whether any such company deserves a market value above $50 billion.

Fact is, Musk’s production goals weren’t being met. Profitability seems to be ephemeral. Telsa’s gravy train of federal subsidies neared an end after the company sold 200,000 cars, while new entrants feast on government money.

No wonder shares fell.

And Musk began to crack. He irrationally lashed out at critics on Twitter (Chanos in particular), making wild, unsubstantiated charges. He claimed a diver in the Thailand cave rescue is a “pedo guy.” He smoked pot on a podcast despite having a federal security clearance that prohibits it (the Defense Department tells Fox Business it’s looking into the matter).

His unraveling hit a low when Musk tweeted that he was taking Tesla private and had “funding secured” for a buyout at $420 a share. Shares skyrocketed until it became clear that funding was hardly secured.

It took just about eight weeks for the Securities and Exchange Commission to marshal enough facts to charge Musk with securities fraud and threaten to ban him as director or executive of Tesla unless he agreed to a settlement, which was reached over the weekend: Musk can remain CEO but must name a chairman and more “independent directors” to his board.

And he has to lay off Twitter, or at least have his tweets monitored by a lawyer.

Investors like the SEC deal and lapped up the stock after the settlement, but they’re missing the bigger point: The underlying problems with Tesla remain, and Musk is still running the show.

That will likely ensure continued irrational exuberance around a stock in dire need of rational discourse.

Charles Gasparino is a Fox Business senior correspondent.