Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable

[Artful Dodger]

With that tweet out there and being in war mode, felt he had to make a dramatic response to what could be seen as a challenge to his full executive authority in the company.

Remember when Ronald Reagan fired all the air traffic controllers?
Was that before or after he tore down that wall?

 

[Webeevdrivers]

Quick question. Where was this supercharger team of 500 based out of?. I was under the impression that it was the buffalo factory but have since read that this is not the case.

 

[MP3Mike]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1785496161820053822

And this person apparently knows somebody that says that isn't true, and there is still a skeleton crew to handle things:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1785370293344899429

That makes me think this was indeed the manager refusing to cut the poor performers/unnecessary staff, so Elon made an example of the group.

One example of unnecessary work being done:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1785524406992666880

 

[unk45]

This thread needs more people being cautionary/bearish. Investing isn't gambling and the more information the better. It's up to readers to decide if it alters an investment hypothesis.

The craziest people IMO are some of the bulls, I mean really nutty like blame the media and calling a reporter a fraud etc only to find out the reporter had done their job very well indeed and were correct. Did the name callers apologize to the thread...no they did not. Just loaded up on the next reporter, then attack Troy for his estimate forecasts.

Now Troy has once again made an estimate forecast that ...will not be well received by the bulls. Will they attack him and then graciously apologize? No, don't think they will apologize when they are proven to be dead wrong.

EM has gone to China and made some level of deal with the CCP to get FSD there, it is a huge opportunity but fraught with risk re loss of IP. Details not released but it involves some level of cooperation with a CCP controlled mapping company. It pumped the stock and EM desperately needs that as his comp vote is coming up. It also removed him from the USA while a high profile layoff was taking place so he doesn't have to answer questions on that. Leaving town and firing people is never a good look.

The push to RT is going to have massive negative environmental costs and uncertain long term impacts on sustainability. I am not sure it will be much more than marginally positive and it's my view that millions of additional EVs would outweigh the impact of RT in the next decade.

Whether I agree with this post or not is irrelevant. This is a well articulated statement of risk that is often dismissed. It should be treated seriously, not just dismissed. Without question, TSLA is in unprecedented territory. It is becoming a true multinational company, with all the span of control, regulatory complexity, tax complexity and operating complexity that such a state implies. Tesla Energy alone claimed presence in >65 countries! Just imagine that, considering that in that case alone there are regulatory, tax and operating issues that are very complex. Then for Superchargers, those problems are hugely exacerbated by energy supply restrictions, pricing regulations and energy production regulations gioverning source and use.

Can all this be handled effectively with mass team replacement? We are about to see.

Several of us commented on known problems in numerous respects. All of those are customer-facing. They are only the surface.

 

[advocate8]

So one could assume that "existing locations" means "cities" which means preparing for robotaxis as some have posted this might be the case.

huh. Still gotta travel around the states. Still holes to fill. sigh...

There is nearly 100 percent uptime now. There needs to be focus on expanding the system to continue to dominate the charging sector.

 

[CHGolferJim]

Fair enough, I was just paraphrasing what Elon said, I don't feel your contributions are pointless, I was just pointing out with autonomy/FSD there is a larger opportunity. Especially if they are first and then license it out to other manufacturers and increase volume. One scenario is FSD is so good non FSD cars could be forced off the road if they don't have it due to regulations or very high insurance premiums. So think tens of million cars paying $499 a month.

What is the argument for a legacy US/EU/UK company to license FSD before L5 regulatory approval and whilst they are deemphasizing BEVs? I can see it for a Korean or Japanese company wanting to accelerate US BEV market penetration.

 

[2daMoon]

Oh, man, just let it go. Is it actually relevant to the idea that someone is a great XYZ if he failed for 82% at XYZ or if it was actually 74.5%? Can you not think for yourselves and try to understand whether the underlying point is correct or not?

But here you go, the actual ratio from what I calculated is 86.8%. 86.8% of the quarters Musk has led a company were while said company was losing money. So it's FACTUALLY proven he hasn't led profitable companies.

If your argument is only supported by numbers based upon your opinion it demonstrates you aren't willing to do what you call the easy work to back it up.

So, yes, it is relevant. Do the work yourself, then post up the resulting facts and references. Even here, you give a number, but haven't informed about how the result was derived so that anyone can confirm it.

You just put it out there, then say "he hasn't led profitable companies" off the cuff. This would indicate you have included quarterly profits in your calculations from a number of privately owned companies.

Where did you get these numbers for SpaceX, Twitter, Boring Co, and other Musk led companies?

How about you let it go, and give us a rest from your consistently negative opinions and attempts to allude to facts you offer no data to support.

Edited: upon sage wisdom of @Artful Dodger about the advantage of responding to trolling with fewer lines than the troller used.

 

[NicoV]

This may take even more than a couple of years to rectify. For everyone's sake I hope it will be that short.

According to industry insiders, Belgium is on its way to have an oversupply of fast chargers in about 2 years: https://www.tijd.be/ondernemen/mili...nelladers-bij-doe-het-zelfketen/10512454.html

The company quoted in the article believes that at that point, fast charging will be barely more expensive per kWh than regular charging, and certain lower than the 85 cents.

All of this because of government incentives to speed up the rollout of fastchargers, combined with the exponential growth of EV sales. If this can happen in Belgium it can happen anywhere.

BTW: It’s a sunny and windy holiday and my car is currently charging at -0.12 €/kWh at home.

 

[Krugerrand]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1785224907560743390

The disagree is mostly that Mr Black has proven to have no more clue today than he did yesterday what Tesla should be worth. It’s also because you linked to his nonsense.

 

[Krugerrand]

My sister sold her X and went back to Lexus bc she didn't feel comfortable at some IN SuC she had to use (and the X felt like it was gonna rattle apart). I know now to pre-screen stops I haven't been yet.

Said nobody who’s driven a fossil fuel car (that feels like it’s gonna rattle apart) and needed to fuel in a sketchy place. Because we all know gas stations are a place where the best citizens of the planet love to congregate.

 

[Linkmeup]

I was watching Bloomberg's segment about Tesla's layoffs. Apparently, the supercharger team was the key, if not only, remaining point of contact between the other OEM's and Tesla.

With the timing of the leaks...I wonder...

 

[sunwarriors]

Not now, but imagine FSD becomes 10x safer (proven by data) than manual driving. Insurance will drop and Tesla will likely offer very cheap insurance or included with FSD. The $499 number could include insurance, connectivity, services etc on a sub 30k car, that could be added to the CyberCab network and make the money back.

This is why I brought up asking who has an insurance car cost of $499/month? You might as well simply never drive if you had to pay $6k a year just to legally (have insurance) drive in the US. Sorta like if a life saving drug that one needs is $10 million, they might as well just die honestly since it's not possible to pay for it (or real life case, folks seeing home insurance costs of $10k a year or more now).

I can't speak for anyone else here (knock on wood), but in my decades upon decades of driving, have never been at fault in any moving accident and no, my insurance cost isn't anywhere close to $499/month. Will all these half decent drivers like myself shell out any substantial $$ for FSD because it's 10x safer (your speculation)? Will Tesla insurance charge me exactly what my other insurance will charge me or even less because I have FSD (this has to be much closer to < $100/month).

Contrary to what a lot of people here think, not all of us here created our accounts last month nor are trying to troll people here. The math just doesn't work financially I feel. Elon has a plan of course and we'll see long term how this plays out since I clearly am not as rich/smart/wealthy as him (years).


This has been my general disagreement that people are willing to shell out tons of $$ for FSD. Really bad drivers who had their license suspended, drive under influence, likes to speed, tail gate, cut people off, run red lights, aggressive, etc aren't going to pay for FSD (these are the drivers who really should use it) since it's slow and follows the rules.

 

[Tronguy]

Um. Regarding Superchargers.

For a variety of minor insane reasons, I often go to Supercharge.info, a web site that tracks Supercharger installations and uses openmap. On the road, it's vaguely useful in determining what food/services are near an SuC; and it's mildly interesting tracking what's installed near places of which I have some minor interest in. I'm not sure about how it all works, but comments to certain threads here at TMC are linked to from the site, and so on.

Day in, day out, weekends, not holidays, worldwide, changes pop up on the site, anywhere from two to a dozen a day. New sites being planned, sites going under construction, sites going into service, and so on.

I know that the mass firings over at the Supercharger division of Tesla only happened a couple of days ago. And, I guess, May Day is kind of an international holiday. But there are no changes in North America since the 29th. Period. The EU, China, well, lots.

It might just be random variations. Or maybe the admins at the site are doing some kind of strike in support of the laid-off workers. But there it is.

Has all Supercharger installation work in North America stopped?

 

[Artful Dodger]

If your argument is only supported by numbers based upon your opinion it demonstrates you aren't willing to do what you call the easy work to back it up.

So, yes, it is relevant. Do the work yourself, then post up the resulting facts and references. Even here, you give a number, but haven't informed about how the result was derived so that anyone can confirm it.

You just put it out there, then say "he hasn't led profitable companies" off the cuff.

This would indicate you have included quarterly profits in your calculations from a number of privately owned companies.

Where did you get these numbers for SpaceX, Twitter, Boring Co, and other Musk led companies?

How about you let it go, and give us a rest from your consistently negative opinions and attempts to allude to facts you offer no data to support.

Hint: you are losing because your replies are 3x longer than the original post. He's playing you. A one-sentence reply gutting his core problem is best. ie: "Too lazy to do the work, too stubborn to listen."

 

[unk45]

In a sense yes. But roadtripping in Europe to other countries and trying to use other than Tesla chargers is a nightmare.
I drove last summer through Sweden to Denmark, tried to charge a couple times at a different fast charger and it was just impossible. Process:

1. Download some danish app, thats completely in Danish, which I try to make sense with google translate
2. Try to enter a my Finnish credit card details, then 2FA through my finnish bank, which the app for some reason did not accept
3. finally it accepted the card after a few tries
4. charger cannot be started with the app but requires a rfid tag for some reason
5. Give up and drive to nearest Tesla SuC

Hah also Lidl chargers would not work with my Finnish lidl account, and lidl app would not let me register a danish account because it defaulted to the finnish account

Finlands ABC service station chain has quite an extensive charger network, price is 0,33€/kwh so quite ok. I can guarantee if you want to use their app for charging as a foreigner, its gonna be another nightmare

Then repeat this horrendous process throughout places that have a single local language in the midst of major tourist routes. Thinking of some in Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia but also in major tourist areas in France, italy and elsewhere. Being multilingual helps but really solves few problems generically. At least were there to be French, Spanish, English and German included most EV drivers can muddle through at least one of those languages. The payment interoperability is utterly ridiculous in today's world, but persists. One should imagine that the MC/Visa standard global interchange should work for charging with addition of a handful on major interchange issues; but no! Every in personal globally, no problem, even gasoline vendors. But EV charging, nope we love only locals!

That is how most of us end out with Superchargers or hotel charging when we travel outside our local systems wherever they are. Don't even discuss what happens if you have hired your non-Tesla EV.

 

[Ipcress]

Starlink is literally rocket science and earth orbit is the largest real estate there is that is accessible to mankind. The guy is obviously s*** posting like he said

The same process has happened 2 other times - Recently when he fired 80% of Twitter and before that when he announced the closure of all Tesla showrooms/galleries & move to an online only sales model. Everyone at the time announced that the sky was falling.

He probably has a skeletal staff and he’ll rehire the people who are exceptional/dedicated/crazy/trustworthy enough to come back.

Yes, but he fired the people who know who the dedicated/exceptional people were. Might be a little harder to make new hires into a company that treats staff so utterly poorly.

 

[sunwarriors]

That makes me think this was indeed the manager refusing to cut the poor performers/unnecessary staff, so Elon made an example of the group.

If true, then the manager is an idiot and I am really surprised they can't do their jobs and had to be made an example of, but it's still speculation unless it comes from a direct Tesla employee/Musk. Some video I saw are trying to get folks directly affected so we should all get some visibility on this eventually.

 

[wtlloyd]

Not sure it is 100% margins. Last I read, Tesla was buying $10B+ in Nvidia GPU’s/chips for training and end to end neural nets, And Dojo costs, along with all the people power to put all this together.

FSD autonomy will be applicable to Optimus, and many, many other applications. Limitless, really.
Construction, agriculture, factory assembly. Anything that moves for any reason can benefit from the neural net development that is FSD.

 

[advocate8]

Elon going hard core on loyalty ,

https://twitter.com/x/status/1785405979573514425

Free speech absoluting at its finest! The leak was something that needed to leak, and probably already had been somewhere else. The funny thing is, Sawyer could scarcely be more of a cheerleader for Tesla, TSLA and EM.

 

[Knightshade]

We will have to see what Elon identified as the problems with the current team. He has in no way indicated that the intent is to cut down on SC investment overall.

One can read the below different ways of course, but sure reads like a cut in investment to me-- and indeed given the whole layoff thing was done in the context of reducing costs not sure how to credibly read it any OTHER way.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1785406795814510785

Not now, but imagine FSD becomes 10x safer (proven by data) than manual driving. Insurance will drop and Tesla will likely offer very cheap insurance or included with FSD.

Tesla insurance is still only available in a minority of US states and has not expanded to new ones in years now. The last report we had on the unit itself it was losing money (discussed in here a couple months ago).

Maybe THAT is the group Elon should've fired?

Free speech absoluting at its finest! The leak was something that needed to leak, and probably already had been somewhere else. The funny thing is, Sawyer could scarcely be more of a cheerleader for Tesla, TSLA and EM.

A lot of folks have trouble understanding how free speech works.

It's the freedom to say things.

It's not the freedom to be immune to the consequences of saying them.