General Discussion: 2018 Investor Roundtable

[electracity]

I feel sorry for him. If the board is up to its tasks, it will order him to take couple of months off.

He is simply now paying the price for the hubris of "Alien Dreadnaught". SpaceX was apparently able to overcome manufacturing chaos with an effective COO and other senior managers.

He wants credit for sleeping in the factory. This is just his version of industrial Munchausen syndrome.

 

[Brando]

it was a joke. relax tiger.
did you watch the youtube clip?
he’s a nutless monkey in those clips, it’s hilarious

Yes, king george was/is always hilarious and most any ______less adjective describes him well. i can miss sarcasm - thanks - was a very very funny clip, even funnier than our new trump(ette) with his dainty hands. The most incompetent? Luckily we don't have to pick - we get to try both.

it really is a joke
Someday Elon/Tesla may be allowed to build a store in every state.
And they'll let us into Canada without a special ID and even come back home without special ID.
Imagine. Just like the old days.

 

[gluu]

How specifically? The shorts have been at this game for years, crying about the brand. Remember the early 2012 days, remember the fires, remember the front suspension, remember about the government loan and how they just ride the corporate welfare train. Yet we are still standing at 400k+ people eagerly waiting for a M3. If there is no truth to the FUD then you can amplify all you want but what you get out of it is actually positive publicity for Tesla. Because people are going to talk to their friend, neighbour etc about that Tesla they have. And if that friend, neighbour shows them the car and they can see for themselves how fab it is, consumers convert to it. It has worked for Tesla for 5+ years now. Why would it stop working today?



How can that destroy Tesla? Sure, it will depress the share price for a while? So what? Nevermind that, in actuality, Tesla gained large institutional shareholders, all through the same relentless negative short selling campaign (most recently Tencent and the Saudi fund). In fact, institutional demand for Tesla is strong enough that it can simply ignore "exemplary governance" guidelines that prevent other large institutions like the Norwegian fund to pile in as well.

To me both explanations above fall flat in the face of simple observations.

The fires and NYTimes article by Broder had a measurable impact on Tesla's sales. Hence, Elon started a counter-propaganda campaign and publicly resolved to add titanium plates to the Model S. I believe in an interview he said that the NYTimes article caused many cancellations of orders for the Model S.

Model 3 is currently undergoing the same noise. Tons of bullshit about quality, panel gaps, company going out of business and being unable to service vehicles, etc, etc. I have no doubt it has appreciably affected Tesla's conversion rate for Model 3, and without effective counter propaganda and Tesla supporters evangelism, has some non-zero probability of killing the company. I think it's quite remote, but it's not zero. It's quite clear to me that without its fans and supporters, Tesla would have died long ago.

 

[ggies07]

He is simply now paying the price for the hubris of "Alien Dreadnaught". SpaceX was apparently able to overcome manufacturing chaos with an effective COO and other senior managers.

He wants credit for sleeping in the factory. This is just his version of industrial Munchausen syndrome.

That's quite a negative spin on the topic. I do think he created his own chaos with the cell manufacturing snafu that eventually led to more stress, but he owned up to it and did the work to get out of the mess.

What has made it worse is the media/shorts. If the company had been private when the goof up happened, it would have been a little easier to handle. It makes sense why Tesla needs to go private so future growth will not be hampered.

 

[ZeApelido]

Musk is just cleaning out weak longs and keeping shorts in the game until a squeeze.

 

[Intl Professor]

Musk is just cleaning out weak longs and keeping shorts in the game until a squeeze.

I read sneeze not squeeze at first. Senility or need for a laugh?

 

[aubreymcfato]

@schonelucht Di you miss the whole thread?
Here's a link on Reddit with all the mayor posts by @jesselivenomore :
r/teslamotors - Elon Musk vs. Short sellers (great explanation from TMC)

 

[RubberToe]

Bollinger tweet asking Musk if they can use the Supercharger network.

Bollinger Motors on Twitter

Those trucks are pretty wide, not sure they would even fit into the Supercharger stalls where the stalls are on the side versus back. Not expecting huge numbers of Bollinger trucks at the Superchargers though. Having another company on board for Superchargers though is a definite positive.

RT

 

[Ulmo]

Elon Musk may be having a Kanye West moment where he goes to his old "friends" that are actually Communists trying to destroy him. Antonio Gracias, the "independent" board member who himself is on a zillion boards and is from Chicago (i.e., the furthest from independent as you can get), extracted an agreement from Musk to not tweet. Yet, as we can see, Twitter could be a powerful tool for someone like Kanye or Trump who is in control of their own destiny. As long as Musk is silenced by the Communist elite and their rats (the "Korean" (probably actually a Chinese agent pretending to be Korean) interviewer at the Fake Newspaper), he will be played with like a slave. He needs to move out of Hollywood, stop taking drugs, and become a serious man who doesn't put up with being "handled" by the communists.

The best way he can do this is going private.

That is the struggle of any leader at Tesla, and of Tesla itself, regardless of Elon Musk. The best way for Tesla to overcome this is by going private.

Tesla Board of Directors: if you support Tesla and its mission, you should see that Elon Musk's struggle is the struggle of anybody that will ever lead Tesla during this time of transition of the world's economy to a clean energy and clean transportation economy. Surely you should be able to see that, otherwise, you don't belong on Tesla's Board of Directors. If you want to throw someone under the bus as you run them over, make it the Wall Street shorts who actively work against Tesla, not your own CEO who is actively working for it. If you scapegoat Elon Musk, all you are doing is scapegoating Tesla and throwing Tesla under the bus, and completely ending the transition to clean energy in USA, putting USA out of the running of the future economies.

 

[mickificki]

The problem is we don't really know how that interview went. We only know NYT's retelling. I subscribe to the paper, but I don't believe for a second this was an accurate portrayal of what went down.

Good lord please unsubscribe from the NYT.

 

[ckessel]

2012 S owner, stock/LEAP holder in various forms since 2011, and the NYT interview is pretty concerning even if they cherry picked Elon's worst comments.

At 120 hours in a week, even Elon is human enough to be too exhausted to be useful at that point. And a boss that's too exhausted makes counter productive decisions that affect far more than his own work. At those sorts of hours, you're working to assuage guilt or as a pre-rebuttal of criticism about effort, not because it's useful.

I've read and heard interviews of his times in earlier days, when all his companies were legitimately on the edge of death, and he never seemed as self flagellating and pessimistic as he does now.

• "Friends are concerned"...by the time someone tells you that and you're willing to repeat it, the situation is bad
• He'd be happy to have someone take over the job if they could do better, so the joys of the challenge aren't worth the pain.
• He sees even more personal pain coming, that's fatalism from depression
• He's more blatantly paranoid, rather than just angry, about shorts than I've ever heard.
• He's on Ambien...and no one ever overstates drug use, they under state it and down play it

He sounds like a man that's already in the beginnings of a breakdown. I think Tesla could survive without Elon at this point, though the stock would take a pretty major hit in the short/mid-term if Elon steps down. However, Elon running things during a breakdown could be even worse.

Should have listened to my gut earlier this week and dumped my LEAPS that were slated to expire within the next 6 months, but no...I held them thinking I wait to get the capital gains tax rate in a couple months.

 

[schonelucht]

@schonelucht Di you miss the whole thread?

No I didn't miss it. The problem is that thread assumes Tesla is vulnerable because it needs access to the capital markets which is in direct contradiction with management guidance. At this point, I see no reason to doubt management on that. It would take model 3 margins well below 10% and significant unannounced capex+opex to bump Tesla in such a negative cash flow that it would risk a credit event. But if that turns out to be the case, then I would not say it's the short sellers that bankrupted Tesla, but management by failing to execute on their vision, failing to anticipate cash needs and failing to communicate correspondingly with the market. And finally, the Saudi's offered $2B in exchange for an equity stake. If Tesla was really vulnerable to the point of going bankrupt in the next quarters, then it would be nearly criminally negligent not to just take them up on the offer and add $2B to the coffers to sing out the last bumps on the Model 3 ramp.

 

[dmckinstry]

The problem is we don't really know how that interview went. We only know NYT's retelling. I subscribe to the paper, but I don't believe for a second this was an accurate portrayal of what went down.

Hmmm? I wonder if Elon taped the interview and will release the tape if there is much difference between the two narratives. A NYT trap?

 

[hobbes]

This might be a better forum for Elon than the NYT:
Marques Brownlee on Twitter

(Looks like MKBHD will have Elon, though he doesn´t say it explicitely)

 

[bhtooefr]

So I'm going to reply to this post from Market Action over here:

Note that it's not just shorts:

• Labor rights movement liberals influenced by UAW (ICE automotive bed fellows) FUD against Tesla
• Conservatives influenced by old-energy (Koch brothers, etc.) FUD against Tesla,
• ICE competitors must be scared of a private Tesla which will be more opaque and less attackable through the capital markets,
• Shallow journalists who are misreading Elon the same way they were misreading Hillary Clinton: awkward geek introvert who cannot wait for an interview to be over are sending the wrong kind of metacommunication to extrovert journalists. They are also spooked by Tesla not advertising and Elon talking about watching the watchers: Pravduh. Outrageous notion to hold journalists accountable!

All of these forces will unify against Tesla.

This is why Elon couldn't attempt going-private from a position of weakness (early 2018), he had to do it from a position of strength, after Q2 and with Q3 around the corner.

And this post as well, from further in that thread:

You think the average person considering buying a Tesla watches CNBC or even knows Jim Chanos. Stop thinking as an investor. I know people who were considering buying a Model 3 and changed their mind because of BS they read on social media. OEMs and Oil companies don’t have to “use their own people” either. Well not officially anyway. Chanos doesn’t even use his real name on Twitter. Not to mention bots are a thing....

Understanding these points is critical to understanding the FUD campaign, IMO.

Go-private will get a lot of the small-time shorts that see shorting TSLA as an opportunity for personal financial gain (often based on the FUD that they're reading) out of the stock, and they'll likely stop amplifying the FUD. It'll also force the big-time shorts out, and if any are in this purely for financial gain, they'll be forced out of the picture, and they'll be forced out of the investor media (CNBC et. al.) pretty quickly IMO.

But, as the posts that I quoted correctly point out... that's not the whole game. Sure, Tesla going private closes shorting as a way to hurt Tesla, but the interests that want Tesla gone have plenty of other ways to hurt Tesla, and importantly, they already have.

In many automotive forums that I'm on, a popular opinion held by real people - not sockpuppets - is that Musk is a huckster or even a conman, selling badly built and dangerous (Autopilot) cars to gullible people, making promises he knows he can't meet, and locking people out of repairing their own vehicles.

Sure, a lot of this is based on FUD, although FUD is sometimes based in elements of truth - after all, Tesla has had quality issues, Autopilot has had issues and is absolutely used improperly by drivers, even the most ardent Tesla fans are well aware of the concept of "Elon time", and Tesla is by far the most restrictive automaker for DIY repairs.

In left-wing circles that I'm in, Musk is portrayed as a robber baron who's abusive to his workers, puts them into harm's way because of petty aesthetic reasons, abusive to women, undermining public transit with pie-in-the-sky projects that will only be accessible to the rich, donates to Republicans, and who plans on, when the planet is utterly wrecked, hopping on a rocket to Mars and letting all of the poor people fight over the scraps on Earth and die.

This is a mix of UAW propaganda, some things that Justine Musk said and some questionable Twitter behavior IIRC, frankly a lot of truth on the mass transit thing (Boring Company and the hype around Hyperloop have supplanted some far more viable mass transit projects, and Musk has said some things that indicate that he's not a fan of mass transit although he later backpedaled, although it's worth noting that cities are complicit in this, by choosing Boring Company over more useful systems, and even refusing to deploy existing technology in the hope that Hyperloop will come), although it's important to note that Americans are pretty allergic to mass transit, he has donated to Republicans (but also Democrats), and the Mars thing is... well, there's a lot of Silicon Valley billionaires who would absolutely do that, and Musk is in those circles, although I personally see huge differences between Musk and those billionaires (namely, I do see Tesla as a serious attempt to help, especially with Tesla Energy).

Basically, you don't have to close the financial markets to a company to kill it, you can do it by convincing potential customers that the company makes shoddy, dangerous, impossible to fix cars, and is run by an evil person who intends to widen class divides and bail on the planet. And, frankly? The FUDsters are doing a damn good job of that.

 

[Intl Professor]

Now we are halfway through the quarter where we are going to turn the corner into being a profitable company. Current stock trend is down. Is this the ultimate "sell on the news" scenario, or the 420 hangover effect?

RT

Both plus this is the last time to short, so they think and are.

 

[Remus]

2012 S owner, stock/LEAP holder in various forms since 2011, and the NYT interview is pretty concerning even if they cherry picked Elon's worst comments.

At 120 hours in a week, even Elon is human enough to be too exhausted to be useful at that point. And a boss that's too exhausted makes counter productive decisions that affect far more than his own work. At those sorts of hours, you're working to assuage guilt or as a pre-rebuttal of criticism about effort, not because it's useful.

I've read and heard interviews of his times in earlier days, when all his companies were legitimately on the edge of death, and he never seemed as self flagellating and pessimistic as he does now.

• "Friends are concerned"...by the time someone tells you that and you're willing to repeat it, the situation is bad
• He'd be happy to have someone take over the job if they could do better, so the joys of the challenge aren't worth the pain.
• He sees even more personal pain coming, that's fatalism from depression
• He's more blatantly paranoid, rather than just angry, about shorts than I've ever heard.
• He's on Ambien...and no one ever overstates drug use, they under state it and down play it

He sounds like a man that's already in the beginnings of a breakdown. I think Tesla could survive without Elon at this point, though the stock would take a pretty major hit in the short/mid-term if Elon steps down. However, Elon running things during a breakdown could be even worse.

Should have listened to my gut earlier this week and dumped my LEAPS that were slated to expire within the next 6 months, but no...I held them thinking I wait to get the capital gains tax rate in a couple months.

I think you read too much to an apparently ill willed story telling.

And finally, the Saudi's offered $2B in exchange for an equity stake. If Tesla was really vulnerable to the point of going bankrupt in the next quarters, then it would be nearly criminally negligent not to just take them up on the offer and add $2B to the coffers to sing out the last bumps on the Model 3 ramp.

That is why I don't believe Elon is on the brink of break down. If he truly believe Tesla is on the verge of bankruptcy why didn't he take the 2B cash?

 

[The Blue Owl]

That is why I don't believe Elon is on the brink of break down. If he truly believe Tesla is on the verge of bankruptcy why didn't he take the 2B cash?

I have no clue if he is on the verge of a breakdown or not, but that and Tesla bankruptcy are two entirely different things. Just pointing that out.

(I agree that bankruptcy is not in the cards.)

 

[Bobfitz1]

I apparently have a more active imagination...

Rope-a-dope...
Ambush...
It's a trap...
Ash's words of wisdom....

As you are an Ash/Evil Dead fan I won't go any further than to agree you have a very active imagination...

 

[Bobfitz1]

The problem is we don't really know how that interview went. We only know NYT's retelling. I subscribe to the paper, but I don't believe for a second this was an accurate portrayal of what went down.

He knew NYT would cherry pick anything he said. But since they were surely recording the call, wouldn't he do so as well?
If the portrayal in what they printed wasn't accurate, Elon would be able to release the tape to correct the record.
I expect they quoted him accurately and of course included only what they wanted, so as to portray him as exhausted and close to breaking and further push down the SP.