Out of respect for your contribution and excellent insights that have delighted me, and clarified for me some of my own thoughts, I'll try to rephrase and clarify my statements. x
#1 My point is that Elon is in actor in TSLA price story. You and I are observers. Here is why that is important. Assume Elon is trying to build new, cheaper, better battery. He starts from first principle, looking at elements and how much they cost. While everyone says not possible, first principle says that battery can be much, much cheaper. It doesn't say it's easy or what to do and how to get to the cheap battery, but that it's perhaps possible and worth exploring. So, he comes up with the GF.
If there is a World War, Elon can start making electrical tanks. Maybe self-driving electrical tanks. He could say: based on first principle and cost/talent/technology advantage over conventional car industry, given reasonable timeframe, stock price of TSLA will rise.
You and I can't do squat over unknowns, unexpected events and black swans, so we don't have that certainty
#2 'Reasonable timeframe' - I very much agree. But you were calling 9 weeks (not reasonable timeframe) and laying down (almost) month by month play. You can't be certain of that, however, you projected certainty. I actually think there is very good probability you're correct to a high degree. The only reason I keep bringing this up, is because I felt your unwillingness to consider probabilities lead to fairly rigid posture that made other opinions unwelcome.
Humans are very, very poorly equipped to handle unique black swan events, based on experience. You can't imagine something if your experience didn't prepare you for. Hence our blindness to black swans. Have you considered war? Real war, with bombs under your window, not war at foreign soil that you don't feel. I almost woke up to one after living for many years in supposedly civilized country in Europe. There was NO SIGN couple years before it.
If you think this is all impossible, that's your experience lying to you, so you can't see black swan coming.
I don't anticipate any of this in reasonable timeframe, however, my point is about lack of certainty, i.e. one has to be open to possibilities.
#3 I'm afraid this is not true. Entropy and second law of thermodynamics ensures Black swan events are default when it some to surprises, and white swan doesn't really exist, it's called hard work.
Sunday sermon on the philosopy of determinabilty. tl;dr version: skip this unless you fancy (hopefully) enjoying a read. It has nothing directly to do with the short term, more like a 50 year term.
The above post that prompted me to assemble some thoughts on this topic is a response is to something I wrote that contains this line:
"Tesla and its EV colleagues [are] following the tech disruption trend line, as these emerge [it] will precipitate an auto industry recession
with numerous ramifications across the economic and political spectrum because it does not take much to send a traditional auto maker bust. Much less than it takes to re-supply its customers or re-employ its workers."
If you look closely enough at this line, especially the bit I have highlighted, you can deduce four things. One, that I am fully aware of black swan events. Two, that it is possible to assign probabilities to them. Three, that being alarmist about these things I feel is imprudent. Four (and for a reasons mentioned), they are incorporated in the world-view I have presented. Wars for example are made of the military industrial and technological capabilities of the times in which they occur and the probabilities intersect at the point where Tesla (and SpaceX and Solar City) in a future timeframe would definitely be incorporated into the military industrial complex. Autonomous, silent, satellite guided troop insertion, extraction and patrol, automated supply lines and ordinance delivery that can run lights-out at night and so close to ambient temperature that it is just about invisible to night-vision or heat-seeking weaponry (Tesla's auto-piloted EV architecture - especially where supported by a resilient 4000 satellite command and control network) is a powerful and eminently advanced military technology. I am itching to see Model X off-road capabilities, enhanced AWD traction has military and security implications too. SpaceX is emerging as the de-facto US Airforce space wing - we just watched eleven what might as well be precision guided warheads deployed via livestream from a booster that can technically be relaunched many times per day - this advanced weapons technology that is already classified accordingly under ITAR. Discreet micro grid based power networks that cannot be knocked out by hitting a central power plant naturally deliver significantly upgraded strategic energy security and could be deployed readily deep in-theatre, ending the vulnerability of securing energy supply lines, particularly in connection with EV based mobility. There is precedent for this. Ford for example was a massive net beneficiary of WW2 supplying both Allied and the Axis military machine and allegedly that involved some kind of pact for the Allies not to bomb Ford facilities in Germany. VW is literally the product of Nazi Germany and Toyota very much the net beneficiary of WW2 Japan. Today Toyota is anecdotally the transportation of choice for ISIS and similarly horrific groups in the trouble spots of Africa.
There are also an omega points in statistics: Nobody need care about the TSLA stock price post a society-ending event. Thus making the null thesis irrelevant. By definition apocalyptic scenarios do not weigh on the averages in any frame of reference where civilization continues to exist at the point of measurement. i.e. if civilization completely ceases to exist, the stock price would not be low. In the absence of both money and the stock market it would become indeterminable.
It is also worth mentioning a precedent that every major change in the energy and transportation basis of society has resulted in disruption to the balance of power and has resulted in widespread wars to re-establish it. That is true from horse to steam and from steam to the internal combustion of oil and its refinery products. On that basis, the default thesis would be war as a result of a transition to the irrelevance of oil an internal combustion. Huge power bases are built on these things. The US armed forces for example is the world's single largest consumer of oil and its primary function in the world under the euphemism of 'American Interests Abroad' is the protection of its own strategic oil supply lines. Typically flowing from unfriendly territories. A more technically advanced military that does not need oil would change matters drastically. Think of an alternative plot for the movie Independence Day - Aliens show up but they can't sustain a fight without drilling oil wells and operating oil refineries and tankers. Nothing to fear. There is good reason why a change to renewable energy and battery storage may result in unprecedented peace instead of war. Nobody has a national super-concentration or scarcity of it and the advantages of a historically strong oil-based economy also lend themselves to rapid innovation and access to capital for transition that need not alter the global power balance more than to deflate the tensions surrounding the oil concentrations in the Middle East. Even in Saudi the regime has figured out that solar powered electricity production is more economical that the use of their own abundant natural gas supply. The term GreenPeace may actually turn out to prophetic.
I almost explained this the first time out and I deleted it again for the avoidance of alarmism.
Routing back to Future History (psychohistory, Asimov style). It is very popular at present and especially in the West to regard the future as indeterminable. This is NOT the truth. What is the truth is that it is very widespread cultural meme at present that is frequently regarded as a general truth that needs to be defended. This is not the only cultural meme that there has ever been neither is it the only cultural meme that currently exists. At times and in places it has been widely popular (and defended adamantly) that the future is highly determinable. In China right now the general working population is certain that the country is progressing successfully along a definite plan from general poverty to general wealth. They know it is true because for example the young professionals I met in Shenzhen have realistic goals to buy BMWs while once a year at Spring break they return to far-off villages to visit grandparents that in their day counted access to a paddy field as their primary source of net worth.
In fact the hard-core of the prevailing future indeterminability meme surrounding energy and transportation is bat-sh*t crazy when you really stop and think about it. It goes like this: Nobody can know the future and it will definitely not change for as long as you and I live. Sorry, but that is a self-defeating and completely illogical statement of an absolutely predetermined future. To make matters worse I have to object to the concept of entropy in a socio-economic context. That's a load of rubbish too. We are each a member of a species that was semi-naked and chasing after wild animals with sticks not so very long ago. Now we sit in machine-woven outfits in air conditioned buildings watching space ships on the freaking internet. What entropy? One relatively fool-proof definition of life itself is that it is counter-entropic. It assembles order out of chaos. We are in fact living beings surrounded by things that have massive negative entropy produced by massively counter-entropic chains of business processes that ultimately get stuff that was once distributed relatively randomly throughout rocks in the ground and assembled in a definite order with really mind-blowing entropy reduction - like this computer in front of me. The drive for order out of chaos and its products is so ubiquitous in Western society that vacation breaks from it all to see some chaotically distributed sand and water or snow and rocks for example can be really really nice.
Given that an uncertain future is the prevailing cultural Western meme and that the meme itself it is not objectively true. It is true to say that this cultural meme is the 'psychohistorical' canvas on which Future History will now be written. It is a recipe for surprise rather than expectation when things change radically, especially things that change radically for the better. This is a time for extraordinary success of 'visionaries' that can see through the cultural mist and act accordingly.
Perhaps on another weekend I could consider writing something about the exceptional predictability of Elon Musk. Even as an observer is possible to know just about exactly what he will do as a system component when faced with a novel deliverable like a Gigafactory. Musk according to my observations represents the epitome of counter-entropic behavior. It is stupidity that introduces entropy (chaos and unpredictability). Musk is extremely non-stupid and the thing about that is, that if you also know what the truth is and what the optimum decision is given that truth, then just as there are thousands of ways to be wrong and only one way to be right if you set the axioms and parameters correctly then you know with great precision what Musk and hence Tesla will do - and because the actions of Tesla affect a very large population in various contingencies from competition to the investment community and media to consumers, politics and economics it is highly possible to generate a semantic tree of Future History that has a single very high probability path that within the range of probabilities interesting to the art of investing for gain (win significantly more than you lose) is in my opinion as deterministic as anything ever gets.
