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

[winfield100]

I've been suggesting since the Semi reveal that Megachargers should be grid connected solar farms with big batteries.
The grid connection is for selling electricity to the grid, including peaking electricity - that should be profitable.
Megacharging and Supercharging for 7 cents per kWh would be profitable.

I think Elon was just giving an idea of how much solar was needed to power the US, not suggesting locating it all in one place.

IMO Solar farm Megachargers need to be built on cheap land near major highways about 250 miles apart, if they were built, they would be very significant in aggregate.

My view is based on a a very literal interpretation of things Elon has said, it seems that Tesla are at least open to the idea of using solar to power fast charging.

@MC3OZ
while not Tesla focused per se, an 83 megawatt Solar farm is being built (about 1.5 square miles) a few miles from the intersection of Interstate highways I-81 and I-64, 30 miles west of Charlottesville, Virginia and about 150 miles SW of washington DC that purportedly will have batteries, they are also building Ventura battery project in California while may be largest in the world for a short while.
ie, this stuff is hitting non-linear log growth phase

 

[StealthP3D]

I had a gut feeling today with all of the specific share price capping, that we are dealing with a new round of ‘smart shorts’

You used a term that made me feel confused. I had never even heard of 'smart shorts' so I had to Google it:

This is amazing! I had no idea 'smart shorts' even existed! Forgive me for thinking you didn't know what you were talking about!


/s

 

[Christine69420]

20% of all Audi e-tron's sold to tiny Norway

In 2020 Audi sold 9,184 in Norway and 47,324 globally.
In 2019 Audi sold 5,377 in Norway and 26,000-ish globally.

Tiny Norway got 5,3 mill inhabitants. Much less than 1% of the world population - even less than 1% of the population in Europe.

Some years ago Tesla sold many of their cars to Norway since the rest of the world were sceptical to EVs. But now Tesla sends too few cars to Norway since it sells out all over the world.

So why don't Audi do the same?

Source in Norwegian: Tek.no - Tester, guider, teknologi

 

[ammulder]

Some years ago Tesla sold many of their cars to Norway since the rest of the world were sceptical to EVs. But now Tesla sends too few cars to Norway since it sells out all over the world.

So why don't Audi do the same?

If I were Audi, I'd do the same... send cars to where Tesla isn't. After all, if you sent them to the same places, you'd have to, you know, compete on merits.

 

[StealthP3D]

Lucid looking to go public through SPAC in $15 billion deal

Looks like we have a Lucid SPAC on its way...

"Electric vehicle maker Lucid Motors is in talks to go public through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition companies run by former Citigroup rainmaker Michael Klein, according to people familiar with the matter."

That language would make me very cautious about assuming it's real.

 

[heltok]

I found this video relevant to understand some of Tesla’s competition for FSD:

Mobileye seems to have gotten pretty far, at least in development. With Intel behind them, they will be a very serious competitior to Tesla.

 

[Unpilot]

I pride myself in the the fact that I have no fracking idea what he is saying.

All you need to read is this snippet.

"....a lot of competition is ramping up"

So yeah a well thought out blog/s

 

[StealthP3D]

I found this video relevant to understand some of Tesla’s competition for FSD:

Mobileye seems to have gotten pretty far, at least in development. With Intel behind them, they will be a very serious competitior to Tesla.

There is a difference between having a system that works all over (Mobileye is not there yet either) and being competitive with Tesla. Mobileye uses more expensive power-hungry lidar and computers. I'm not sure how many watts it consumes but, if it's too high, it could limit it's use to gas cars only.

Even if they get the power low enough to make it practical on EV's, you have the problem of cost. Integrating roof-top lidar into the bodywork so it doesn't cause excessive aerodynamic drag is not cheap or convenient. The lidar is not cheap. Cost is typically an important consideration when determining competitiveness as well as it's suitability to be used on EV's in actual commercial service.

 

[StealthP3D]

All you need to read is this snippet.

"....a lot of competition is ramping up"

So yeah a well thought out blog/s

Well, he's under 30 years old, has been investing less than 4 years and he's made money off bitcoin.

What could go wrong?

 

[SOULPEDL]

They target 10% TSLA and some here have argued that their timing of sales are unconnected to any timing of the market day to day. That it's just a function of rebalancing and somehow automatic. (Although some rules obviously exist and may force some action as well.) But I don't think so.

I've been trading like ARK (fixed % not including my past 2 trading days), and somewhat with ARK on timing for months now. Not the first time I've considered their actions to trigger mine. It has worked very well so far, for me, on finding many of the peaks and troughs. Some of my sells have occurred before I knew about theirs so we have a similar rhythm on this perhaps.

ARK sold some TSLA yesterday. I'm still buyng when I can.

 

[Silentk]

All you need to read is this snippet.

"....a lot of competition is ramping up"

So yeah a well thought out blog/s

"....and there is no real mote for Tesla."

My guess is he does not have a mote of intelligence.

 

[joh01652]

You know that part of the reason I did this analysis was to determine how Tesla Energy works, along with other solar companies, to determine what their roadmap might look like in the future. If Tesla is interested in buying the cars they produce themselves, its fair that they might do the same with solar/roofs and sell the electricity back to the grid and stabilizes through Autobidder.

Edit: Elon has mentioned building a massive solar farm somewhere, like Texas, to power the entire US in the past...as an example.

I think the 'massive solar farm' you are referring to comes from Musk's Tesla Energy presentation back in 2015. This is my favorite Musk video of all time, and shows a little square within the Texas panhandle to demonstrate the land area required to transition the U.S. to carbon-zero electricity generation. Within that little square, he has another little square that shows the amount of land area required for battery storage.

A must-watch video as far as I'm concerned. This single video is what sparked my enthusiasm for Musk and Tesla and gave me hope that there might be a way out of our climate conundrum. Truly, a very inspiring video for me personally. Definitely worth a re-watch if you haven't seen it in a while.

Watch Elon Musk deliver the best tech keynote I've ever seen

 

[Juhoru]

"I shorted Tesla at $833.43"

thehobbyinvestorthatcould.com/i-shorted-tesla-at-833/

edit: Just a clarification, it`s not me that is going short on tesla

Read through this and although I wouldn't call myself an especially experienced investor, this talk of bubbles baffles me a bit. It's like some people just think everything that grows big is necessarily also a bubble.
Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see any other reason why Tesla is going to start falling other than it's really high.

 

[Silentk]

Spotted on the Twitters:

 

[joh01652]

I haven't seen any report it yet, so here is the short interest report as of 12/31/2020:

View attachment 627061

Summary: Since 12/15 short interest went up, by number of shares, 34% to 60,620,873 shares, which is the highest it has been since 8/14/2020. So the shorts have been busy... That makes the run up since 1/1 make more sense if they were starting to cover while benchmark funds also started buying.

If the short interest was still that high that would be ~$51.5 Billion dollars of short interest.

Ahh, so that's why we're all millionaires....

 

[Boomer19]

For those wondering: S3 totally missed the additional shorting in their update on 1/4, where the graph still showed ~45M as of 12/31:



So whoever was doing the shorting was outside of the data S3 has access to. It will be interesting to see their next update.

by 1/4, the exchange report wasn’t out yet

nasdaq reports short interest as of mid month and end of month about 8-9 days after each cutoff

S3 has a list of customers/participants that subscribe to its service. those participants report short back to S3 in return as part of the service. so S3 has a subset of overall market activity that’s not all-encompassing

sometimes they’re accurate with that sample size but sometimes not.

even the nasdaq short interest report, while actual data, is it really what’s happening? at the very least, it’s 8-9 days old

at the very worst, it’s not accurate due to the various ways to avoid reporting short to exchange (as debated here many times in past).

bottom line, these are data points that, when combined with other data, may map out a pattern.
but individually they are not enough evidence to say one way or another what is going on right now.

 

[SunCatcher]

A must-watch video as far as I'm concerned. This single video is what sparked my enthusiasm for Musk and Tesla and gave me hope that there might be a way out of our climate conundrum. Truly, a very inspiring video for me personally. Definitely worth a re-watch if you haven't seen it in a while.

Watch Elon Musk deliver the best tech keynote I've ever seen

"We want to show people what's possible. That's the future we should have. I think that this is something that we must do, and that we can do, and that we will do." Elon Musk

Agreed. This was the presentation that grabbed me, and never let go. And here we are 5 years later, and so much has been accomplished. So much; and I really do believe that there's no stopping the Tesla Train now... Never been a more exciting time to be alive!

And that some of us are hugely benefiting financially; well, that's some pretty terrific icing on this cake. Can't believe my lucky stars that I stumbled into this realm.

 

[bkp_duke]

I found this video relevant to understand some of Tesla’s competition for FSD:

Mobileye seems to have gotten pretty far, at least in development. With Intel behind them, they will be a very serious competitior to Tesla.

Mobileye built the silicon for Autopilot 1 for Tesla. They do have some experience in this field based upon that.

What they lack are the billions of miles of real driving data that Tesla has. That is going to take them a long time to build up.

 

[thx1139]

The bar to be competitive with tesla is rising ...
- in 2009 you needed to produce a few thousand sportscars at a 6 figure price
- in 2012 you needed to produce some tens of thousands familiy sedans with 250miles range under $100k and think about charging
- in 2015 you needed to produce even 7-seater SUV with AWD, fastcharging, connectivity
- in 2018 you needed to produce houndred thousand familiy sedan with 300miles range at $50k
- in 2021 you need to produce 500 thousand sport sedans with 350 miles range under 50k with supercharging, connectivity, autonomy
- in 2024 you may very well just call it a day

Very good. I get into this all the time when people say X is making Y electric car. Look into it and X is making 50K of them to sell in 2021 to compete with the Model Y. Really Tesla going to sell upwards of 500K and X is going to sell 50K. That is competition that is compliance.

 

[thx1139]

20% of all Audi e-tron's sold to tiny Norway

In 2020 Audi sold 9,184 in Norway and 47,324 globally.
In 2019 Audi sold 5,377 in Norway and 26,000-ish globally.

Tiny Norway got 5,3 mill inhabitants. Much less than 1% of the world population - even less than 1% of the population in Europe.

Some years ago Tesla sold many of their cars to Norway since the rest of the world were sceptical to EVs. But now Tesla sends too few cars to Norway since it sells out all over the world.

So why don't Audi do the same?

Source in Norwegian: Tek.no - Tester, guider, teknologi

I am told this is proof that Tesla has little demand in Europe. Are people lying to me? They tell me Tesla could build 50K, 100K or more in 2020 and sell them to Europe if Tesla had the demand. Are they lying to me?

/s