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

[EVWatcher]

1. Did I miss the reveal of what got so excited about from Tesla’s last all hands?
2. Is it just me or does the normal loud speculation of deliveries feel abnormally quiet?

 

[JustMe]

1. Did I miss the reveal of what got so excited about from Tesla’s last all hands?
2. Is it just me or does the normal loud speculation of deliveries feel abnormally quiet?

Check Rob Maurer’s podcast for the deets:

 

[EVWatcher]

Check Rob Maurer’s podcast for the deets:

If that’s really all it was then Tesla has some pretty boring all hands calls for that to have made waves.

 

[UnknownSoldier]

I want to speculate on what this tweet means.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1375652425814704128

Elon is a Transformers fan?

 

[Buckminster]

Important poll:

Technoking Poll

 

[MXWing]

I want to believe Tesla has solved FSD....


...but then I watch this guy's videos, and I just can't comprehend how version 9 can make such a big leap to overcome these obstacles.

That's a pretty difficult unprotected left hand turn if you were in a slow Prius or BMW.

FSD just needs to commit to the turn and do 0-60 in 3 seconds.

Program neural net so:

Green = Go Fast
Yellow = Go Faster
Red = Heat battery to gun it when Green

 

[Artful Dodger]

Upgrades can be useful for better rates and terms on debt, but that doesn't mean much to Tesla right now.

The FED is now (and has been for the past year) buying investment-grade Corporate Bonds, excepting those rated 'junk', like Tesla bonds. Go figure.

There have been 100s of Billions of USD injected into businesses with this "Quantitative Easing". All the pigs have been feeding at the inflationary trough, whilst Tesla looks in from the cold.

Slow-walking the Credit Ratings is the same as withholding FED funds from Telsa while feeding their competitors.

It matters.

 

[Tslynk67]

I believe the phrase more commonly used by the Mormon Church is "and so it came to pass".............................as in "and so it came to pass that Tesla became the most valuable company in the world, and our December investments in TSLA went forth and multiplied!"

Yeah, I was taking the line from The Handmaid's Tale...

What do you mean? Did WS consensus numbers go up? Troy didn't release an update since the 16th.

Consensus has gone up from 163k to 170k (probably skewed by Gordo's 250k ), Troy updated to Patreon supporters on the 25th with a lower figure.

 

[Artful Dodger]

I ran this tweet by a few family members and it’s clear not everyone reads it the same way. I read it as ...

So how did the other family members read it?

TIA

 

[Artful Dodger]

How much is SpaceX worth?

$74B in USD. In hope for humanity, priceless.

 

[LiveLong&Profit]

@LiveLong&Profit I have to say, your new avatar kind of looks like a young Boris Johnson smurf.

Soooooo funny ! - yeah, I guess I see what you mean, ha ha
I finally got around to making an avatar, but that was ... unintended.
Regardless of politics, which we should leave out of this forum, Boris hairstyle is ... an interesting choice. And so is mine, apparently. Hm...

 

[LiveLong&Profit]

You can borrow mine. I should warn you though, it makes you spend all your money on Tesla shares when the price goes down. I've had words, but it doesn't listen.

All we need now is a mad scientist, and a monkey!
No - wait, hold the monkey: Animals should be treated as kindly as practically possible. Guess you are on your own then.

 

[LiveLong&Profit]

OK, let's think about this theme where: FSD release => stock goes up ~3x, and all this happens in a few months
Market is of course forward looking, but how far ???

Let's take the best case scenario:

1. Tesla releases FSD soon (within few months) too all who purchased / willing to purchase.
2. First of all, we all know for a fact, that upon release it will be officially categorized as level 2 autonomy leaving the human with full responsibility.
3. Then we get a long iterative march-of-9s to improve the NN based on feedback gathered from the fleet.
4. This iterative process may easily last years before Tesla is confident enough to declare FSD as a level-3 or 4 system taking on liability in case of trouble/crash.
5. Robotaxi revenue can come only after regulatory approval, which in turn only comes after Tesla is willing to declare the system level-4 or 5.

Now let's see how investors in various categories will react to this:
A) The uber-bulls (who believe the best case scenario + march-of-9s lasting only a few months so Robotaxi revenue can kick in before the end of this year) have already invested every single available and borrowable penny, so they will not be able to push the stock price any higher upon the release of FSD.
B) Some investors who are skeptical about the technical solution or Tesla's approach to solve the problem and are convinced otherwise by the release will jump in.
C) There is a group who are skeptical about the adoption rate or regulatory approval, who will wait much longer (until level4+ and regulatory approval)
D) There are also those who think "the competition is coming" and will be cautious even longer
E) There are other's who are waiting until actual financial results from robotaxi are proven

IMHO, to get Tesla into valuations higher than all other companies, will need investments from more than just group B, therefore I expect that to happen significantly later in the process.

Good points - I mostly agree with most of them.

One thing though is hard to quantify: The wide-spread belief that self-driving is a) possible at all and b) the arrival is imminent - within a very few years.

There is a cultural/psychological component that may be culturally related, maybe depends how strong your grounding in science and technology is. (Maybe also depends on how much science fiction you have read.)

People got used to Deep Blue beating Kasparov in chess, but it was fairly big then.
For a long time after, the game of Go was the next frontier, until suddenly that was not only conquered, but vanquished.

Go is *big* in the china cultural sphere - Koreans openly wept when their world champion Lee Se-dol was roundly beaten in 2016 by 4 games to 1.
Lee was optimistic, nay cocky before the game, thinking that he could hold a master class in go and teach these these arrogant (mostly) Americans programmers a lesson in humility.

He himself afterwords said that the go-program had a 'feel or deep intuition for playing go' that utterly stunned him. Given that, it is a testament to his mental strength that he recovered form this great shock, and actually won a subsequent game by playing perhaps the best game of his life.

Many people's minds were blown then.
Lee retired in 2019, saying that no matter how good he could still become he could never beat the new 'entity'.
Former Go champion beaten by DeepMind retires after declaring AI invincible

So, for option F) i would add this:
A large number of totally ordinary people waking up to the fact that the arrival of Self Driving might be pivotal moment, to be compared with other big technological leaps like steam engines, the assembly line, computing or the internet. And invest according to their newfound realization.

I think it will be an iPhone moment.

 

[LiveLong&Profit]

I think I agree with Rob. Let's be honest, while Tesla is on a trajectory to possibly be the largest company in the world someday, the notion that it could happen a few months from now is simply preposterous. Elon must have mistweeted there and meant to tweet on another thread.

Hm ... You are most likely right.
On the other hand: I, for one, did not foresee the extreme ~8X TSLA appreciation in 2020.
Sometimes things do happen quickly, however unlikely that may appear beforehand.

 

[winfield100]

Hm ... You are most likely right.
On the other hand: I, for one, did not foresee the extreme ~8X TSLA appreciation in 2020.
Sometimes things do happen quickly, however unlikely that may appear beforehand.

just think of it as one of a variations upon the below

or watch this, a nice 10 minute movie that showed in the 2nd floor of the Air & Space building, SE corner in a small theater on continuous loop in the SE corner

 

[lklundin]

I think its a genius demand lever to open up SuperChargers for the peasants.

Think about Leaf, Bolt owners - charging for double the time as Tesla owners.. surfing on their phones or whatever..
While Tesla owners barely have time to watch an episode of their favorite Netflix show - with cinema grade sound, before they zip away to their destination.

I'd consider swaping for a Tesla if I was one of those stuck in an inferior EV. They dont know better I guess, but to watch and experience what it is like to own a Tesla will open their minds. IMHO.

I have been a avid Tesla fan for a decade - and still both brother and aunt went ahead and bought a Leaf. Tells me - they have to be able to make up their minds on their own - experience/watch what a Tesla is all about. Sometimes when we who know gush about Tesla, all they get out of it is "He/She is just another fan, it cant be that much better than this LEaf I get a $6k discount on if I buy from the local dealer"..

Regarding supercharger access Tesla would be negotiating from a point of strength.

In addition to entering a contract with a given car maker, they can also require that a specific EV-owner that wants to use the Supercharger Network for their car create a Tesla-account, to enable the payment - giving them an opportunity to check out Tesla's other products...

Naturally, a non-Tesla, slowly-charging EV cannot reduce the Supercharger throughput. So the payment of the non-Tesla EV would need to be the greater of the price of the electricity they actually charged and the price of the electricity a Tesla could have charged in the same amount of time at the stall.

Looking at Tesla's recent conditions for buyers who opt to pay with Bitcoin, I am fully confident that Tesla will know to get the best out the Supercharger Network.

 

[lafrisbee]

I think it's time to strike Max Pain from our library of fundamental indicators.

I promise, I will be as quiet as those that don't believe in maxpain for the rest of the week end.

 

[Singuy]

Hm ... You are most likely right.
On the other hand: I, for one, did not foresee the extreme ~8X TSLA appreciation in 2020.
Sometimes things do happen quickly, however unlikely that may appear beforehand.

The only rare event that may happen is people don't know how to evaluate what they see and start buying up the stock just incase. We were getting that with "Ev being the future and its profitable thanks to Tesla showing the way so let's buy up every stock that's ev related and ask questions later".

So I can easily see Tesla x2 or x3 if Tesla vision is solved even though robotaxies still need years of validation before it can generate any revenue.

Wondering what Tesla AI is going to be later this year. Lots of speculation that once generalized vision AI is solved, the application is endless such as no long needing to program robots to grab things with precision, as they can now see and understand. Another area where people may just not know what to do with valuation.

Tesla technologies is all about going into the unknown with unlimited TAM as no one really knows if it'll change the world or not. Their ev project and energy changed the world with Tesla 1.0. FSD plus general AI vision is Tesla 2.0, can it do it again?

 

[Boomer19]

between starfox (think bigger/crazier) merritt (so obvious) and maurer (the company call bulletpoints discussed on podcast seemed run of mill, and nothing to be THAT excited about, nor ‘bigger/crazier’)
‘sources’ and all that ensued;

something has to be up.

but something(s) big are always up at tesla. that’s the whole point. ‘think bigger/crazier’ and, ‘so obvious’, to me points to TE. but then elon, almost on queue, in reply to a twtr post says they’re still cell constrained until “probably ok next year”

but the ‘next few years are going to be amazing’ still fits regardless of elon’s cell constrained (and reaction to 10 new peakers owned by buffet in TX).

no news to us here. maybe to others.

what’s key to me is that ‘probably ok next year’ means a quicker timeline than expected (from battery day) on 4680, even if not used in TE, freeing up other form factors for storage.

what’s TE growth if m3/y fully replaced by 4680 by 2024 and all the 2170 and 18650 are deployed to storage?

as for fsd, and thinking bigger/crazier, and admitting now, that it is ‘obvious’, i’m hopeful that the problem is mostly solved...from the standpoint of; its ready to start generating serious revenue across multiple applications even PART of the time.

do i think tesla 3x in a matter of months...no. maurers source and the bulletpoints he discusses on the call seemed completely uneventful compared to starfox. so those still don’t reconcile...without more clarity.

even if tesla benefitted heavily from US infrastructure contracts for energy deployment etc, how much can that move the needle? i’m guessing that could be a big impact (anyone have company comparisons for those involved in infrastructure booms in US in past?) even if tesla got a fraction of infrastructure spending it could be an outsized impact to income and expenses on their books. with tesla efficiency, this ratio could widen quickly as they improve logistics.

lots to look forward to, as usual. do any of them reconcile with a huge short term multiple? maybe, but not likely given the context we currently have.

what else could be up? what else is staring us in the face they we will inevitably and collectively “facepalm” ourselves when it happens.

i guess that’s why you have to be in it to win it. hold a # shares you’re comfortable with at minimum. for the other stuff, make sure your timeline doesn’t get nullified by the market bosses.

 

[Prunesquallor]

Regarding supercharger access Tesla would be negotiating from a point of strength.

In addition to entering a contract with a given car maker, they can also require that a specific EV-owner that wants to use the Supercharger Network for their car create a Tesla-account, to enable the payment - giving them an opportunity to check out Tesla's other products...

Naturally, a non-Tesla, slowly-charging EV cannot reduce the Supercharger throughput. So the payment of the non-Tesla EV would need to be the greater of the price of the electricity they actually charged and the price of the electricity a Tesla could have charged in the same amount of time at the stall.

Looking at Tesla's recent conditions for buyers who opt to pay with Bitcoin, I am fully confident that Tesla will know to get the best out the Supercharger Network.

I don’t think they will deal with other carmakers at all. Ionity, EVGo, etc don’t need to deal with carmakers.

I think Tesla will only deal directly with owners. Want to use Superchargers? Pay $599.95 for adapter, get the SCUser App and set up an account.