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

[mongo]

Are you aware that Elon approached Mercedes in Fall 2018 to purchase Sprinter "gliders" (chassis w/o drivetrain, made in North Charleston, S.C.) so Tesla could begin making EV vans? Mercedes never took up the request.

Elon Musk on Twitter: "Lot on our plate, so it’s either get van gliders (no battery, powertrain or compute tech) from Daimler & produce sooner or do all & produce later. Not a big difference to total vehicles produced either way. Priority list is Model Y,​

Tesla and Mercedes were talking about it in 2019, after that tweet which spurred the discussion:
Tesla & Mercedes Talking About Electric Van Collaboration

The thread also provides more context
Nov 19, 2018 (times are eastern)
At 10:29am he said: "Maybe interesting to work with Daimler/Mercedes on an electric Sprinter. That’s a great van. We will inquire."

4:01 pm : "Lot on our plate, so it’s either get van gliders (no battery, powertrain or compute tech) from Daimler & produce sooner or do all & produce later. Not a big difference to total vehicles produced either way. Priority list is Model Y, solar roof tiles, pickup, semi, Roadster."

Re Pickup, but relevent:
4:47 pm: "What really matters is time to volume production, not initial market intro. Apart from brief moments, Tesla vehicle production is limited by total battery output."

Re van:
4:55pm : "No, it’s got enough load capacity & volume to carry the battery pack & our current pack energy density is about double that of original Roadster. Still, it would probably only save about 30% to 40% of effort, all things considered."

 

[Buckminster]

I may have missed someone pointing this out:

Closed $775
Max pain $775

Max pain is at $730 next week but will rise significantly.

 

[Criscmt]

Only 1 notable single-issue event in all of 2020: During events in February, TSLA transited from the Upper- to the Lower-BB in 8 sessions:

View attachment 716262

In 2019, there were 2 events which lead to discontinuities in the SP (and were very closely Upper-to-Lower BB single-day drops): Apr 4, 2019 (SEC lawsuit) and Jul 25, 2019 (Q2 Earnings): SEE CHART BELOW

This is ironic because the SEC caused one of these 2 discontinuity events, which they were established to prevent. Jolly jokers, wholey-pwned by Wall St. Hedgies. Despicable abuse of the Public Trust.

View attachment 716264

There was one other discontinuity event during 2019, which was Q3 Earnings and affected the Market on Oct 25, 2019. SP jumped bu $10 to $60 and has never looked back in these past two years.

It would not surprise me in the LEAST that some of the most suspendered disconnected analysts on Wall St. still hope to "fill that gap". Wedgies...

HTH.

Cheers!

Assuming you did it without visually looking at the charts, how were you able to identify this? Which platform did you use?
If you found these visually looking at the charts, did you figure out the April-04-2019 by looking at the chart here?

 

[kanweg]

There isn't any reason why Tesla would want such a partnership at this point. They can pop out new Gigafactories in a year if they feel like they need more capacity. What does a partnership with any legacy auto company offer them now?

As mentioned by someone else, it would further the mission, but it would also mean more models. People like that. And that helps finding your car on the parking lot if they are not all white Tesla’s. Some people hate Tesla’s panel gaps but don’t mind those of Ford. As long as EV demand can’t be satisfied, it is basically a competitor earning money for you. Tesla has plenty on the side (energy, bots) when we near the end of the S curve.

 

[UnknownSoldier]

Today's reminder to vote your shares before the October 6th deadline. The Annual Meeting is the 7th!

 

[WarpedOne]

And that helps finding your car on the parking lot if they are not all white Tesla’s.

I don't understand ... FINDING your car? My car finds me ...

 

[ThisStockGood]

Tesla Economist is chiming in on Q3 deliveries. 252k

 

[Lessmog]

BUT if Lordstown sells it's only factory to Foxconn, then what does Lordstown have left?

Rename to Lordsvillage or Lordsshantytown after the sale?

AppleTown would be more likely with Foxcon involved ...

Little Apple, L.A.OHFox Of course.

 

[OrthoSurg]

Tesla Economist is chiming in on Q3 deliveries. 252k

My estimation method is taking the average of all the estimates. I call it the average of the wrongs. I am always spot off. /s

 

[replicant]

This exciting video stimulated some thoughts:

1) We know Elon is worried that unfriendly AI could destroy humanity. He just said in the CodeCon interview that AI is the second greatest threat after population collapse.

2) When Elon worries about a risk, he takes action to reduce it. For example, he started OpenAI and Neuralink for the stated purpose of reducing the danger of unfriendly AI.

3) The stated purpose of Tesla's AI Day was to recruit the best AI engineers in the world. Anecdotal evidence claimed by the above video suggests this plan is working.

4) If the best engineers, and a worthy corporate mission, attract more top engineers (as the video claims), then we can expect Tesla to become the world leader in AI research and development, because...

5) Tesla has a new, expanded mission not yet appreciated by the general public. In addition to accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, Tesla is now accelerating the creation of friendly Artificial General Intelligence (also known as The Singularity).

6) Tesla is building Dojo and the Bot not only to make more and better cars and energy systems. Elon has harnessed the extraordinary resources of his companies to tackle what he sees as the second greatest threat to humanity.

Elon continues to ignore the collapse of biodiversity, which is a much bigger threat than climate change already. None of his projects aims at preventing this catastrophe and IMO, both SpaceX and Tesla will speed up the biodiversity collapse by 1) reducing the cost of transportation, 2) making it easier to live/work in remote places (however clean!) and 3) reducing the cost of labor (which makes it muich easier to exploit nature for some quick bucks).

That's a long story but remember it took a long time for Elon to realize that climate change had become an existential risk (he admitted to recognize this long after he joined/funded Tesla). Since biodiversity collapse is happening now and keeps accelerating (NB: world leaders are only starting to work on CO2 emissions when biodiversity is dropping at a faster rate than temperature are rising...), I doubt Elon will change his position early enough, mostly because all his projects will be at the forefront of the new main threat. We'll see...

 

[Prunesquallor]

Elon continues to ignore the collapse of biodiversity, which is a much bigger threat than climate change already. None of his projects aims at preventing this catastrophe and IMO, both SpaceX and Tesla will speed up the biodiversity collapse by 1) reducing the cost of transportation, 2) making it easier to live/work in remote places (however clean!) and 3) reducing the cost of labor (which makes it muich easier to exploit nature for some quick bucks).

That's a long story but remember it took a long time for Elon to realize that climate change had become an existential risk (he admitted to recognize this long after he joined/funded Tesla). Since biodiversity collapse is happening now and keeps accelerating (NB: world leaders are only starting to work on CO2 emissions when biodiversity is dropping at a faster rate than temperature are rising...), I doubt Elon will change his position early enough, mostly because all his projects will be at the forefront of the new main threat. We'll see...

He probably thinks that human population decline will slow this.

A hostile AI would probably fix it.

 

[replicant]

He probably thinks that human population decline will slow this.

1. population decline will be far slower than pace of biodiversity collapse
2. it will take decades for global population to peak while biodiversity keeps collapsing

I don't think that he takes this seriously or that he even thinks about it (yet). He never mentioned it once and all his projects go against preservation of biodiversity (transitioning to renewable contributes very little to biodiversity collapse, let's no confuse the two things).

His main talking point to promote Starlink is that it's a moral imperative to make it easier to live in remote areas (aka help those who already live there... but how does helping remote communities not make it easier to anyone to move there?). Idem for making the Cybertruck a great tool to go encroach on wild spaces (it's slient and clean, so it's fine...). This really shows his blind spot, but his position can't last long given how things are evolving (badly).

A hostile AI would probably fix it.

Elon wants a friendly AI to defend humanity at all cost... so if we set rules so AI helps us enjoy things (with little consideration for our habitat and what our survival requires with regards to biodiversity), then AI can only be our enemy: a friendly one will help us kill ourselves while the hostile one will fight us to we don't kill ourselves. The AI can't save us in that regard.

Mod: A discussion that is interesting, timely, somewhat scary…and completely not appropriate fir this thread.
Take all further discussion elsewhere.

 

[nativewolf]

I disagree. Tesla's contracts with battery suppliers is very stable and the only reason their % is decreasing is because China is cranking out low end batteries for sub-par EV's. Tesla's 4680 battery road map is in addition to their contractual battery supply. There's a reason no other legacy auto maker is cranking out the volume Tesla is and that disparity is going to grow over 2022 and 2023, not shrink.

They are stable because Tesla can afford to buy them and the major OEMs are just getting started so at this point no huge problem. If VW has a sudden success with the next car, and that is likely, they'll take every battery they can get. Tesla is putting those so called low end batteries into their own cars so I'd be careful claiming there is anything different. Controlling battery supply is a great differentiator but it is very very ephemeral, in 5 years the world will be awash in batteries. Which is great. The battery advantage I see is not controlling the battery supply, which they don't, it is innovating and manufacturing excellence that enables them to roll-out things like the 4680 lines which are superior across every metric and offer a robust differentiator for the next 5-6 years. If the competition is relying on pouch batteries and slower to charge form factors than Tesla can actually offer service that matters to consumers. Faster charging, more reliability, no fires , longer range, density great enough to offer new products such as the semi and cyber truck, etc.

I would be very careful dismissing the ability of China to dump so many li-fe-X on the market that battery supply for anyone is stable. They have in other industries orchestrated dumping on such a scale as to bankrupt whole national industrial bases- its done by providing free money to anyone starting an industry in X field- I mean any idiot could get a 1 billion dollar loan to make a factory with the only requirement that the product must be exported. Beijing may decide that's a great idea in battery and then Ford's new battery plant will be producing batteries for 2x the cost that catl or whomever is selling comps, etc etc etc. This would also impact Tesla and not in a good way. As an investor I think the question is can Tesla innovate faster than the Chinese battery guys can scale to enable dumping...that's really the race I see. Control? China will very soon pretty much control supply. Even the 4680s rely on Chinese refined inputs. Korea is trying but lacks ability to process and refine the base chemistries at scale or to produce at the scale of catl, they recognize the issue and are moving but are late; that's probably the greatest hope for actual competition. The expiration of the li-fe patents may open up all sorts of neat innovations but most likely greatest impact will be $.

If I were the new German Govt I would by hyper focused on developing excellence in battery chemistry and manufacturing. It would play to a strong EU excellence in chemistry and german manufacturing and would help save some remnants of EU auto manufacturing. I'd start by ratcheting up tariffs on all non EU produced battery and require any foreign entity to have local partners and minority ownership. Old game but that's where the EU is, basically developing world status in battery manufacturing.

 

[nativewolf]

Troy has been wrong many times too. So are we going to censor him too? Forecasting is always dicey. You can’t censor them because they are wrong sometimes ( I am no fan of Troy. But he has the right to put wrong predictions out there)

I can't believe people are seriously talking about censoring. I mean...have they learned nothing? Nothing? How could you care about Tesla and want to censor anything?

 

[nativewolf]

Elon continues to ignore the collapse of biodiversity, which is a much bigger threat than climate change already. None of his projects aims at preventing this catastrophe and IMO, both SpaceX and Tesla will speed up the biodiversity collapse by 1) reducing the cost of transportation, 2) making it easier to live/work in remote places (however clean!) and 3) reducing the cost of labor (which makes it muich easier to exploit nature for some quick bucks).

That's a long story but remember it took a long time for Elon to realize that climate change had become an existential risk (he admitted to recognize this long after he joined/funded Tesla). Since biodiversity collapse is happening now and keeps accelerating (NB: world leaders are only starting to work on CO2 emissions when biodiversity is dropping at a faster rate than temperature are rising...), I doubt Elon will change his position early enough, mostly because all his projects will be at the forefront of the new main threat. We'll see...

Thank you very much for this excellent posts. The collapse of biodiversity is actually at the heart of my companies struggle. We are losing our Eastern decidious forests in the USA and we are fighting a pretty lonely fight...not that others don't recognize issue but I have yet to see another management entity really engaged in actively confronting this. However, on the grand scheme of globalization related biodiveristy loss we are simply a small problem, they are all small problems though. Thousand and thousands of species getting wiped out. Too far off topic for this thread but thanks.

Mod: As above, wrong thread

 

[ammulder]

They are stable because Tesla can afford to buy them and the major OEMs are just getting started so at this point no huge problem. If VW has a sudden success with the next car, and that is likely, they'll take every battery they can get. Tesla is putting those so called low end batteries into their own cars so I'd be careful claiming there is anything different. Controlling battery supply is a great differentiator but it is very very ephemeral, in 5 years the world will be awash in batteries. Which is great. The battery advantage I see is not controlling the battery supply, which they don't, it is innovating and manufacturing excellence that enables them to roll-out things like the 4680 lines which are superior across every metric and offer a robust differentiator for the next 5-6 years. If the competition is relying on pouch batteries and slower to charge form factors than Tesla can actually offer service that matters to consumers. Faster charging, more reliability, no fires , longer range, density great enough to offer new products such as the semi and cyber truck, etc.

I would be very careful dismissing the ability of China to dump so many li-fe-X on the market that battery supply for anyone is stable. They have in other industries orchestrated dumping on such a scale as to bankrupt whole national industrial bases- its done by providing free money to anyone starting an industry in X field- I mean any idiot could get a 1 billion dollar loan to make a factory with the only requirement that the product must be exported. Beijing may decide that's a great idea in battery and then Ford's new battery plant will be producing batteries for 2x the cost that catl or whomever is selling comps, etc etc etc. This would also impact Tesla and not in a good way. As an investor I think the question is can Tesla innovate faster than the Chinese battery guys can scale to enable dumping...that's really the race I see. Control? China will very soon pretty much control supply. Even the 4680s rely on Chinese refined inputs. Korea is trying but lacks ability to process and refine the base chemistries at scale or to produce at the scale of catl, they recognize the issue and are moving but are late; that's probably the greatest hope for actual competition. The expiration of the li-fe patents may open up all sorts of neat innovations but most likely greatest impact will be $.

If I were the new German Govt I would by hyper focused on developing excellence in battery chemistry and manufacturing. It would play to a strong EU excellence in chemistry and german manufacturing and would help save some remnants of EU auto manufacturing. I'd start by ratcheting up tariffs on all non EU produced battery and require any foreign entity to have local partners and minority ownership. Old game but that's where the EU is, basically developed world status in battery manufacturing.

So one of the YouTubers — perhaps Tesla Economist — made the argument that Tesla is using CATL LFP batteries, and still getting better range on comparable models vs. BYD using their own LFP batteries, which are allegedly more energy-dense than CATL batteries. (I haven’t verified these claims.) Why does this matter? It would mean Tesla has better efficiency(range-per-unit-battery-onboard), whether via car design or battery-management software or whatever.

If true, then having a supply of batteries isn’t enough to compete with Tesla — you either use the same amount of batteries as the corresponding Tesla and have worse range, or you use more batteries to match the range and either charge more for the car or receive lower margins. None of those options sound attractive, and that’s before considering product and manufacturing advantages of things like megacasting or software advantages like FSD that lets Tesla lower price or improve margins aside from batteries.

If China floods the world with batteries, presumably Tesla can still buy them. If they’re so plentiful and cheap, Tesla has options like ‘produce similar cars with better range, price, and software, cutting down 6-month order backlog‘ and ‘produce powerwalls and megapacks, cutting down 2-year order backlog’ and ‘use better margins to offer similar cars with 4680s or other Nickel-based batteries and offer dramatically better range at comparable prices’.

 

[lascavarian]

Gene Munster coming up on CNBC. Probably mention Foxconn building the Apple vehicle and the new factory purchase(?). Perhaps discuss Tesla quarter too.

edit: debt will impact tech negatively. 5G and AR benefit Apple. Bullish on FB Due to addictive behavior And global directory. No mention of Tesla really. See Apple at 200 in a year or so.

 

[nativewolf]

@ammulder- absolutely. Tesla is great the BMS side of things, a big deal as GM has discovered. You are describing the reasons why controlling the battery supply is not critical , my point actually. As an investor if you feel control of the battery supply is critical than watch out because Tesla won't control it. Hopefully they'll innovate fast enough to maintain advantage in the results that matter- range, costs, safety, new products.

 

[2daMoon]

Seems to me Tesla doesn't have the bandwidth to service a partnership and provide for the scale they need to grow their own business. If they had spare battery capacity then it might work. As it is, they are using every battery they can manufacture or source and still coming up short.

Are they going to ship even fewer Powerwalls in order to supply cells to a partner? Doesn't make sense.

I was thinking more about sharing strategies, advising them on design of their own giga-factories, effecting for others what they have demonstrated works through patent sharing, etc. Following the McDonalds' model of duplication of known working processes via franchise to speed up expansion toward the goal.

Perhaps sharing other resources that could be more easily expanded in production such as FSD, motors, etc. to help others move into the electric vehicle realm sooner.

If Tesla could get some help in the transportation space they could put more effort toward solar and battery production in the Energy space. This would get the world moving toward an economy based on sustainability, wealth equality, exploration, etc. faster than they can now.

This is the bigger picture from what I've gleaned so far of Elon's vision for the future.

 

[Knightshade]

My main issue with Troy's estimates is that I feel that there's zero purpose for putting out any estimates for the first half of the quarter. He starts off low every time and just increases throughout the quarter.

This was debunked the last time we had the "Troys numbers suck" conversation.

AD made the same, untrue, claim- and Troys own numbers that were posted going back years debunked it. Troy provided his start and end numbers by quarter, and the real number for each.

He was wrong to the HIGH side at start of quarter more often than the other way around (though it was like a 60/40 split)


I agree his overall numbers and results aren't awesome- but the bias people keep insisting is there simply isn't.