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

[RobDickinson]

We are already seeing (political) efforts to slow tesla down in the USA whilst helping out the competition.

Will any of it work? Unliekly, but it will drag out the whole thing for much longer which is not what we need, esp if you are taking a short position against toyota..

 

[Jack6591]

Goodbye.

 

[bruce4000]

I really have gotten the feeling the Fukushima disaster soured Japan on nuclear, and with that going away they picked hydrogen as the fuel of the future. Isn’t there a large movement for Australia to export hydrogen to Japan? I think Toyota is all about fuel cells because they think they’ll be awash in hydrogen in the future. (I don’t know why they haven’t noticed that no other major auto market plans to be.)

e.g. Australia warms to green hydrogen amid Japanese demand

Instead of importing hydrogen, you would think Japan would be building more offshore wind (which could power ev’s)

 

[Gigapress]

Listening to Joe Justice's videos, I have now also developed more confidence the culture and MO of Elon's "cybernetic collective" companies will last long after he leaves (or dies or is completely incapacitated, in his words).

Apparently, nearly all teams at Tesla form ad hoc by people self-selecting with whom to work on a particular problem. The entire organization of over 10,000 employees is more of an heavily interconnected small society of equals spontaneously optimizing their own tiny, well-defined slice of the mission. The social network at the company more closely resembles a densely connected graph than a tree. Everything is organized according to highly visible public interfaces, like APIs. This is basically a mix of object-oriented and functional programming of software to manipulate atoms. Hence why "errors in the product reflect errors in the organizational structure."

With clearly designed inputs and outputs, everyone in the company can see what everyone else in the company is doing. All data is openly readable by anyone in the company, which Joe J calls "radical transparency" as opposed to information hiding. This transparency, plus the continual churn between teams builds a wide web of trusting relationships between employees while also making it much easier to question the constraints on one's own input/output definition imposed by other teams.

Each 4-7 person team basically consists of representatives with all necessary skills for that task, plus some kind of robot, automatic test procedure, and usually some machine learning model and traditional software automation accelerating design.

It is clear to me that this kind of culture will long outlast the current leadership team. It's a cult, and not the kind that ends with the death of the founder. It's essentially a new religion rooted in radical rationality like this: The Methods of Rationality - LessWrong.

And here's the craziest part. Elon is essentially using his companies as ongoing experiments in social structure based on spontaneous self-governance, extreme personal freedom and responsibility, normalized altruism and issue-based direct democracy for the Mars colony.

Moral of the story: "How much can we do in parallel?"

 

[dhanson865]

Tesla is far more likely to use those small amount of alternative format cells for stationary storage products than for a different $25k variant where the 18650 supply would only amount to less than 1% of targeted unit output.

management said recently that when they have temporary excess cell supply (above car manufacturing capacity), those cells go into stationary storage shipments.

Fair enough but do you agree with dodger that it'll be 7 years before Model S/X stops using 18650?

When they stop using 16850 in Model S will it be because:

* They are still using 16850 in another product (car or stationary storage)
* They stop receiving them (Tesla and Panasonic agree on a date to stop making them)

Dodger is set on the idea that this choice doesn't come into play for so many years it's practically set in stone. Model S just uses 18650 for the next 7 years no matter what else is happening.

I disagree with that. I say it's more like 2-4 years and things will change.

 

[30seconds]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1444836840461279232

hmm,

$50B in 2021 rev with $5B EBITA.

Plus only $70B in 2022 rev

someone is going to need to revise numbers up

 

[dl003]

Q1 P&D released April 2 (Good Friday, markets were closed)- stock had closed Thursday at $661.75. Next trading day it opened up quite a bit ($707.71), intraday high only just above that ($708.16), intraday low at $684.70, and closed at $691.05, almost $30 up from pre-P&D.



Q2 P&D released July 2 after closing that day at $678.90. Next trading day it opened up slightly ($681.71), intraday high of $684, intraday low of $651.40-- and closed overall down almost $20 ($659.58) from before P&D.



So Q1, big pop for open, close was still up a fair bit.

Q2 tiny bump at open, close was down a fair bit.

for some context, Q1 est was 167k, actual 185k. Big beat.
Q2 est 208-210k. Actual 215k. Small beat.

EDIT: Q2 est was 195k. Actual 201k.

 

[deshkart]

. Worth watching.

 

[Tyler34]

for some context, Q1 est was 167k, actual 185k. Big beat.
Q2 est 208-210k. Actual 215k. Small beat.

Q2 was 206k produced, 201k delivered. Not sure where you got your numbers

 

[dl003]

Q2 was 206k produced, 201k delivered. Not sure where you got your numbers

Sorry, you're right. Q2 expectation was 195k, I think? And delivery was 201k. Point is it was a small beat.

 

[RobStark]

Perhaps the North American demand for large pickup trucks and SUVs is another “Galapagos” market, insulated from the rest fo the world and (until recently) was happily fed by the domestic OEMs…who now face the same issues (as the 1990s/early 2000s mobile phone makers in Japan) because of the introduction of the iPhone of cars.

North America is one very big muther ****ing Galapagos.

North America is over 20M units in a non-pandemic year.

Japan is about 5.2M units in a non-pandemic year with ~2M units being itty bitty cheap kei cars.

Darren Palmer, head of Ford electric cars, has said there has been many Norwegian customers asking about the Ford Lightning at Norwegian Ford dealers. Ford also sells the Ford F-150 Raptor in China.

Australia privately imports over 5k full size American pickups at great cost.

There is going to be significant demand for full sized electric pickups in rural Scandinavia/Europe,Australia, Asia. And if they get their electric grids in order S America and Africa too.

 

[Curt Renz]

Forbes - half hour ago: Automotive Among Industries Targeted For Greenwashing By European Group

Excerpt:

“The overall carbon footprint of an automaker is 80% use of product unless you're a Tesla TSLA 0.0%, assuming you're plugging in your Tesla to renewable energy,” said symposium participant Timothy Nixon in an interview. Nixon is CEO at Signal Climate Analytics. “It's great they're doing that and hopefully that provides an incentive for others to do it, but that's not really where the sweet spot is on climate leadership.”

 

[RobStark]

I heard the argument for zombie car companies, never profitable but being kept alive by governments... Imo these people don’t understand how much customers will prefer Tesla over a subsidized car.

It’s not like Japan could have paid Motorola $100/phone and Motorola would outsell iPhone or Android. They had a much worse ecosystem and a culture that didn’t innovate fast enough.

It’s not like VW will outcompete Tesla if they don’t have to pay German taxes or they get new a bailout every year. Disruption is coming, already Teslas are much better and cheaper to produce, with scale comes even better FSD and even cheaper to produce.

Soon Model 2 will cost $25k with 20%+ margins. 7 years later Tesla has increased their volume by 10x, likely they can sell that same car for $15k with the same profit. And the software would still be a lot better than a i1 for $15k after subsidies and better at every other metric.

Imo government bailouts will not save Toyota, they can give them a few years, but losses will be massive and in the end the company will still fall.


Would love to hear any good arguments for why the car industry will not go through the same disruption that mobile phones did.

Because cars aren't phones.

Cars are a much bigger part of the national economy.

Because the automobile industry is a far greater point of national pride.

It is naïve to think Japan, Germany and France are going stand idly by as all their automakers go bankrupt.

In Tesla's homeland, the US government is working to give Tesla a $4,500 disadvantage per vehicle sold. What won't foreign governments do?

Through April this year Tesla sold 588 cars in Japan according to the Japan Automobile Importers Association. Despite a large almost unused Supercharger Network.

 

[Artful Dodger]

That's really rich coming from someone who willfully refuses to read the (fairly short) authoritative document defining the meaning of marking a transaction as "short exempt" for the express purpose of sustaining your own false narrative. Head in the sand.

Spoiler

Probably should send this to snippiness

You have a mental/legal model of how the Market is supposed to work. I have made predictions where it would fail, and why. Both of the 5:1 share dividend and the S&P 500 addition provided field experiments to test that theory. My predictions held to within a few percentage points.

You have not dealt with that, only offered your mental framework, which is in fact now dogma (not evidence based) and the "party-line". It does not fit the evidence. That's the problem with your narrative: it leads to wrong decisions.

 

[Thekiwi]

Fair enough but do you agree with dodger that it'll be 7 years before Model S/X stops using 18650?

When they stop using 16850 in Model S will it be because:

* They are still using 16850 in another product (car or stationary storage)
* They stop receiving them (Tesla and Panasonic agree on a date to stop making them)

Dodger is set on the idea that this choice doesn't come into play for so many years it's practically set in stone. Model S just uses 18650 for the next 7 years no matter what else is happening.

I disagree with that. I say it's more like 2-4 years and things will change.

Would agree that they will likely transition Model S/X much sooner than 7 years, especially if 4680s show significant advantages in range and charging speeds etc.

 

[Electroman]

. Worth watching.

Just WOW !..

 

[Artful Dodger]

So, what happens tomorrow.
Typical UP UP UP then down to RED ?

Macros:

Nasdaq 100 Dec 21 (NQ=F)​

CME Delayed Price. Currency in USD​

14,715.00 -46.75 (-0.32%)​

As of 12:35AM EDT. Oct 4, 2021​

Market open.​

​

 

[Electroman]

Bribery and Corruption of Journalists and Media by the Automotive Industry - Fully Charged Show

Alex Voigt questions if the corruption of journalists directly impacts the representation of cars and manufacturers in the automobile sector.

fullycharged.show

Nothing surprising to any of us following Media and Tesla.

 

[lascavarian]

> Companies tell employees they can move to Austin or Miami or wherever and keep their SV salaries.
I agree that it's a lie.
I would add I haven't heard of any company that says the employees can keep the SV salary, the companies say, your salary will be adjusted to local market you move to.

Generally true. I transferred out of SF to the East with a modest raise for same job. SF Bay Area is the best lifestyle in the country IMO but real estate is awful as a result. Reward was getting 3x the house on 5X the lot In the East In 1981. I expect TX would be similar for some related to real estate.

IMO, seems TX is mostly related to SpaceX and Starbase and less about anything else. You can’t build Starbase just anywhere.

 

[22522]

. Worth watching.

This is textbook Public Relations. There is a reason Tesla does not spend money on it.