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

[MP3Mike]

Logistics also involves movement of the finished product. It's not obvious, at least to me, how loading the cars will be handled at Giga Texas. I think there may be a surprise coming (or, they'll just drive around the building to the big empty parking lot, haha)

I've been wondering about this too. In addition there is no test track yet. (Unless it was built inside out of our view, which seems unlikely.)

 

[henchman24]

My prediction... when Elon finishes his sales and taxes, he's gonna push that back on everybody calling for higher taxes at pretty much every opportunity.

 

[Ogre]

My prediction... when Elon finishes his sales and taxes, he's gonna push that back on everybody calling for higher taxes at pretty much every opportunity.

I certainly think it’s tone deaf harping on Musk about taxes right at this moment. Perhaps some of our congresspeople aren’t up on current events.

 

[JustSaying]

You are missing something. Debts have to be paid off before assets are distributed to the heirs, so taxes will be paid. And if you taxed the money withdrawn as a loan, do you credit the tax back when the loan is repaid? Or are you saying that they should be double taxed?

How would Home mortgages work? Car Loans? Credit Card Debt (loan against your "FICO" score)?
As income tax law is "Form over Substance" the Attorneys and Accountants would get a new revenue stream drafting loan documents that are unsecured until they are not...
JustSaying.

 

[RobDickinson]

It doesnt matter, he is a personality a majority hate because the media have told them to hate him, and he's rich.

Point scoring whilst ignoring real problems whilst getting funded by unions and fossil companies.

 

[thx1139]

Yes. Argued way upthread, but he faces an 8% additional tax on his option exercises under BBB.

Since he has to exercise by August of next year anyway, he might as well pay the lower tax rate this year (and consequently keep additional shares).

Even if BBB doesn't pass (or passes without the 8% hike), the timing doesn't hurt to finish all this year.

So he likely will sell more then once per week the remainder of the week. So he had ~10M left to exercise. So at the ~2M per transaction that would have been 5 left at the start of this week. He did another ~2M yesterday so 4 more before end of the year.

 

[Cherry Wine]

My prediction... when Elon finishes his sales and taxes, he's gonna push that back on everybody calling for higher taxes at pretty much every opportunity.

Of course he will - that is the primary reason he's doing it this way. He will go out of his way to make a point, impacts on the stock price be damned.

 

[Nocturnal]

For such a smart guy, Elon sure loves giving troll politicians what they want from him. Oh well.

Of course he will - that is the primary reason he's doing it this way. He will go out of his way to make a point, impacts on the stock price be damned.

That idea is baffling to me. As if Sanders is sitting there looking at the market, or TSLA and thinking "oh, that sure would hurt the stock market if all rich people sold." Instead it's "great, if the market crashes I can blame greedy wall street and people will beg for me to save them."

 

[Radish11]

Bruh, read the actual, legally binding 10-Q.

That $5.7B is also buried in their 10-Q under a segment note disclosure. Here I'll find it for you. Take your blinders off. Dig in to the details.

View attachment 744308

2020 - completely not profitable across entire business once you back out Argo AI revaluation
2021 - auto not profitable when you back out pension revaluations (all auto related, currently in Special Items), interest expense (all auto related, currently in stand-alone column), and selling expenses (almost all auto related, only a small portion has seemingly been attributed to Auto, and rest likely buried in Corporate Other); try to reconstruct the $5.7B to their actual Income Statement... you can't. You can almost reconstruct the Ford Credit amount of $3.7B to the penny. Where'd the rest of SG&A go? What is that SG&A supporting?

Moral of the story: Ford executive have done an excellent job investing in other businesses. Their Corporate VC team should be well paid. Their own business though... jury is still out on that one.

The special items isn’t included in the automotive profit. It clearly lists it as a separate item and even has a little footnote so there can be no confusion.
Ford made $5.7B in automotive profit. Lost $637M working on their mobility division, made $3.66B from Ford credit (which is absolutely a part of their core business, you can’t just ignore it because you want to) and lost $1.365B from interest expense and lost $964M for special items (restructuring, pension revaluation etc…) and made $96M on a Rivian markup. This totals to $6.5B in profit. And you can rest assured that number will be substantially higher at years end even excluding the roughly 10B mostly unrealized gain on rivian

 

[Prunesquallor]

I'm not disputing any of your points, I mostly just wanted to correct the incorrect prior statement and add some speculation about clever engineering. Of course a self-sustaining civilisation on Mars, especially with true terraforming as you seem to be alluding to, is no question far beyond current technology, but a small outpost could very well be soon within the realm of possibility. While "The Martian" has some inaccuracies, it is worth pointing out that even in the context of the movie or the book, the Mars mission was never about establishing a permanent presence on the planet and therefore there was no dedicated farming equipment. However, as the Dutch will gladly tell you, the most productive agriculture in the world does not need any soil at all, just a big hydroponic greenhouse, nutrients, CO2 and a moderate amount of sunlight. All of this should in the grand scheme of things be doable on Mars without too much difficulty (compared to getting there in the first place, at least). Any progress made in this regard is incidentally also very useful on Earth, especially when it comes to maximizing agricultural yields in inhospitable regions and establishing a true cyclic economy. Any aspiration that helps people achieve these goals is a good thing, even if the Martian settlement does not come to fruition within our lifetimes.

After "studying" various techniques for human Mars missions over many years, I had pretty much come to the conclusion that without near-miraculous technical advances, it was wholly impractical. But the relatively recent discovery of vast quantities of reasonably accessible Martian water (in the form of massive, thinly buried water ice glaciers) has changed my mind. Readily accessible hydrogen, oxygen and carbon is key. After that, it’s just energy, chemistry and large-scale Additive Manufacturing.

 

[Boomer19]

I'm starting to suspect that this broker is leaking Elon's daily sales plan to hedge funds. We've seen multiple sales days now where there was a large drop in the pre-market on zero news (literally 12-hrs before the SEC Form 4 was released).

Take for example yesterday, Mon Dec 13, 2021. There was a huge bear raid in the pre-market from about 9 a.m. causing the SP to Open at a $20 discount, followed by heavy short selling throughout the day (4x multiple on macros vs the more typical 2x multiple):

View attachment 744210

It's not the first time either that shortzes have jumped on the pre-Market on days when Elon was selling. But it's illegal for brokers to share private information on selling plans, right? Because they'd get in trouble with the SEC, right?

/S

do you think elon will opt to execute this style of plan again next go ‘round?

 

[Paul_SF]

PSA, before the mods start deleting your stuff: I’m sure there’s a thread about colonizing mars, if not can you guys make one for yourselves?

PS: check Nexus Aurora project if you haven’t and discuss it in that thread.

 

[Gigapress]

Trucks and containers are definitely out for Boring tunnels: they are too big to fit.

Boring Co is still working on freight tunnels with the same 12-foot diameter as their Loop, Pedestrian, Utility and Bare tunnels. A standard shipping container is around 8 feet wide and 8.5 feet tall. Some container varieties are slightly smaller. It's a tight fit but it is large enough, although I can't verify whether it's big enough after other design constraints are taken into consideration.

This summer they also had a leak showing a proposal for a wider 21' freight tunnel that could fit two freight lines.

(I think this will be a Big Deal in the long run and will add a big chunk to the total battery market of the future, especially if the tunnels can cross the Bering straight and thus ship freight continuously between Asia and N America at highway speeds--or maybe faster)

Products — The Boring Company

www.boringcompany.com

Elon Musk’s Boring Co. Pitches Double-Wide Tunnels

Boring Co. wants to transport freight, not just people.

www.bloomberg.com

Logistics also involves movement of the finished product. It's not obvious, at least to me, how loading the cars will be handled at Giga Texas. I think there may be a surprise coming (or, they'll just drive around the building to the big empty parking lot, haha)

I'd PREFER to see autonomous cars driving through dedicated tunnels, like will soon be operational at the Las Vegas Convention Center. FSD software, give it a preprogrammed map during initial assembly, move along little doggies...

Cheers!

For autonomous delivery to work it'd need to be full autonomous from factory to customer. Otherwise they'd still need to load cars up onto a truck for shipping. More efficient to just do that at the factory parking lot.

In the 12/9 video from Giga Shanghai the narrator says they're pursuing "the ultimate in zero inventory" (translated from Mandarin). Apparently they have already achieved stunningly low inventory on the production itself in Shanghai based on what I'm seeing in that video and others. And that's a lot harder to do than achieving low inventory in the shipping step of the process, especially considering that all Tesla vehicles are still made-to-order and they have a long order backlog instead of dealerships carrying months worth of inventory (in normal times, anyway; COVID shortages changed that).

Most of Giga Austin's production will be for Eastern US and Canada only and simply needs to be loaded onto trucks and trains instead of transoceanic boats. The distance is cut roughly in half compared to shipping from California. I would not be surprised if this means they can shrink the necessary size of the parking lot for completed vehicles waiting to be shipped.

 

[S3XY]

That doesn’t make sense, you are borrowing money and paying interest on it, which is non deductible. Why should you need to pay income tax over borrowed money? If you refinance your home, and take money out, do you pay tax on that money as well? No!

Because the whole point of borrowing against your stock holdings is to avoid selling it which would likely be a taxable event. Mortgages on your home enable you to have somewhere to live. It's not an obvious act to avoid a sale that would be taxable.

 

[Ogre]

Boring Co is still working on freight tunnels with the same 12-foot diameter as their Loop, Pedestrian, Utility and Bare tunnels. A standard shipping container is around 8 feet wide and 8.5 feet tall. Some container varieties are slightly smaller. It's a tight fit but it is large enough, although I can't verify whether it's big enough after other design constraints are taken into consideration.

If they had a tunnel which connected to a railyard, they could conceivably use sleds to offload supplies and send vehicles to be shipped. I wonder if they could effectively ship vehicles in shipping containers. It would save on returning empties and speed up loading.

 

[Gigapress]

I've been wondering about this too. In addition there is no test track yet. (Unless it was built inside out of our view, which seems unlikely.)

Test track is pretty small at Giga Shanghai:

 

[The Accountant]

Isn't 1.5M a bit on the low side? My thought is ~2M vehicles.
Adding 2 facilities which each should push out 500K by the end of the year & Shanghai at a rate of well over 500k/yr. Some Semi trucks coming from Nevada too. My thought is that Shanghai will do something like 800k next year unless there is some bottleneck preventing that? delivery trucks/paint line etc ..what is the expected current capacity of these factories? Fremont >500k. Berlin 300k min? Texas 300k min(2022) ... are the new factories not going to ramp faster?
With castings and shorter production times & lines I think these numbers are very underestimated as long as all pieces & batteries are available.

Shanghai delivered 145k in it's first year.
I can see an argument for a faster ramp at Berlin and Austin but I think 300k would be a stretch. . . .I would love for Tesla to shock the world though !!

My 2022 number of 1.5m vehicles assumes:
732k - Shanghai
510k - Fremont
146k - Berlin
146k - Austin

 

[Artful Dodger]

do you think elon will opt to execute this style of plan again next go ‘round?

I think we'll need to see the results of this go 'round before we can decide.

 

[Boomer19]

I am genuinely interested to know if anyone had any insight into this.

they’ll get govt money but it likely won’t be spent well. they’ll shower themselves in bonuses and dividends for sure. 50/50 it works out for some of them. for the failures, everyone else will hold the bag while the fully enriched escape and stay clear of the spotlight. sound familiar?

 

[WADan]

Those good people won’t be hurt if they’re paying attention to what’s going on with the company they work for and the one they don’t.

They have access to the same information we do. They can at any time make decisions and choices in their best interests or stick their heads in the sand and wait for it all to implode. They’re all responsible for themselves.

We can’t stop progressin, and yes many people will be hurt (especially older people). This is where social policies will come in to provide support for the less fortunate!