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

[Krugerrand]

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If this is a recent picture of Giga Shanghai and when I see the amount of meters soil on the NE part, it confirms my thoughts that this is prestressing like described in post #291,032 .
This is going on for at least 3 months now, but like @c041v has pointed out later, there is no way of knowing how far Tesla is in the process of prestressing.
We will have to wait until we see trucks and dozers taking away/spreading out the meters of (probably) sand, after which we will see the actual building starting to take place there.
Taking into account that the building of a factory takes around a year, the earliest it will be in operation is Q1 2023.

No idea what you’re looking at. All I see is Potemkin Village.

Remember when that was being flogged? And yet, all those people STILL have a pulpit. WTfignewton is wrong with people that we allow the liars and their deceptions to continue? There should be consequences and punishments so as to discourage others from following suit.

 

[Tyler34]

I had a profound thought last night after a few drinks. It is my opinion that Elon and co purposely upped the 1 time charges this quarter so that the QoQ operating margins would continue to increase sequentially even with new factories coming online. Elon did not have to do his options exercise last quarter and Tesla did not have to take the full 250m hit from elons package last quarter. I believe this was a big brain move by Zach so that we can have the narrative of "Tesla was able to increase operating margins while ramping 2 new factories. They are truly juggernauts of business." HODL

 

[kanweg]

But its the awe-inspiring BREADTH of the opposition thats mind boggling: From NY Times, to CNBC, to Bloomberg, to Airanna Huffington, to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. He11, they even got the founder of the amazing "Climate Progress" blog, Joe Romm, to write some hit-pieces on Tesla cars not being good for the friken environment!! And now, POTUS.

This CAN NOT be a coincidence. There is too much coordination, and common messaging. This is a well-funded and CENTRALLY-run PR campaign with the sole objective of destroying Elon Musk and killing Tesla before it gets too big to be controlled. Don't fool yourself; those same 'environ-mentals' at NABU in Berlin are funded by whoever is doing all this. We may never find out who it is responsible, but I'll wager that JPMorgan knows (and took some of their $$$).

Luckily for us, Elon won't quit, and he's winning. As Uncle Jack used to tell us in his Friday 'fireside chats', one man has them surrounded, out-numbered, and out-gunned (R.I.P. Jack). Thanks for all the thankless sh!t you put up with Elon, to make this work. Love you, Brother.

/rant

I came across this YT movie by Greenpeace on the stranglehold of big fossil on politics in Australia. It is as interesting as the family tree of someone you don’t know, but the number of links is staggering.

Perhaps this research should be done for the US as well.

The Juice media (see YouTube) frequently makes satirical (and very funny yet very sad) movies on the subject.

 

[capster]

It seems to me that the Optimus Sub Prime development project is not closely aligned with mission of Tesla. Some will disagree of course.

It may be prudent to consider possible scenarios where this project is split off as a separate business entity in order to more properly recognize value.

Would this make sense and how would Tesla shareholders benefit If this made sense?

If Optimus Sub Prime can drive ICE cars, that may encourage more ridesharing. That would increase utilization of those cars leading to reduced demand for new ICE cars. That, in turn, would eliminate the commitment to future emissions that each new ICE car entails.

Maybe there would be more total ICE miles driven for a while, maybe not. Would an improvement in emissions net out? Somebody’d need to model it.

 

[BriansTesla]

AFAIK Tesla has already created and staffed a design center in China tasked with designing the smaller and less expensive next model.
I didn't hear anything on call saying they will close this center or retask it. I expect it is a modest cost to keep it working (but not rushing) to complete and refine the Model 2 design. I agree extra time optimizing the design will be helpful and pay off in bringing it to production should delays in Robotaxi bring it back into the product roadmap. But I don't believe there is much risk needing to be reduced.

Cybertruck is a new product. Model 2, if Tesla chooses to produce it will be a follow on product. It will build on Model Y manufacturing improvements,
not require major new ones. I.e. the same model Gigapresses will use new molds to cast front and rear assemblies. A smaller size structural battery pack is not a never before developed pack, it's a smaller version of what 3 and Y use. Also extra time means the economies of scale from ramping M3 and MY help you in meeting cost targets. Especially the continued reductions in 4680 battery costs.

I think that 2 years from now, if Tesla decide they need Model 2 to continue growing at > 50%, they will add new buildings and lines to the now 3 state of the art Giga factories and have M2 ramping faster than many imagine.

I believe that Elon has decided that the Model 2 will not be designed to have a steering wheel or pedals, so further development and rollout will coincide with the success of level 4-5 of FSD. No sense in hurrying up the mechanical parts right now.

 

[EVDRVN]

It just dawned on me (apologies if this is obvious) that the factories Elon talks about scouting this year….probably at least one of those isn’t going to be a vehicle factory.

I heard from a good source one of them will be a B&B factory for the new upcoming supercharger station changes.

 

[MikeAtkinson]

Screenshot from Battery Day:

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Yes, they said they want to develop a $25k car several times, but I don't think that it was ever mentioned as being in development.

we are confident that long term we can design and manufacture a compelling $25k electric vehicle

 

[BitJam]

FWIW, perhaps way OT, the New York Times asked me why I recently cancelled my subscription. I said:

Why do you spread lies and misleading negative stories about Tesla? Are you against US made cars? Against US innovation? Are you a tool of the corrupt UAW? Do you honestly think US legacy auto has even a remote chance of surviving? Please do some legitimate research instead of spreading lies and innuendo like a paid YouTube shill.

I'm left wing. I've held my nose and voted Democrat all my life. But I'm disgusted by all the anti-Tesla nonsense from the NYT and the Democrats. It reeks of corruption. Worse, it reeks of stupidity.

The politicians I've written to ignore me. Maybe the NYT will listen. I'm holding TSLA, not my breath.

 

[BitJam]

I tend to agree. Elon often said in the past that he was unhappy that more people couldn’t afford his cars. Well, evidently more than he thought can. Prime directive says replace as many ICE as possible as soon as possible. Blasting out Y/3 to the max currently seems to be the strategy.

Absolutely! I bought a Model Y LR last summer. Since then the price has gone up $5k and the delivery delay has blossomed from 1 month to close to 1 year. Demand is so great that used MYs cost more than new ones. MY prices and demand were even lower when Tesla announced the Model 25k. Tesla did not anticipate such a large jump in demand so soon.

Even after raising prices, Tesla can't make enough Model Ys to keep delivery delays reasonable. It would be utter madness to undercut the current models. Their margins would go down and delivery delays would go through the roof.

 

[Thekiwi]

A couple of thoughts on "service & other" (S&O),

First an observation : there appears to be some annual effect going on in the S&O line. The Q1 as a % of auto is higher than other quarters. Given that Q1 is a low-driving-miles quarter you'd expect that Supercharger income to be reduced. So that would mean that service income is up in Q1, which might make sense. Now it is possible that Covid-19 has messed the driving-miles-per-quarter and corresponding charger use, but anyway I throw it out as an observation. If we had other information we could probably intuit something about S&O fixed costs, and relative profitability of sales (presumably always -ve) vs service vs chargers.

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Another observation is of course that it has moved into positive GM% territory earlier than my own forecasting had assumed (I like being too pessimistic, if only that was also the case in Energy).

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So .... a question for people with industry experience. In a typical legacy auto dealership,
1) How many cars are sold each year,
2) How many cars are maintained each year,

In other words how well is Tesla doing by comparison with a typical legacy outfit ?

View attachment 761778
Whilst I'm at it, here is how the charger situation is evolving. Personally I would prefer to see the trend reversing as it makes me worry about the qualitative user experience. I'll admit that the charge-rate improvements might be occurring at a faster pace than the deterioration in the connector contention ratio, so that the effective contention ratio is still satisfactory. But until one can see more data that is not discernable (at least by me).

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“Services“ also includes used car sales by tesla, and they have benefitted from strong growth in used car pricing recently which perhaps also contributed to their positive gross margin number for the quarter for that reporting segment.

 

[insaneoctane]

I struck up a conversation here in Florida today with someone from Switzerland. His son is about to graduate college there, and I asked him what his son plans to do after graduation. "He wants to work for Elon Musk. But he knows how unlikely that is, because everyone wants to, and it's super competitive to get a job at one of his companies."

I am in agreement with the many posters here that Musk is a poor public speaker, particularly on earnings calls and product launches. He rambles, he digresses, he mumbles.

Yet despite all that (or partly because of it?) the graduating class of 2022 is completely enamored with him. So, before you post another rant about Musk's shortcomings, ask yourself this: How many people in this world want to work for you?

Reading your reply, Tesla's advantage of attracting the best talent really sunk in....

So many engineers (and other fields) are flocking to work for an Elon Musk company because of HIM. His:

• Leadership
• Talent and first principals logic
• Vision to do hard and challenging things
• Vision to do important and consequential things
• Involvement and Work ethic
• Good character ; real, honest, humble

I'm sure there are many more qualities, but these are the ones that strike me as unique and drive the best talent out there to gravitate to our Tesla....Giving them the opportunity to choose from the "cream of the crop". They want to be a part of something great. It almost doesn't seem fair...

 

[WADan]

I finally got around to reading the transcript of the quarterly earnings call. Now I understand why the market was so unhappy. I was super annoyed with Elon's comments about self-driving. I mean, we've all heard about the benefits of autonomous driving, ad nauseum. This is the most hyped vaporware technology in Silicon Valley history! I don't need another hype talk from Elon!

Just deliver the damn thing!

It's not just Tesla. Google/Waymo has been overhyping self-driving cars longer than Elon. GM/Cruise has made overpromises (full robotaxi rollout in 2019!) as egregious as Elon. Nowadays the autonomous car hype talk just gets eye rolls around Silicon Valley.

It's a whole thing of Elon poo-pooing Tesla's actual programs while hyping up vague projects in general AI, humanoid robots, and *groan* autonomous cars.

I agree. I am sick of hearing “FSD, it’s here it’s here” for how many years now. We just need to watch all the videos on YT to see how far away this is going to be (BTW, I hope I am wrong).
Since the beginning of my working life as a computer person (IBM 360 mainframe, punch cards), AI was supposed to make us, human programmers, obsolete. Yes, computer has gotten much more powerful, and NN is a recently development, but programming remains the most lucrative job. I think I understand why many people hate Tesla due to this FSD hype.

 

[UnknownSoldier]

FWIW, perhaps way OT, the New York Times asked me why I recently cancelled my subscription. I said:

The politicians I've written to ignore me. Maybe the NYT will listen. I'm holding TSLA, not my breath.

The NYT doesn't care about you. Their puppet masters pay them way more in a day than your individual sub would over a lifetime.

 

[insaneoctane]

Yep, I recall it was over 150 a few months back but Disney's SP has also been taken to the woodshed as appropriate.

To be fair, their forward looking PE is 25....

 

[insaneoctane]

I tend to agree. Elon often said in the past that he was unhappy that more people couldn’t afford his cars. Well, evidently more than he thought can. Prime directive says replace as many ICE as possible as soon as possible. Blasting out Y/3 to the max currently seems to be the strategy.

Seems like per the earnings call, EM thinks he can get more price-sensitive-Tesla-seeking people into Tesla EVs quicker via FSD and robotaxis giving them rides vs ramping and selling a new cheaper vehicle. I am parsing what I think EM believes...don't shoot the messenger!

 

[woodisgood]

Reading your reply, Tesla's advantage of attracting the best talent really sunk in....

So many engineers (and other fields) are flocking to work for an Elon Musk company because of HIM. His:

• Leadership
• Talent and first principals logic
• Vision to do hard and challenging things
• Vision to do important and consequential things
• Involvement and Work ethic
• Good character ; real, honest, humble

I'm sure there are many more qualities, but these are the ones that strike me as unique and drive the best talent out there to gravitate to our Tesla....Giving them the opportunity to choose from the "cream of the crop". They want to be a part of something great. It almost doesn't seem fair...

It‘s why I went into medicine. Obviously Tesla and Elon’s other ”save the world” endeavors didn’t exist when I was making career choices. If only I could turn back the clock 20 years!

Heck I still might try.

 

[82bert]

Probably wishful thinking, but Minneapolis is currently discussing a portion of downtown/uptown in regards to widening the sidewalks, single lane roads with little street parking starting in 2024.

Are they seeing the future Elon sees with less need for parking as robotaxis come and go, constantly driving around with little need for parking, or just coincidental. I’m guessing coincidental, but it will be interesting to see how cities transform. Lot of small businesses freaking out about potential for little street parking.

 

[Abergdc]

I agree. I am sick of hearing “FSD, it’s here it’s here” for how many years now. We just need to watch all the videos on YT to see how far away this is going to be (BTW, I hope I am wrong).
Since the beginning of my working life as a computer person (IBM 360 mainframe, punch cards), AI was supposed to make us, human programmers, obsolete. Yes, computer has gotten much more powerful, and NN is a recently development, but programming remains the most lucrative job. I think I understand why many people hate Tesla due to this FSD hype.

Indeed.

The history of AI is littered with episodes of radical over-optimism. The reality is that narrow AI has made a ton of progress, but it sounds very naive to talk about how FSD has solved (or even is solving) general AI (not that Elon says that.) or, given the evidence before our eyes, that FSD level 4 is close.

And while one or two or three years of gross over optimism about FSD are maybe understandable, by now I cannot avoid worrying whether Elon’s understanding of AI as applied to FSD may be fundamentally flawed. By now surely it’s not enough to say”it’s harder than I thought.” I mean, that was obvious years ago. But the same forecast errors are
repeated. And there is zero evidence that he’s adjusted his mental model.
I’m a huge Tesla (and Elon) fan and have the FSD beta. I do experience occasional wonderful drives. I agree/really hope that evertually, with the gradual progress we see, we will realize we are at level 3. I’m excited to see. But it is idiotic in many circumstances, and wonder how how many years it will take and whether the hardware can do it. So until we do see, we have to have to ignore our lying eyes about “robotaxis” and cars without steering wheels.

The robot is cool, but I see no evidence yet that the FSD code will do the trick. The perception part is important, but the driving/path planning uses traditional algorithms, I understand. If so, they have a gigantic amount to figure out in terms of making the robot useful.

I personally have zero interest in a car without steering wheel, even if level 4 ( level 5 seems hard to imagine for many years), and partly for that reason I find convincing the points others have made about the limited market for “robotaxis.”

This call reminded me of the panicky investor during the model 3 ramp where he first emphasized robotaxis and all that, which seemed at the time (and in retrospect) like a deflection from the then-pressing ramp challenges.

So I was also very distressed by the call, even before true market reaction (of course I didn’t sell!).

 

[Singuy]

Interesting, some talks that fed may not raise rates because atlanticfed's estimate for 1q 2022 GDP growth is 0.1%. Aggressive rate hikes = instant recession. Perhaps partial reason for Friday's rally.

GDPNow

Provides a

www.atlantafed.org

 

[Discoducky]

I wonder that Andrej is talking about?

Edit: Obviously

https://twitter.com/x/status/1487511477149831169