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

[henchman24]

Impressive strength by the market here. A real nice bounce off 11,700. Doesn't look like we will get a vix below 27, so that'll be the first thing to look for tomorrow.

 

[StealthP3D]

Again...Blue Origin beat SpaceX to actual orbital space and they did it twice with the same rocket before SpaceX.

Can we cut the BS? The difficulty in getting into orbit is not getting to a high enough altitude, it's getting there with enough speed to actually maintain orbit. The fastest Blue Origin has obtained is 2300 mph. Minimum orbital velocity is ~ 17,500 mph or 7.6 times as fast. Blue Origin was not even close to being in orbit. Do you know how much additional fuel must be carried to reach a speed over 7 times as fast? Hint: It's a lot!

There is no such thing as "orbital space" unless by that you mean "space". Because if there is significant atmosphere it will prevent the craft from maintaining orbit. Saying Blue Origin reached "orbital space" is meaningless when they were only travelling a tiny fraction of orbital velocity.

 

[thesmokingman]

Lucid is recalling ALL of their cars.... all 1,117 of them for a wiring issue.

Lucid recalls all of its 2022 Air EVs due to wiring issues

To prevent potential accidents caused by an unsecured wiring harness, Lucid has issued a recall for its 2022 Air EVs.

www.engadget.com

 

[M|S|M MYP]

Can you imagine how much road rash those rental rims will have...

Ur only swapping the tires

 

[growler23]

Absolutely, BUT this has all very real effects on the economy. High oil and commodity prices means people can't spend money on other things, meaning demand destruction, meaning recession. Car sales drop during a recession. Now, will Tesla's order backlog hold up during a recession? I don't know the answer to that, would love to hear other's thoughts. Obviously Tesla is the best positioned auto manufacturer to ride out a recession, but does that mean its stock price will rise or stay flat? And how sure are we that we either are or will soon be in a recession? Sigh...

Also agreed - see my earlier posts on [FF changeover == ripping out our own (economic and political) guts]. The economic pain will get worse, and will have wild swings from not too bad to awful. The industrial world is to a first-order approximation an FF-based economy, we have just gotten more efficient at being one since the 1970's.
Let's keep driving our EVs to places that welcome them, businesses that help us do so, etc. to help direct the transition. We are small potatoes but we are growing bigger as fast as possible in this fine (but often rather toxic) Martian soil.
To stay with your questions, I think recession or not, demand will stay high (for EVs and most other things) because high demand is what is fueling the current turmoil.
Stock price movement? Ye gads, I can only say long term upwards. Who knows week-to-week or even month-to-month now. Money printing machines have apparently gone the way of bell bottoms since Q1

 

[Ratanpara]

Interesting suggestion. probably correct as to BI — less likely both as to intent and success if attempted against LATimes and NYT. You might recall Tesla’s legally unsuccessful lawsuit against TopGear in the UK. The UK doesn’t have anything like a first amendment and Tesla had pretty good facts from what I recall, but they still lost. It is hard in the West to succeed on defamation claims.

But I am seeing Peter Thiel’s influence on Musk right now. Both politically and the new litigation threats. Peter Thiel famously (and probably rightly) took down Gawker The Most Expensive Comment in Internet History?. by litigation except he did it by proxy through funding Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit. I like Peter Thiel for this although am undecided on his other actions, including apparent support for Trump where he must think Trump and many of the people on his administration were corrupt or moronic or both — Yet he still seemed to think the pro-business-sort-of-libertarian policies were enough to allow him to hold his nose and support them. Maybe Musk is doing the same politically now.

And Musk might be looking to do a Gawker against Business Insider, or at least find something to get past motions to dismiss to do discovery on them.

I agree that the tweet recruiting for lawyers is not likely to get enough in house lawyers to fully vertically integrate litigation projects. Litigation work involves very lumpy work — all hands on deck for weeks at a time, and then sometimes just months of waiting doing very little — hard to staff that appropriately in house. Law firms can spread that lumpiness over many clients and allows them to maintain the staff needed. Also I think experienced law firm lawyers are compensated at levels that would be hard for Tesla to stomach even with generous equity comp.

In addition to Peter Thiel, I think Musk may also be influenced by defamation litigation in Asia which is much more a thing. The face-saving culture in Asia results in more, and more tolerance for, legal action against defamation. Whereas insults or out-right lies in the west would be ignored or tolerated with no legal recourse, in Asia, they can and more often do result in litigation. Tesla China is certainly doing that and Tesla US may try it more and while unlikely to ultimately win, as a plaintiff getting to the discovery stage and making the defendants miserable is sort of winning. As more typically a Defendant, Tesla is often on the losing side of that calculation but may be looking for more opportunities as a plaintiff.

Well Written, Tesla need to put a big fear in company like Business Insider who just want to write a Click Bait articles, Tesla need to protect its brand image. People who doesn’t follow Tesla closely end up believing lies of media.

 

[Drax7]

++1 because he could still do all the great things and keep his stupid mouth shut.

Relax something good always happens

 

[henchman24]

Nasdaq tested the daily high here right at the end and it took a significant sell to bat it down.

 

[Drax7]

Lucid is recalling ALL of their cars.... all 1,117 of them for a wiring issue.

Lucid recalls all of its 2022 Air EVs due to wiring issues

To prevent potential accidents caused by an unsecured wiring harness, Lucid has issued a recall for its 2022 Air EVs.

www.engadget.com

Aluminum wiring?
On a more serious note, we have negated downward price momentum, now
we could use some bullish news to help an upward rise.

 

[Big Dog]

Absolutely, BUT this has all very real effects on the economy. High oil and commodity prices means people can't spend money on other things, meaning demand destruction, meaning recession. Car sales drop during a recession. Now, will Tesla's order backlog hold up during a recession? I don't know the answer to that, would love to hear other's thoughts. Obviously Tesla is the best positioned auto manufacturer to ride out a recession, but does that mean its stock price will rise or stay flat? And how sure are we that we either are or will soon be in a recession? Sigh...

Not sure it is all that 'obvious'. IMO, GM & Ford are too big to fail. No way this Admin lets the US-based and heavily unionized GM or Ford crater. Tesla just needs a lot of cash to ride out the upcoming storm.

 

[Thumper]

Captain Video landed this ship regularly with down thrust in 1952. I couldn't wait for John Cameron Swayze to quit talking about the Korean War every day so Captain Video would come on next. This was a big improvement over Flash Gordon who landed bogusly like an airplane coming in for a belly landing.

 

[StealthP3D]

Not sure it is all that 'obvious'. IMO, GM & Ford are too big to fail. No way this Admin lets the US-based and heavily unionized GM or Ford crater. Tesla just needs a lot of cash to ride out the upcoming storm.

Tesla will sell every car they can make for a far as the eye can see, recession or no recession.

That's the benefit of having pricing power (the ability to drop prices to suit market conditions while still maintaining production volumes and profit).

In other words, a recession will not cause TSLA to burn through cash.

 

[henchman24]

Tesla is a cash flow machine right now... they don't really need their cash to survive the recession (if we have one). What it will do is give them a huge amount of purchasing power to secure better deals.

 

[dhanson865]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1529859815014637568

Just to give you the idea of the scale of updating autopilot/FSD features. This is a 1 minute TL;DW summation of the scale of FSD.

 

[JustMe]

Can we cut the BS? The difficulty in getting into orbit is not getting to a high enough altitude, it's getting there with enough speed to actually maintain orbit. The fastest Blue Origin has obtained is 2300 mph. Minimum orbital velocity is ~ 17,500 mph or 7.6 times as fast. Blue Origin was not even close to being in orbit. Do you know how much additional fuel must be carried to reach a speed over 7 times as fast? Hint: It's a lot!

There is no such thing as "orbital space" unless by that you mean "space". Because if there is significant atmosphere it will prevent the craft from maintaining orbit. Saying Blue Origin reached "orbital space" is meaningless when they were only travelling a tiny fraction of orbital velocity.

I might add that’s a hell of a lot more kinetic energy that needs to be dissipated - going as the square of the velocity.

 

[ZenRockGarden]

Lucid is recalling ALL of their cars.... all 1,117 of them for a wiring issue.

Lucid recalls all of its 2022 Air EVs due to wiring issues

To prevent potential accidents caused by an unsecured wiring harness, Lucid has issued a recall for its 2022 Air EVs.

www.engadget.com

And this is an actual "recall" vs Tesla constantly being ordered to turn of silly features with an over-the-air update. No fart-noises allowed!

 

[insaneoctane]

That's the benefit of having pricing power (the ability to drop prices to suit market conditions while still maintaining production volumes and profit).

Maybe wording, but they would not maintain the same profit. But I wholeheartedly agree in the storm of a recession, Tesla has the high margins to allow them to reduce pricing and maintain their aggressive demand and growth strategy...even in a recession with reduced automotive sales.

 

[Ogre]

And this is an actual "recall" vs Tesla constantly being ordered to turn of silly features with an over-the-air update. No fart-noises allowed!

I'm sure there will be a few from the mechanic when he's bending over to replace those cables.

 

[Ogre]

Tesla is a cash flow machine right now... they don't really need their cash to survive the recession (if we have one). What it will do is give them a huge amount of purchasing power to secure better deals.

Hugely important in the current market.

Right now when we're in a "Recession", having a big cash hoard to deploy to aggressively secure raw material and battery supplies will pay off muchly. They will reap the rewards for their tight finances and rock solid balance sheet for decades to come.

Ford, GM, VW, and Stelantis all have massive piles of debt and face rising interest rates which is going to severely limit their ability to chase down more cash to secure resources.

 

[PeterJA]

Tesla will sell every car they can make for a far as the eye can see, recession or no recession.

That's the benefit of having pricing power (the ability to drop prices to suit market conditions while still maintaining production volumes and profit).

In other words, a recession will not cause TSLA to burn through cash.

Also, I doubt Tesla will need to use its power to lower prices. The completion of FSD will skyrocket demand, because it will make all competing cars obsolete. Few luxury-car buyers will want a car that can't drive itself.

The price of Tesla hardware could decrease (due to manufacturing improvements) but the price of FSD will increase, according to Elon. He wants to make Tesla cars as affordable as possible, but he can't lower prices when demand skyrockets, as we are seeing already.