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

[TheTalkingMule]

Nope, those people have lived in "wildfire" areas for decades, and this problem has only gotten worse for 2 main reasons:
1) Climate change (it's hotter and drier here)
2) less maintenance to keep trees, etc. cut back - PG&E was taken to court on this one, lost, and declared bankruptcy to protect themselves against the judgement

#1 is a bigger problem to deal with, but #2 if done properly would mitigate a TON of the wildfire risk here.

Really? That's the solution a certain orange fellow proposed. You can't "clean up" a forest to cut wildfire risk.

This is decades of fire suppression in areas that need fire to maintain equilibrium. It gets worse and worse because the suppression builds up risk.

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

Well there's that bit about recession fears from the original email that spooked the market.

If that didn't exist and only the staff email went out, sp would probably be green.

Right......the email that has still yet to be seen. Even though the other 2 emails sent to the leadership team earlier this week were screenshotted and posted within hours of Reuter's reporting on them.

If we don't actually see a screenshot of said email, I'm going to think Reuter's took something from that email and essentially added in the recession fear part or the email doesn't actually exist

 

[NicoV]

Headcount =employees

Hourly workers=paid on an hourly basis. Must pay OT at 1.5x hourly rate if worked over 40hrs. Must have 30min lunch break unless a healthcare worker. These are all under the law.

Salary worker= gets paid at a specific yearly salary. Will get this money if the person worked 20hrs that week or 80hrs that week. Zero protection under the law.

In the US most salary workers are white collar because they have more autonomy and the company probably need said person to work beyond 40 from time to time and doesn't want to deal with OT.

So basically, salary workers keep their jobs if they work sufficiently>40hours/week, and the low performers get fired.
This is exactly the reason why I became a independent contractor many years ago: Companies taking advantage of people‘s willingness to work more/harder than agreed upon by their contract. In the USA, at least you may get stock options in return for that kind of behaviour, in Europe you get a nothing but a burnout.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

Well there's that bit about recession fears from the original email that spooked the market.

If that didn't exist and only the staff email went out, sp would probably be green.

Markets don't close for another 5 hours.

 

[JRP3]

If we don't actually see a screenshot of said email, I'm going to think Reuter's took something from that email and essentially added in the recession fear part or the email doesn't actually exist

It does very much sound like the way Elon would phrase it though.

 

[Mengy]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1532728341865943040

Reduce salary headcount and increase hourly headcount. Ramp is still a go

I notice Reuters left out some very important info from that email. Typical.

 

[henchman24]

Well there's that bit about recession fears from the original email that spooked the market.

If that didn't exist and only the staff email went out, sp would probably be green.

I doubt we'd be green. Whole market is trying to fall 1-3%... in step or only down ~4-5% would make sense in that case. Really though, since the 10% will be localized to salary... I'm not really all that concerned by it. We won't get the details, but 10% off the AI team would be my biggest concern amongst the salaried staff.

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

I assumed I would miss the bottom, but yeah.....zero outlets have any interest in clarifying their now 90% false narrative.

Was able to sneak in after seeing this email and sell my put spreads for next week. Not usually the case when info pops up clarifying something like this.

CNBC 5 minutes ago had a Roth analyst on talking about 10k layoffs. Riiiiight.

You know they're not going to update their reporting and the damage is done at this point.

Btw......all those 800 Call buyers from Wed lol......man what a beatdown on them

 

[gtrplyr1]

Just read the actually post from Elon. I'm not sure if there is anything else out there but if that is the only word ... those headlines are complete BS. That should not be any surprise to anyone here on this forum ....

10% across the board is completely different from what Elon's intentions seem to be .... wow ... F*&K Wall Street ....

BUY MORE

 

[Singuy]

So basically, salary workers keep their jobs if they work sufficiently>40hours/week, and the low performers get fired.
This is exactly the reason why I became a independent contractor many years ago: Companies taking advantage of people‘s willingness to work more/harder than agreed upon by their contract. In the USA, at least you may get stock options in return for that kind of behaviour, in Europe you get a nothing but a burnout.

Kind of yes. If you hire a bunch of salary workers and they all put in 30hrs to get the job done, then you are overstaffed. Ideally they should be hitting 40 or higher.

Typical salary worker gets paid way more, like 3x-5x more than hourly workers at Tesla.

 

[bkp_duke]

Really? That's the solution a certain orange fellow proposed. You can't "clean up" a forest to cut wildfire risk.

This is decades of fire suppression in areas that need fire to maintain equilibrium. It gets worse and worse because the suppression builds up risk.

Ok genius, it's not clear cutting a forest. It's LITERALLY trimming back trees that encroach too close to high-voltage power lines. They REALLY let maintenance like that slide out here, and it shows. Just down the hill from me we had a fire start from one of these HV lines and I could see the trees getting blown too close to the lines. Trees that should have been removed a decade ago.

This isn't rocket science, this isn't something NEW. Utilities have done this kind of maintenance since they ran wires on poles. This is blatant corruption at the power companies and failure to do this work. They find it cheaper to literally shut off power during high wind days than to do proper maintenance.

I literally live in a "high wildfire risk zone", it makes finding home insurance harder. This risk would be much much lower if utilities either:
1) cut back the trees as they have for decades in the past OR
2) buried the electrical lines.

Both are more expensive, far more, than just shutting off power, sometimes for days on end, when there are high winds.


EDIT - and to BE CLEAR - most of the wildfires in CA start from trees hitting power lines. It's not lightning strikes here, certainly not in SoCal where lightning is a rare occurrence.

 

[Blue horseshoe]

I notice Reuters left out some very important info from that email. Typical.

To be fair this appears to be a followup email to everyone and Reuters based their article on an email to executives. This is according to an additional tweet from whole mars.

 

[Knightshade]

Salary = management (white colar)
Hours = production staff (line, battery, etc. etc.)

So this "headcount cut" has nothing to do with production, and everything to do with leaning down management.

This is not entirely accurate.

Tons of non-management folks are also salaried... most relevant to advancing Tesla products would be a large % of IT staff, programmers, sysadmins, R&D folks, AI folks, etc... Those are generally relatively high paying salaried jobs without being management jobs.


One can certainly believe the management portion of salaried is who Elon is targeting here, but it's inaccurate to portray the divide quite as you did.

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

It does very much sound like the way Elon would phrase it though.

If Reuter's has the email, post it. They did for the other 2, but are not for this one. That's beyond suspicious

 

[wooter]

Recruiters are having a good week poaching Tesla staff.

Generally, in cuts like these, you want the bad people to leave, but in reality it's the good people that leave.

 

[Chunky Jr.]

The 10% reduction doesn't make sense to me. Tesla has tons of cash, so they can easily withstand any economic headwinds. Only reasons I can think of to reduce staff is because they think their costs are too high so margins are being threatened, or they grew too quickly and realized they didn't need as many people as they thought (or a combo of the two). I don't suspect a demand issue because they aren't cutting back at the factories. I suppose another reason could be as other people have mentioned that this is a rhetorical tool to force people back into the office (eg "we are laying off all remote workers")

I assume there will some kind of hit to earnings for the associated restructuring charge, unless he says they achieved their goal through attrition.

 

[mongo]

So basically, salary workers keep their jobs if they work sufficiently>40hours/week, and the low performers get fired.
This is exactly the reason why I became a independent contractor many years ago: Companies taking advantage of people‘s willingness to work more/harder than agreed upon by their contract. In the USA, at least you may get stock options in return for that kind of behaviour, in Europe you get a nothing but a burnout.

People hiring into Tesla are aware (or at least should have been) of the level of output expected; therefore, there cannot be any "taking advantage".
Also, the US salaried types usually do not have rigidly defined contracts, it's just at-will employment/ unemployment.

 

[GrandEnigma]

Leave it to TSLA that reducing unnecessary headcount is a negative for the company bottom line and investors per Mr. Market.

They are trimming white-collar jobs, not production jobs.

 

[jbcarioca]

From my copious TV-sports watching, the message Honda seems to be putting out in the US ads is "Don't forget us! We are still here and we have a lot of history and stuff making fun vehicles!" They frequently run an ad for no specific car, and it shows a CGI'd "virtual all-terrain race" of older and newer Hondas: motorcycles, 4-wheelers, race cars, SUV's, sedans, etc., racing forward into the future?
To me, the message is "Yes, we blew it on EV's, but please love us anyway because we are Honda and we were cool when you were growing up".
Not bullish.

Back in the dark ages of 1968 I bought Honda ADR's. Why? I had a Honda motorcycle that was really excellent transportation to my job in Thailand. Then a Honda executive showed me a Honda S600 coupe. It was dirt cheap 10,500 RPM on a dual overhead cam 4 cylinder, ran well and instantly replaced my motorcycle. A few days later I found out what an ADR was, what a share was, and put all my meager savings into that. It worked out well.

They stopped innovating sometime about three decades later. They did not survive the founder's enormous, Elon-like vision. We must be diligent to ensure that a similar fate will not befall our investments. Frankly, I think TSLA, SpaceX and The Boring Company will survive and thrive quite well for my remaining lifetime, at least.

 

[Nocturnal]

That was my first reaction as well. But this is Texas, soon enough the grid will be awash is way too much excess solar/wind.

All Tesla needs to worry about in Texas is storage. Huge, massive gobs of storage. Hopefully they are also compensated appropriately for saving this trainwreck of a grid.

Well, if GigaAustin builds say 2 million EVs, at an average kWH pack size of 100, that's 200 million kWh worth of packs. If 80% are sold outside of Texas, and if each pack is charged to 90% before shipping, that's 144k megawatts being exported out of the state each year.