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

[Tim S]

I’ve owned BPTIX for 2 years for the SpaceX exposure. Then it was 45% TSLA and 5% SpaceX, so I’m a little surprised to see the exposure drop to 31%. I suppose that is from buying other companies with inflows, as I don’t think Baron has sold any TSLA or SpaceX, but I don’t follow it closely.

I've owned BPTRX for over 2 years myself. I don't think they've sold any TSLA. The percentage has dropped because of the performance of TSLA in 2022 in comparison to their other holdings. For example, their largest holdings after Tesla and SpaceX, CGSP and ACGL, were both up in 2022.

 

[Cobbler]

Our famous prophet is capitulating.
So much for being an ultra bull.



View attachment 892220

$TSLA 90% up later, Chicken has gone full Greg Wester??
He perfectly sold at the top, still not too late to buy back in with huge profits.

 

[mongo]

Has there been much indication DOJO would replace human labelers? On the last earnings call it was mostly about increasing efficiency and reducing power usage per unit of training by using chips specifically designed for this rather than the NVIDIA H100s

As I understand it anyways

DOJO vs Nvidia is like AMD vs Intel, they are both processors, they can run the same programs just at different price/cost/speed/ energy usage values.

Autolabling is a miminally supervised ginormous (self reinforcing?) NN that identifies features from multisecond/ multiview/ multivehicle/ multipass data sets to feed to the FSD training compute cluster.

 

[NicoV]

This would be OT except that the interoperability of charging systems cannot be efficient without modern technology, with QR codes the better choice, although bar codes are an acceptable second choice.

In the White House link that was shared yesterday (FACT SHEET: Biden-Harris Administration Announces New Standards and Major Progress for a Made-in-America National Network of Electric Vehicle Chargers - The White House) there’s an interesting requirement:
“Drivers do not have to use multiple apps and accounts to charge, by requiring that a single method of identification works across all chargers;”
If you take that literally, it would mean that Tesla (as a charging provider) should implement a way to roam with all the other charging providers.
That’s actually a big pain point in Europe (probably more so than in the US due to the multitude of countries and languages). I have a wallet in my car with no less than 6 charge cards, most of them practically unused. I don’t want the get stuck in the middle of nowhere abroad wanting to charge at a charger that needs some specific charge card that I don’t have. Nowadays most charge card providers have widespread roaming agreements with each other (that was definitely not the case 7 years ago when I bought my first Tesla).

I always wondered why Tesla didn’t make a charge card to enable charging on other networks, using the same billing as for the supercharger network. This requirement from the White House seems to force Tesla to introduce something like that.

 

[Curt Renz]

Reuters through US News - 10:20 am EST
Utah Senator Seeks Allies in Push to Keep EVs Out of U.S. renewable fuels program

The headline editor incorrectly wrote biofuel ranther than renewable fuel. Thanks to jerry33 for catching that.

 

[lafrisbee]

SO I was reading twitter and found the one really smart guy when it comes to investing...








Jan

@jan_x7


Replying to
@alex_avoigt
As engineer in the German Automotive business, I do hedge my job with #TSLA. Ether I have a good job, or don't need to work. But I don't see a med to long term possibility to have a job in this sector... here in Germany, this emphasis my view.


6:00 AM · Feb 16, 2023·
6,954
Views

 

[jerry33]

Copacetic. But thinking about it, while having the charge port near the front of the car (and it looks like Lincoln is about to do the same) is contrary to where the fueling ports on cars have always been, in the rear of the car, be it left, right, or under the license plate. Why should the charge port for BEV's be any different? OTOH, while I understand why Tesla (and others) have positioned charging stations the way they have, to accommodate more rigs in a smaller space, fueling stations are laid out in a way to accommodate different port locations and also have retractable hoses. Perhaps that should have been considered by Tesla when they originally developed Supercharger locations.

Originally Tesla thought that other manufacturers would quickly step up to the plate. We've all seen how that went. I'm sure they thought at the time that Superchargers would be just one of many. Agreed they should change to allow more charge port locations, better trailer access, etc.

 

[MP3Mike]

Or the ones having the most limited number of keystrokes/hr.

I think that is covered by the "least productive".

You have to be really careful counting keystrokes. A company I used to work for used to have keystroke metrics, but some people figured out that you could just add periods to the abbreviations in addresses, then remove them to get keystrokes without actually doing any work. Then they implemented "productivity" requirements, i.e. you had to work x accounts per day. People ended up fighting over the "easy" accounts, leaving nobody working the "difficult" accounts.

There were also cases where people, that were very good at their jobs, would hit their productivity requirement after ~5 hours, so they would just surf the web, or read a book, for the rest of the day. (No point in working past the required number of accounts if you weren't rewarded in any way for it, and you couldn't really be punished because you had met the required metrics.)

 

[lukex4]

It would be, but I guess they will go for "the site being down", so if there is one working charger (even if it's not at the full charging rate, it's not down. Stupid way to do it, but that's my guess. I don't have a lot of confidence in them doing the right thing.

I wouldn't be surprise that's the way it'll be calculated... As a sys/net admin that's often how we would calculate our uptime. Even if the main fiber link to a remote site was down but the 3G backup one was up, the site was technically "up". Even if the users couldn't do *sugar* in reality..

 

[Christine69420]

WuWa has some interesting comments on his latest video from Shanghai:

Some time ago, some friends have been asking about the shutdown of Tesla's Shanghai factory. These days, we got the information that the Shanghai factory will be upgraded in batches by the end of February to meet the revised Model 3, which means that the production line of Model 3 will not be a complete shutdown and transformation. This time the upgrade is different from the past, simply to improve production capacity. So, we saw at the site of Tesla's Shanghai factory that the factory is still running normally.

Last year, the new Model 3 plans have been revealed, the internal development code "Highland", the main goal is to further streamline the internal design and thereby reduce the number of internal components, to achieve the goal of reducing production costs. It is said that this facelift includes the vehicle touch screen design, steering wheel design may change, part of the body shape, power output performance may also be different from the current model.

 

[Curt Renz]

Ya, this caught my attention. Is that 400 or some other mark?

It would curently be around $240, the upper end of the down trending price channel that commenced 15 months ago.

 

[AndrewZ]

I don't know that DOJO is replacing human labelers, it is their AutoLabeling development that is replacing human labelers. They talked significantly about how the AutoLabeling was cutting the amount of human effort required to label clips. That leads to one of two things, or a combination of both, fewer labelers or labeling more clips.

We already know they dropped ~200 labelers in California likely because of AutoLabeling. No reason to expect that they wouldn't cut the least productive labelers in NY as well. (Or ones not following company policies/procedures.)

Those ~200 labelers were dropped and the San Mateo office closed because FSDBeta on HW3 is all but done, and it coincided with the camera feedback button being deactivated + FSDBeta ceasing uploads to the mothership.

I haven't personally heard anything about this replacing the human labelers, but maybe I missed it somewhere. The human labelers are there to capture new stuff and feed it into the training system, which is currently NVIDIA H100s and aiming to be DOJO.

 

[jerry33]

Reuters through US News - 10:20 am EST
Utah Senator Seeks Allies in Push to Keep EVs Out of U.S. Biofuel Program

Why would BEVs want to use biofuels?

 

[Cobbler]

Congratz Elon!!

 

[Ogre]

This would IMHO be a way of Ford deleting debt and liabilities.

on splitting shares, it could be arranged so that the ICE company would carry the debt, old factories and the majority of the employees, with the new EV business relatively debt free. EV company will then hold most of the IP, brand and patents, much of which would then be licensed back to the ICE company (sucking more money out of the old ICE business)

The ICE business would then become unprofitable over time and ultimately go into bankruptcy, taking with it its debts, the unprofitable factories, and the costs of laying off staff - leaving the EV business clean and debt free and holding the valuable assets.

Should there be a share split, look to see who owns the debt, brand and the IP. This will tell the true story of what's really going on.

Yeah, it’s just not clear what happens to Ford (F) when it suddenly becomes a company with no future and a giant pile of debt. This might not pass a shareholder vote (and there might be lawsuits from creditors). I think the market is starting to understand that EVs are the path forward. Would you want to own any Ford if they peeled out the EV side?

In 2-3 years once this is even more obvious I think it’s going to be even more difficult to pull this off.

 

[Curt Renz]

Why would BEVs want to use biofuels?

The headline editor incorrectly wrote biofuel. He should have written renewable fuels. Thanks for catching that. I'll correct it.

 

[MP3Mike]

I always wondered why Tesla didn’t make a charge card to enable charging on other networks, using the same billing as for the supercharger network. This requirement from the White House seems to force Tesla to introduce something like that

They would only be forced to do that if they want NEVI funding. They can open select Superchargers without doing that, just like they have done in the UK, Europe, and Australia.

This is another one of the reasons I don't think Tesla will go for NEVI funding. They don't want to have to share a cut of Supercharger billing with other providers, and they don't want to share live Supercharger usage data with everyone which is another requirement for NEVI funding.

 

[JRP3]

Why would BEVs want to use biofuels?

At issue is a proposal from the Biden administration that would for the first time allow EV manufacturers to tap into a multibillion-dollar market for tradable renewable fuels credits under the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). EV makers, such as Tesla Inc, would be able to generate the credits, known as RINs, and sell them to refiners, if they can prove that the cars and trucks they make are being powered by electricity from plants that burn biofuels.

 

[wipster]

 

[bkp_duke]

This would IMHO be a way of Ford deleting debt and liabilities.

on splitting shares, it could be arranged so that the ICE company would carry the debt, old factories and the majority of the employees, with the new EV business relatively debt free. EV company will then hold most of the IP, brand and patents, much of which would then be licensed back to the ICE company (sucking more money out of the old ICE business)

The ICE business would then become unprofitable over time and ultimately go into bankruptcy, taking with it its debts, the unprofitable factories, and the costs of laying off staff - leaving the EV business clean and debt free and holding the valuable assets.

Should there be a share split, look to see who owns the debt, brand and the IP. This will tell the true story of what's really going on.

More importantly:
Ford's new EV company could 1) go dealerless and 2) go unionless (big hill to climb there, but possible).

Both of the above are massive profitability drags on traditional auto.