I certainly accept that hindsight is an unfair judge. Lots of people were asking the question...where are the batteries coming from though. It was not as if anyone that seriously looked at the business didn't see critical gaps, gaps that had to be addressed. So instead of addressing the gaps they waited til it was critical and then had battery day and got a pass from hard questions because they assured us that they had the capacity, heck Kato was going to produce just Gigs and gigs of capacity. In fact it was just a test lab. It's never produced squat relative to the hype of battery day. Neither has Austin.
Gary's fund is call the "Future Fund". He does analytics like a value investor and does not seem to understand the "Future" could be wildly different depending on success and execution of Tesla on several fronts. (FSD, Robotaxi, Optimus, Energy etc.) Like many here have stated TSLA is an option on future growth in these areas. You can try to put some numbers around these but looking at PE's ratios with decimal points is not looking to the future and is just getting lost in the short term details. Cash flow and short term earnings likely will take even more of a hit with all the investments in AI so expect many WS analysts to be pointing out TSLA's sky high valuation.
Indeed lots of people chasing the Nividia crown and also customers could not buy capacity. Literally..Nividia is sold out. That's when something being sold out is sold out. For now though it is Nividas time to shine. How they respond will be telling and an interesting business case.
I don't know what people mean by that "option on future growth". IMO that's long been priced into things. It's why GM and Ford have outperformed Tesla over 3 years. Tesla is priced as a growth company but is not growing. It is a very very dangerous place for a stockholder and all hype around 8/8 aside it has to grow. It's not a startup with no track record.
"Distracted CEO":
yes but the costs for solar+storage show a falling trend line so I think that's quite positive as a source of robust demand because storage ASP is declining and will soon plummet (I think). Currently the people wanting storage on the utility side are looking at needs other than simple LCOE, its the much more lucrative grid stabilization markets plus time shifting spot prices.
from me.
I haven't seen anyone mention Tesla doesn't have enough compute in the US for US AI, hence they are spending billions to build it out. How in the heck are they going to be able to process the exported data out of China even if it was allowed? Tesla is going to have to build a supercomputer for China anyway (or China can build one and rent out) to process that data since they will be as large of a market if not larger than the US. H100s are not the only game in town. Tesla has proven (as with the car chip shortage) chip shortages don't slow them down. They just write the software for different chips. There are Chinese GPUs but they are on a US blacklist so we never hear about them. I don't know if that means an American company like Tesla can't use them in China or those chips simply can't be imported, I believe it's the later.
Actually as an investor I am happy this is where it's at. By the end of next year there is a rumored huge oversupply of cells and Tesla can scoop them all up and not waste resources on developing cells except at a much lower capacity for research. It's also not a huge loss because the cell manufacturing they do have can still be put into cars at a profit.
