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

[RobStark]

The safety of your reproductive system is absolutely dependent on Apples being manufactured correctly...unless you don't mind exploding phones near your di%k.

Having lithium ion batteries not explode is so simple even emerging market economies can do it.

 

[SPadival]

Just out, Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas is now expecting a recovery in demand for the remainder of the year and into 2020 with a 29% potential upside for the stock price.

“While demand has disappointed vs. our expectations this year, we believe the weakness is largely temporary. In October 2018, we had expected 412k total Tesla units delivered for 2019. By February we had revised our 2019 delivery forecast to 380k units. Today, our 2019 global Tesla unit delivery forecast stands at 347k units. Our current year unit volume has been revised down 16% since October. Over the same period, our 2019 group revenue forecast has been revised down 19%. Looking to 2020, while our forward unit volume forecast has been revised down 11% since October, we still forecast a 39% growth in volume to 482k units. Additionally, we forecast 29% revenue growth in 2020, driven by global availability of the Model 3 in markets like China, leasing and a refreshed Model S and X. We forecast further revenue growth in 2021 driven by the introduction of the Model Y. For the remainder of 2019, we expect a significant sequential improvement in demand driven by: continued European ramp, greater availability of leasing, Model S/X refresh, introduction of lower priced models and a number of price reductions. These drivers confront what we expect to be a continued phase-out of regulatory tax credits, rising availability of second-hand cars and less competitive imports (i.e. 40% import tariff) to China before the start of local production. Heading into 2020, we expect the key demand drivers to be heavily dependent upon start of local Chinese production and the Model Y intro.”

Did you stumble into parody accounts of Bro Jonas on Twitter?

I’m moving on to eight acres near Byron Bay. I will collect zero emission farm and building equipment and hire it for nominal sums to farms in the region.

Mate, leave one acre for me.

 

[RobStark]

At the time, 2008, the Model S hadn't been released, which was the vehicle to upset the most Mercedes sales.

They also purchased motors and batteries from Tesla for a number of years thereafter for their own vehicle. The $50 mil saved Tesla, but is a middling amount for a large corporation such as Daimler. Perhaps they expected to possibly turn Tesla into a supply making only company of theirs, if Tesla continued to struggle to make it's profit? IDK. I'm not an exec.

Now, for Ford-Rivian; I just don't see Ford being ok with enabling a company to unsurp their Truck strangle hold. Perhaps they bought in just enough to get a hold of the IP.

It was already in the secret master plan. For everybody to see.


Whitestar (Model S mule) was already roaming about 5 months before Daimler gave Tesla a dime.

https://jalopnik.com/tesla-whitestar-sedan-powertrain-mule-caught-lurking-ab-397967

Tesla will "unsurp" Ford's stranglehold on truck market anyway.

Or GM or whatever.

Ford buying enough of Rivian's stock to get 1 of 7 seats on their board doesn't get them Rivian's IP.

It likely means Rivian will sell Ford their skateboard for Ford to put a body on top of.

 

[Fact Checking]

I am confident in two things:
1) anyone remotely curious and looking at the financials will quickly discover the COGS for the model 3 is remarkably high, and in line with all the claims I have made with little math required or little assumption required. It takes almost no time to investigate so I recommend you do it yourself.

Again, you offer no actual numbers to back up your Model 3 margins claims, only vague innuendo, offered in a condescending tone.

I gave specific figures of roughly how much even the GAAP margin improves at higher production rates (and Doggydogworld tentatively seemed to agree with that particular figure), but I also outlined how some of the GAAP expenses are artificially high due to past investments, and that while they are valid to include in GAAP income analysis and ESP estimates, it's not valid methodology to include all of them in break-even analysis.

You offered no counterarguments whatsoever.

I highly recommend both neroden (although I find flaws also), and doggydogworld (who so far seems pretty spotless).

Agreed there.

2) that factchecking is one of the least competent and most diversionary members of this board specifically because he operates not from evidence to conclusion but the reverse almost every single time, not to mention his incredibly fast movement to conspiracy talk whenever threatened which is a low probability conclusion.

Uhm, thanks? Care to cite examples of my "conspiracy talk"? Are you trying to distract with personal attacks against me?

 

[AcesDealt]

You really don't know what you are talking about there. Contemporary AI's:

• are self-learning in less than a week to play better chess than the best human chess players,
• are self-learning to play better GO than the best human GO players,
• are self-learning to play better poker than top human poker players.

Literally 100% of the examples you listed are false. You could have listed some lesser known game that nobody has bothered to cover with an AI yet - instead you had to mention GO and poker, the games were AI's are already (crushingly) better than humans including those sector experts who spent a lifetime playing only that single game ...

Not sure what you meant under 'Brute force algorithm', but unless you back it up with links I'll just assume it's gibberish too.



False.



While of course we don't know the future, we do know that your facts, your premise and most of your conclusions are false.



Apparently Intel thought that MobilEye's custom ASIC that has a fraction of the NN inference performance of Tesla's new AI chip was enough of a differentiation to pay 15 billion dollars for.

But yeah, I guess this is the false narrative you wanted to inject into the discussion. Is this another burner account, or are you genuinely this confused about all this?

You really don't know what you are talking about there. Contemporary AI's:

• are self-learning in less than a week to play better chess than the best human chess players,
• are self-learning to play better GO than the best human GO players,
• are self-learning to play better poker than top human poker players.

Literally 100% of the examples you listed are false. You could have listed some lesser known game that nobody has bothered to cover with an AI yet - instead you had to mention GO and poker, the games were AI's are already (crushingly) better than humans including those sector experts who spent a lifetime playing only that single game ...

Not sure what you meant under 'Brute force algorithm', but unless you back it up with links I'll just assume it's gibberish too.



False.



While of course we don't know the future, we do know that your facts, your premise and most of your conclusions are false.



Apparently Intel thought that MobilEye's custom ASIC that has a fraction of the NN inference performance of Tesla's new AI chip was enough of a differentiation to pay 15 billion dollars for.

But yeah, I guess this is the false narrative you wanted to inject into the discussion. Is this another burner account, or are you genuinely this confused about all this?

The funny part here is I could theoretically eviscerate you but I'm not sure why I should bother.

 

[dqd88]

I thought that choice of words very odd. What other CEO uses the word cash burn about his own company? I don't know why, but it struck me as odd and clearly intentional. He certainly knew the email would leak. It's easy to deduce what would follow. Why would he intentionally do this? I really don't know, but there is that damn wink just a week or two later...

"Cash burn" is very common in silicon valley/startup/VC speak, which is in Elon's background. So it didn't feel odd to me.

 

[Compton]

I highly recommend both neroden (although I find flaws also), and doggydogworld (who so far seems pretty spotless).

Doggydogworld is my new favorite contributor on this forum. He's objective, well informed and most often right. There are several other writers here with an enviable (or astonishing) amount of knowledge but without the objectivity.​

 

[Right_Said_Fred]

Does anybody have a link to the Adam Jonas’ analysis?

 

[AcesDealt]

Care to cite examples of my "conspiracy talk"?

Is this another burner account, or are you genuinely this confused about all this

Duh. Not a burner account.

You contribute a lot. I will try to take what is useful but I really suggest people be careful because the rationalization is very strong with you.

 

[BioSehnsucht]

Anyone guessed at pickup production rates yet given that $50k sounds like it is priced for serious production (even accounting for it's polarising looks)?

If they do this by 2022:

M3 - 8k / week (assume drop from 10k?)
MY - 12k / week?
Pickup - 5k / week?

That would be a 400% increase from 6k today (not including S/X / Roadster / Semi). ASP (3, Y, pickup) ~ $55k?

Pickup at 5k/week might be selling the pickup short, assuming it has any level of success. I am having a hard time finding recent numbers but in 2014 there was over 300k trucks sold in Texas. 5k week would be around 1% of Texas truck sales. Nationally 5k will almost certainly not be enough.

If fleet managers believe the TCO story of BEV trucks for fleets, 5k/week might not even sustain the desires of commercial fleet operators.

Granted, there'll be little to no interest in NA sized trucks anywhere but NA, so at least they won't be splitting production between NA and EU / Asia / etc. 5k/week though is probably a good size to start at, so you can keep demand pegged, and get costs under control, then add another 5k/week line. If they need more than two lines though, will depend on how well they penetrate the toxic masculinity infused non-commercial truck market.

 

[BioSehnsucht]

Having lithium ion batteries not explode is so simple even emerging market economies can do it.

Maybe, but - to play devil's advocate for a moment - Samsung had a few problems at one point, so you can't rule out Apple doing so either.

OF COURSE the decision to build in China or not has a lot less to do with that than how much QA you're willing to pay for and the quality of your initial engineering, etc. If you're cheap, your Chinese partners aren't going to sacrifice their margins for you - why should they? Instead your product quality will suffer. If you built in the USA instead, perhaps you'd avoid these problems, but that would have more to do with the differing negotiation tactics and how willing your partners were to sacrifice their margins to build your product at the price you desired. (and to be clear, I'm not stating these are the particular issues that caused Samsung's problems - but they are common problems when contracting out manufacturing to Chinese firms, due to a failure of understanding in how things work)

 

[Fact Checking]

Care to cite examples of my "conspiracy talk"?

Is this another burner account, or are you genuinely this confused about all this

Duh. Not a burner account.

Now you are quoting me out of context. The full quote is:

But yeah, I guess this is the false narrative you wanted to inject into the discussion. Is this another burner account, or are you genuinely this confused about all this?

You left out the crucial "" smiley from the quote, with which I indicated that this was not a serious remark. (Just for the record, burner TMC accounts tend to be freshly registered and yours is from 2016.)

I suspect because literally everything you wrote about the AI chip in that comment was wrong that you are genuinely confused about neural networks in general, and your lack of substantive counter-arguments and the pivoting to personal attacks against me is only strengthening that impression.

 

[EVMeister]

Wow, the last few pages can be summarised thus: "You're wrong. I could easily refute everything you said. But can't be bothered. You're a child". Very convincing arguments.

 

[CyberDutchie]

Source please! That needs to be promoted ASAP and his change of heart needs to be explained

Source is the MS research note that goes out from time to time. I report them as soon as I receive them (I was a customer of MS once, and still receiving these reports).

 

[aagosh]

Source is the MS research note that goes out from time to time. I report them as soon as I receive them (I was a customer of MS once, and still receiving these reports).

Thanks - really looking forward to the public appearance of the news.

 

[dqd88]

Source is the MS research note that goes out from time to time. I report them as soon as I receive them (I was a customer of MS once, and still receiving these reports).

Is the note a paper note or email/web based? If latter, can you link to it?

 

[srius]

Leading up to the Q2 delivery report I expect many of the analysts who (after Q1 consciously and deliberately tried to squeeze leveraged Tesla investors and tried to rattle long term holding investors) to find some excuse before Tesla's Q2 results potentially embarrassingly falsify the nonsense they've been spouting for months.

Those analysts are covered as they've already figured out the strategy - trashing Tesla with demands issue, while keeping a high delivery estimate.

 

[schonelucht]

Not sure what you meant under 'Brute force algorithm', but unless you back it up with links I'll just assume it's gibberish too.

All top game-playing engines in Go and Chess still evaluate multiple orders of magnitude more positions and playouts than humans. Extensive tree traversal is indispensable to counteract AI weakness in static analysis.

 

[ClimateOptimst]

Just out, Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas is now expecting a recovery in demand for the remainder of the year and into 2020 with a 29% potential upside for the stock price.

“While demand has disappointed vs. our expectations this year, we believe the weakness is largely temporary. In October 2018, we had expected 412k total Tesla units delivered for 2019. By February we had revised our 2019 delivery forecast to 380k units. Today, our 2019 global Tesla unit delivery forecast stands at 347k units. Our current year unit volume has been revised down 16% since October. Over the same period, our 2019 group revenue forecast has been revised down 19%. Looking to 2020, while our forward unit volume forecast has been revised down 11% since October, we still forecast a 39% growth in volume to 482k units. Additionally, we forecast 29% revenue growth in 2020, driven by global availability of the Model 3 in markets like China, leasing and a refreshed Model S and X. We forecast further revenue growth in 2021 driven by the introduction of the Model Y. For the remainder of 2019, we expect a significant sequential improvement in demand driven by: continued European ramp, greater availability of leasing, Model S/X refresh, introduction of lower priced models and a number of price reductions. These drivers confront what we expect to be a continued phase-out of regulatory tax credits, rising availability of second-hand cars and less competitive imports (i.e. 40% import tariff) to China before the start of local production. Heading into 2020, we expect the key demand drivers to be heavily dependent upon start of local Chinese production and the Model Y intro.”

It's like a dog whistle signaling the Street that it's time to make money on TSLA going the other way for a spell. Seems the stock will remain a plaything until the Tesla becomes consistently profitable and is showing steady topline revenue growth Q after Q. Hopefully that happens throughout the remainder of the year, is put on steroids when GF3 starts ramping, and that growth pattern becomes a stark contrast when juxtaposed against declining ICE vehicle & incumbent automakers. then the stock might truly and finally breakout of this 5 year see-saw pattern...

 

[CyberDutchie]

Is this a joke?

Did you stumble into parody accounts of Bro Jonas on Twitter?

Haha, no, between quotes here means taken verbatim from Adam Jonas’ note. Not the “Dr. Evil” quotes.

New PT $12.9 ?

“The shares offer more than 29% potential upside to our $230 target, but features high degrees of volatility with a wide bull-bear spread. We reiterate our Equal-weight rating.”