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

[Mike Smith]

https://electrek.co/2019/11/08/vw-starts-pre-production-electric-vehicle-factory-china/

'While pre-production is starting now, the actual official start of production is not expected until October 2020.'

Wait, what? We were told during the Model 3 ramp that the "real car makers" could just flip the switch and be at full production. No problem for the pros. Now we learn that VW is going to spend a year in pre-production? Something Tesla is spending about two months on at GF3? I don't understand. Has the media somehow misled us? There must be some mistake - I'm sure VW will be pumping out cars full throttle by the end of the year..

 

[ReflexFunds]

From Buffalo News of all outlets.....Tesla plant is worth 8% of what New York paid to build it, auditors say

I think the writedown has nothing to do with the operations or underlying value of the factory, it is purely a change of accounting treatment due to a new opinion on the nature of the rental contract (Tesla has to pay just $1 rent per year). The new auditors are just saying to the state - while you do own the factory, you cannot claim its market value on your balance sheet because you have given away most of this value in the form of close to zero rent. It's amazing they were ever able to account for it any differently to be honest.
The return on the state's investment was never supposed to be rent or real estate value, it is supposed to be job creation, GDP growth for the area and eventually tax revenue for the state. With Supercharger V3 and Solar Roof ramping up, together with Panasonic's operations at the factory, it looks like the factory remains on course for this return. But i'm sure there were much more productive ways the state could have spent the money initially rather than awarding an unproven startup (Silveo) a huge factory.

 

[Causalien]

If Einhorn has any sense, he should make the letter short and sincere, use this opportunity to learn a lot from Musk and the tour. If I were Elon, I wouldn't treat him nicely based on his letter. He has a lot to lose from shorting Tesla, it's not a time to be arrogant and waste the opportunity. Elon knows the stock will go a lot higher, many fold higher. He is just trying to help out a short (ultimately to reduce drag and noise on Tesla going forward). But this short is too arrogant to understand the situation.

I found the whole Wall Street is pretty arrogant and stupid. They think they are creating value. In reality they are just a bunch of blood sucking parasites sucking blood from the society.

Farmers grow food; teachers teach students; doctors treat patients; Costco helps to distribute products with a small profit; Tesla builds nice products and making the world a better place...

Blood sucking is fine, because the society has set up to treat that as a legal activity. But suck quietly. Einhorn is comparing his stuff with what Tesla is doing, unbelievable.

It's the nature of wallstreet. When ppl suddenly make a lot of money, they equate that with proof of self worth. When you are constantly in an environment like wall street. The belief gets reinforced.

I used to think that there must be some grown ups there, but when it happened to me, it took a better part of 5 years where 3 years were dedicated to meditation and soul searching to slowly grind down the arrogance and I couldn't have done it if I were immersed in a wallstreet environment.

Nowadays, I can joke about the arrogance from time to time. But I also understand where wallstreet comes from.

 

[AudubonB]

Oh my God that will be my late life crisis car...

Funny. However, a true story:

My mentor was an unfortunately large man. And a few years ago when I was a few years younger than I am now (mid-Pliocene for those interested), his late-mid-life crisis involved a Porsche 911 ('83 Super Carrera, I think, but that's unimportant).

Yowchamagowcha, that thing was hard for me to get in and out of, and it was a supremely unhappy sight to see him struggle to do same.

Fast forward a few centuries....and in his sunset years Mr X purchases not one but two Tesla Roadsters - including one of the fabled Final Five. That's the one he drove my father around in. Those two near-centenarians! Just the recollection of that reminded me to gently suggest you might consider something else for your later years, or it might become a crisis indeed.

OK, full disclosure: I'm with ya, man! Me too!

 

[Causalien]

And now he has an open invitation to every channel to go spread his lies because Elon put him in the news. Guess who’s going to be the guest on CNBC on Monday to talk Tesla instead Kathy to talk about GF3 starting production.

Been saying this for a while. Elon is more famois than any of them, so when he address anybody, he is granting them momentary fame they can never experience in their life. This is something that he should charge millions for.

 

[Unpilot]

Funny. However, a true story:

My mentor was an unfortunately large man. And a few years ago when I was a few years younger than I am now (mid-Pliocene for those interested), his late-mid-life crisis involved a Porsche 911 ('83 Super Carrera, I think, but that's unimportant).

Yowchamagowcha, that thing was hard for me to get in and out of, and it was a supremely unhappy sight to see him struggle to do same.

Fast forward a few centuries....and in his sunset years Mr X purchases not one but two Tesla Roadsters - including one of the fabled Final Five. That's the one he drove my father around in. Those two near-centenarians! Just the recollection of that reminded me to gently suggest you might consider something else for your later years, or it might become a crisis indeed.

OK, full disclosure: I'm with ya, man! Me too!

Me three.

And it is going to self drive itself behind my Tesla RV. Then when we need to run into town for some beer...off in the roadster we go!

 

[Remus]

Funny. However, a true story:

My mentor was an unfortunately large man. And a few years ago when I was a few years younger than I am now (mid-Pliocene for those interested), his mid-life crisis involved a Porsche 911 ('83 Super Carrera, I think, but that's unimportant).

Yowchamagowcha, that thing was hard for me to get in and out of, and it was a supremely unhappy sight to see him struggle to do same.

Fast forward a few centuries....and in his sunset years Mr X purchases not one but two Tesla Roadsters - including one of the fabled Final Five. That's the one he drove my father around in. Those two near-centenarians! Just the recollection of that reminded me to gently suggest you might consider something else for your later years, or it might become a crisis indeed.

OK, full disclosure: I'm with ya, man! Me too!

Nah I'm Asian and small build so no worries. It would be fun to take my silver haired wife go bargain shopping in dollar stores with this thing. So romantic.

 

[Artful Dodger]

Well not 340, but at least the SP was up on a Friday and that in itself is a positive sign... normally we see a fair piece of profit taking.

Monday should be a winner if GF3 starts real production and delivery, followed by cybertruck on 11/21... maybe we'll enter the big block zone!

Yeah, much better than that old 225 Slant Six...

Cheers!

 

[Causalien]

Me three.

And it is going to self drive itself behind my Tesla RV. Then when we need to run into town for some beer...off in the roadster we go!

It'll be my midlife crisis car.

But I might have to move to somewhere sunny first to avoid the 40% sales tax on top of my 50% income tax.

 

[TradingInvest]

Good to see your posts back again TT007!

To be fair, TT007 called the recent big jump accurately, before the jump happened.

 

[kbM3]

I used to think that there must be some grown ups there, but when it happened to me, it took a better part of 5 years where 3 years were dedicated to meditation and soul searching to slowly grind down the arrogance and I couldn't have done it if I were immersed in a wallstreet environment.

Nowadays, I can joke about the arrogance from time to time. But I also understand where wallstreet comes from.

All it took for me to grind down my arrogance was reading the posts of many of the brilliant people on this forum

 

[TheTalkingMule]

Was this discussed today?

UPDATE 1-Worried by climate change, EU moves to end fossil fuel funding

 

[Singuy]

If Einhorn has any sense, he should make the letter short and sincere, use this opportunity to learn a lot from Musk and the tour. If I were Elon, I wouldn't treat him nicely based on his letter. He has a lot to lose from shorting Tesla, it's not a time to be arrogant and waste the opportunity. Elon knows the stock will go a lot higher, many fold higher. He is just trying to help out a short (ultimately to reduce drag and noise on Tesla going forward). But this short is too arrogant to understand the situation.

I found the whole Wall Street is pretty arrogant and stupid. They think they are creating value. In reality they are just a bunch of blood sucking parasites sucking blood from the society.

Farmers grow food; teachers teach students; doctors treat patients; Costco helps to distribute products with a small profit; Tesla builds nice products and making the world a better place...

Blood sucking is fine, because the society has set up to treat that as a legal activity. But suck quietly. Einhorn is comparing his stuff with what Tesla is doing, unbelievable.

Nope, don't agree he is trying to help out the shorts. He wants the shorts to double down. I mean he started the tweet with "Mr. Unicorn", ending with sending him a box of short shorts. This is what I called serving a dish cold with some fake sympathy dashed in for extra flavor.

 

[Thekiwi]

FYI: Pete Buttigieg is proposing:

- dropping the manufacturer 200k unit cap for EV vehicle tax credit eligibility,
- increasing the credit to $10,000 per vehicle,
- 2030 date for all cars sold to be ZEVs.

 

[ReflexFunds]

The 649 billion does include health and global warming externalities. That's why it's 649 billion instead of 4.6 or 27.4 billion.

Pump taxes alone generate close to 100b/year in the US, so it's idiotic to talk of financial subsidies for oil. Percentage depletion and whatever are not even rounding errors compared to all the taxes (pump, severance, income, etc.). The environmental issue is the only issue. Unfortunately there is no accepted dollar figure for externalities. And you'll never win an argument by quoting the IMF's ~$100/ton because your opponent will simply quote a much lower price (or $0) from a different source. Endless arguing, zero convincing.

Elon has it right. Transition requires green solutions that are better in some ways, more or less equal in the rest for roughly the same price. Going on about "fossil subsidies" does more harm than good.

How can going on about fossil fuel subsidies do more harm than good? The more awareness people have of the huge external costs of fossil fuels, the greater the odds that some of these costs are reattached to fossil fuels and the faster we will transition to clean energy. All car fleet emissions limit regulations are a result of this awareness to some extent.

Of course there is no agreement on the exact $ cost of air pollution deaths and the cost of using our carbon budget. But that is true for all Science. The scientific method at its core is an acceptance of fallibility and a tradition of criticism that is open to being wrong and constantly searching for better explanations. Just because there is no precise consensus, why should that make us decide to settle on using the $0 cost published by fossil fuel funded think tanks rather than the estimates published in hundreds of peer reviewed papers published by Scientists?
It is the merchants of doubt propaganda strategy employed by the tobacco industry and then the global warming deniers to tell us just because we are not 100% certain of every last detail about something, we should ignore it completely. It is not difficult to employ an independent and impartial body of experts and scientists to evaluate the current scientific literature to arrive at the current best average guess of fossil fuel's externalised costs. This estimate can be updated every quarter or every year as more evidence becomes available.

Of course, I think it's great Elon is putting plans into place to complete the Clean Energy transition even without removal of fossil fuel subsidies. But there's no doubt the more we reattach fossil fuel's costs/remove their subsidies, the faster the transition will be.

 

[wipster]

Yeah, much better than that old 225 Slant Six...

Cheers!

Had one of them too, but I don't want to curse things...

Push button automatic even!

 

[Beltsbear]

At the risk of making myself sound arrogant, I just realized all the shorts have some sort of mental problems. That makes it very difficult for them to recognize what they are missing. Watch their interviews/posts/actions and make your own judgement.

Mark Spiegel
Bob Lutz
David Einhorn
Steve Eisman
John Thompson
Jim Chanos
Whitney Tilson
Fahmi Quadir
Robert Chapman
And a lot of shorts I follow on various websites.

In addition to all the strange thought process they exhibit, non of them understand the following concepts:

The importance of statistics
Design and quality can continue to improve
Charging at night in a garage takes 5 seconds not 5 hours
Copying a production line is much easier than designing the first one
Scale reduces cost
Competition will have a hard time because they are way behind in many areas
Making air quality better helps everyone, not just EV owners
......
And they sign up to a block list so they won't hear any arguments from the other side.

I know bob lutz gets no love here but I can assure you he gets at least half those points. I think most of those guys on the list are assholes, and I think lutz is mired with old thinking, but he is not a dumb guy. Take him off that list, he is not like the others.

 

[SteveG3]

FYI: Pete Buttigieg is proposing:

- dropping the manufacturer 200k unit cap for EV vehicle tax credit eligibility,
- increasing the credit to $10,000 per vehicle,
- 2030 date for all cars sold to be ZEVs.

link? (quickly scanning Pete's issue page for Climate Change I didn't see any of this)

Edit: never mind, found link to this:

"Zero emissions vehicles. We will immediately enact more stringent vehicle emission standards, requiring that all new passenger vehicles sold be zero-emissions by 2035, and all heavy-duty vehicles sold be net-zero emissions by 2040. We will work to increase and enhance the electric vehicle (EV) tax credit to a maximum of $10,000 per vehicle, which will begin to phase out only when a certain percentage of vehicles sold in the U.S. each year are EVs. This will allow lower- and middle- income families to be able to afford cleaner vehicles. These consumer incentives will go hand in hand with incentives for building EVs and EV technology in America. Lastly, we will extend the EV infrastructure tax credit to build out charging infrastructure for interstate travel, multi-family housing, commercial and public buildings, and public spaces, to move beyond charging only in personal garages. Vehicle manufacturer transition. To secure American jobs and help manufacturers transitioning from conventional engine manufacturing to zero-emission vehicle manufacturing in America, we will offer technology transition loan guarantees for retooling existing automobile and powertrain assembly lines and boosting domestic manufacturing of innovative materials, batteries, and electric propulsion technologies. The future of transportation must be built in the U.S. by American workers with high-paying, high-quality careers."



not quite your bullet point list, but, it does include an example of the point I made earlier in the week that it is likely federal funding efforts will be made to financially prop up and keep GM and Ford running through the transition from EVs. I thought it would take Germany and Japan doing this first for US politicians to call for this, but, right here in a 2020 candidate's plan today.

 

[EVNow]

Pump taxes alone generate close to 100b/year in the US, so it's idiotic to talk of financial subsidies for oil.

How much have the middle east wars cost ? Would we be having these wars if they only exported camels ?

 

[JustMe]

How can going on about fossil fuel subsidies do more harm than good? The more awareness people have of the huge external costs of fossil fuels, the greater the odds that some of these costs are reattached to fossil fuels and the faster we will transition to clean energy. All car fleet pollution limit regulations are a result of this awareness to some extent.

Of course there is no agreement on the exact $ cost of air pollution deaths and the cost of using our carbon budget. But that is true for all Science. The scientific method at its core is an acceptance of fallibility and a tradition of criticism that is open to being wrong and constantly searching for better explanations. Just because there is no precise consensus, why should that make us decide to settle on using the $0 cost published by fossil fuel funded think tanks rather than the estimates published in hundreds of peer reviewed papers published by Scientists?
It is the merchants of doubt propaganda strategy employed by the tobacco industry and then the global warming deniers to tell us just because we are not 100% certain of every last detail about something, we should ignore it completely. It is not difficult to employ an independent and impartial body of experts and scientists to evaluate the current scientific literature to arrive at the current best average guess of fossil fuel's externalised costs. This estimate can be updated every quarter or every year as more evidence becomes available.

Of course, I think it's great Elon is putting plans into place to complete the Clean Energy transition even without removal of fossil fuel subsidies. But there's no doubt the more we reattach fossil fuel's costs/remove their subsidies, the fastest the transition will be.

I might add that no trillion dollar war was ever fought over windmills and solar panels. Not to mention lives lost and billions of petroleum dollars propping up horrific dictatorships. But that would probably be off topic...