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

[Artful Dodger]

But as Elon said (I believe it was during FSD Investor Day), a fleet wide comprise of the AP would bankrupt Tesla, so the seriousness of the matter is publicly acknowleged.

Really wish folks would quit mis-remembering quotes then attributing them to Elon, without a link. It took all of 5s effort Googling to find the real quote:

Elon Musk says preventing a 'fleet-wide hack' is Tesla's top security priority - Electrek

The statement was made at the National Governors Association meeing in July 2017. Elon never said such a hack would bankrupt TESLA (you still reading too much TSLAQ?)

Here's what Elon actually said:

“I think one of the biggest concern for autonomous vehicles is somebody achieving a fleet-wide hack.

“In principles, if someone was able to say hack all the autonomous Teslas, they could say – I mean just as a prank – they could say ‘send them all to Rhode Island’ [laugh] – across the United States… and that would be the end of Tesla and there would be a lot of angry people in Rhode Island.

“We gotta make super sure that a fleet-wide is basically impossible and that if people are in the car, that they have override authority on whatever the car is doing. If the car is doing something wacky, you can press a button that no amount of software can override and ensure that you gain control of the vehicle and cut the link to the servers.

“Within the car, there are multiple sub-systems that have specialized encryption, like the powertrain for example. Even if someone gains access to the car, they cannot take control of the powertrain or braking system.”​

As usual folks, years later fear colors memory more intensely than wise counsel. HTH.

TL;dr It's never a bad as you thought.

Cheers!

 

[jerry33]

Of course, there is a potential cat and mouse game where you may find that certain headlines are designed to deliberately catch out the algo bots by a financial PR company acting in the interest of someone who wants to make money by catching out the algo bots, but I don't think they have reached that level of complexity yet.

FIFY: but I don't think they have reached that level of competency yet.

 

[The Accountant]

While I feel your pain for having missed the ideal timing, I really, really dislike when people wish for the SP to go down for their benefit, ignoring that others on our side of this fence may suffer because of it. Perhaps they have some options in play or need to cash in some shares for unexpected or expected expenses etc...

Can’t we simply be grateful for the opportunities that are afforded us and instead learn the lessons presented?

And that concludes my New Year’s resolution. Next person who posts about wishing the SP would go down for their own selfish purposes is going to get a very different response and not in a good way.

Agree - With so much upside on this stock (600, 800, 1,000?), who cares if you get in at 430 or 390. I have dry powder arriving later this afternoon and I'm buying where ever the price is.

 

[Webeevdrivers]

No. Tesla did that because they wanted to amend their EPA range ratings, but the EPA will only rate vehicles once per model year. This has been discussed on this forum.

Cheers!

Interesting that Nissan has not yet released the 2020 Leafs. There are no 2020’s avaiable as far as I know. No press kit. Just an information vacuum. The rest of the Nissan line up is all 2020. Hmmmm.

 

[jbcarioca]

For a guy who thinks Advertising is just a lie, Elon is brilliant at marketing. The lines at Fremont on 12/31 and the lines we will see at Shanghai when the first customers come to the plant for pick-up are reminiscent of those Apple store lines when a new iPhone version was being released. A no cost marketing event that gains tremendous publicity and generates FOMO.

Actually I doubt that Elon thinks that way. The most effective form of marketing is Word of Mouth if you can get it. Mastery of social media helps. As John Wanamaker famously said “ I know I waste
Half my advertising budget. The problem is I don’t know which half”. Today it’s possible to know. Elon knows.

 

[Etna]

Tesla setting up Israel R&D office
The electric car venture's new office, managed by Adi Gigi, will scout for Israeli startups and technologies

Tesla EVTOL in the works?

Elon has repeatedly expressed his lack of interest for eVTOLs, expecting those to be urban nuisances at best.

Israel is home Mobileye and a bunch of other hi-tech automotive/AI/battery companies with a highly qualified workforce uninterested to move to the US though.

 

[jbcarioca]

First of all, thanks for reading all of it! And I'm happy to hear you found it useful in some way. Here are a few clarifications on my stance:

• There's a small part in the beginning of the automotive section where I point out that a literal monopoly is of course not going happen.
• The blog's overall theme is potential, which kind of means best possible outcome. If Tesla achieves it, they won't achieve this full potential by 2030. It will take them longer than that.
• Google effectively has a monopoly on search. I would argue that actually a lot of the recent tech giants have quasi-monopolies. Facebook on social media, Google on search, Microsoft on PC operating systems. Amazon I'm not super familiar with, but it's kind of heading that way too is the impression I get? So even if you want to reason by analogy, it doesn't seem impossible for Tesla to have a similar quasi-monopoly.

I too sometimes find myself skeptical of my own numbers to be completely frank. The model that predicts $50-60k by 2030, I think is conservative in various ways, but $10T market cap just seems so crazy.

So I'm kind of conflicted in that on one hand you have all the data that suggests Tesla is very very hard to compete with in each of Automotive, Autonomy, and AMaaS individually, and even harder when you combine them. There are risks/uncertainties of course, such as battery supply which is a big one right now, but even when you account for these, it seems that in all likelihood Tesla will absolutely dominate road transportation in the future.

But then on the other hand, I run the numbers and things pop out that just don't seem possible. Like the data I put in that leads to $50k in 2030 is aggressive yet quite reasonable. But then a $10T market cap is just such a crazy number, that I start to feel maybe it should be half or a third of that. Even though I shouldn't let my feelings influence this, and I should just trust the data and numbers.

I probably should have emphasized more how useful I found it to be. Candidly I would not have read it all were it not useful.,.

 

[Artful Dodger]

Interesting that Nissan has not yet released the 2020 Leafs. There are no 2020’s avaiable as far as I know. No press kit. Just an information vacuum. The rest of the Nissan line up is all 2020. Hmmmm.

Elon Musk‏

Carlos Gone

9:32 PM - 31 Dec 2019​

 

[The Accountant]

Actually I doubt that Elon thinks that way. The most effective form of marketing is Word of Mouth if you can get it. Mastery of social media helps. As John Wanamaker famously said “ I know I waste
Half my advertising budget. The problem is I don’t know which half”. Today it’s possible to know. Elon knows.

I went and looked back at his comments during an ER call. He didn't call Advertising a lie - you're correct.
He did allude to the "trickery" often found in advertising.
From the ER transcript:

Elon R. Musk -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer & Director
Yeah, what we're seeing is that word of mouth is more than enough to drive our demand in excess of production. We have no plans to advertise at this time. At some point in the future, we may do advertising not in the traditional sense but more to just inform people and make sure they are aware of the product, but not engage in the typical trickery that is commonplace in advertising.

 

[Artful Dodger]

Israel is home Mobileye and a bunch of other hi-tech automotive/AI/battery companies with a highly qualified workforce uninterested to move to the US though.

It's not a problem letting them work in their home country:

• Tesla's electric motor R&D is hosted at an University Engineering Dept in Athens, Greece (NOT Sparta!)
• Tesla's battery cell R&D is hosted at the E.E. Dept of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

With electronic files and high-speed global internet, it scarcely makes any difference where engineers do their work. The TOUGH part is attracting the TALENT, and Tesla is unmatched in this respect.

Cheers!

 

[HG Wells]

Looks like P&D tomorrow

 

[Silent Ludicrosy]

Elon Musk‏

Carlos Gone

9:32 PM - 31 Dec 2019​

He escaped in a double bass case. Elon could never pull this off because the Model 3 can’t even fit two cello cases in the trunk...

 

[Fact Checking]

Yes, the SEC filing timestamp was 2019-01-02 08:38:32 ET, on a Wednesday.

I still think there's a chance for the delivery report to be delayed to after the market closes, due to the much broader international delivery paperwork compared to Q2'2018 and to allow European and Chinese delivery paperwork to trickle in during the day/evening - but between 8:30-9:30am ET is the most probable time window for the time being.

Usually if the delivery report is delayed there's a negative short-term price reaction, because bearish investors interpret delays as Tesla waiting for a few hundred deliveries to come in to meet guidance. (This was a correct interpretation of the delay that the Q1'2019 delivery report exhibited for example, Tesla was waiting for 50k Model 3 deliveries.)

So the delivery report hasn't been released before market open and Tesla usually doesn't release material news during market hours. So after 4pm ET today is the next time window for the P&D report - and this is what they've done in the last 3 quarters.

I suspect the slight drop in the pre-market was possibly speculative traders closing positions once it became probable that Tesla wouldn't release the results before market open: early releases are almost unconditionally good news, after-market releases are more of a mixed bag. So that could be one of the factors behind the pre-market price dropping from $427.50 to around $424.50 currently, with 1 minute left until market open.

 

[MP3Mike]

Tesla AP or FSD do not do red lights at all, so there should be nothing to investigate. FSD with HW3 in the latest release only has a preview where it only indicates lights, but does nothing with it yet, so there is really nothing to investigate. The driver ran through a red light, this caused the very unfortunate accident, the driver and the driver only screwed up.

@mars_or_bust But NHTSA has already said that they are going to investigate this collision, what do you think they are going to investigate if not AP/NoA? (Remember in the cross traffic death NHTSA investigated and said that AP contributed to the crash even though it is specifically stated that TACC/AP doesn't handle cross traffic,)

 

[Tslynk67]

Looks like P&D tomorrow

Or this evening...

 

[Unpilot]

SP recovered pre-market high's ...and then some.

 

[MTL_HABS1909]

News on GF3 deliveries—>

Breaking: Mass Tesla MIC Model 3 Deliveries to Begin on 1Yr Anniversary of Gigafactory 3’s Groundbreaking Ceremony

Customer delivery event at GF3 on Jan 7, the 1 year anniversary of groundbreaking. Now we know why that huge parking lot was left full of shiny new MIC Model 3s

So this basically confirms that Tesla comfortably met guidance for 2019. Why else would they sit on a few thousand cars if they were unsure about at least getting to 360K deliveries?

 

[SpaceCash]

So this basically confirms that Tesla comfortably met guidance for 2019. Why else would they sit on a few thousand cars if they were unsure about at least getting to 360K deliveries?

In a perfect world we wouldn't be so hyper-fixated on that 360K number anyway. It's absurd to suggest that a few thousand lower or higher should affect the stock price at this point, but that's what Wall Street would have us focus on, I guess.

But I think it'll be a beat

 

[X Fan]

View attachment 495487


The fires in Australia are terrible. The smoke is creating air quality and visibility issues in New Zealand, 1200 to 1500 miles away. It's a huge deal and should be getting more coverage and assistance

Unfortunately, Au has dealt with devastating fires every decade or so.....some good coverage by BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/c2wlvy54gd1t/australia-fires

 

[sweter]

So this basically confirms that Tesla comfortably met guidance for 2019. Why else would they sit on a few thousand cars if they were unsure about at least getting to 360K deliveries?

Maybe they didn't get all the permits to sell to public until EOY? And the initial 15 deliveries to employees is not really "public", but they wanted to be able to stay they started deliveries in Q4?