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

[hobbes]

GF4 (Germany) - project could be delayed by 9 months

there is always some food for the shorties somewhere outside, indeed...

This has been known since the beginning and everybody has had it on their radar. Given the recent increased activity at the site and final purchase contract signed by both sides, I think everything will be ready in time.

 

[Dare]

Wall Street Investor vs Retail InvestorView attachment 506297

Bruh, do you even know that the Supercharger network hAs BeEn CaNCeLeD?

 

[ReflexFunds]

I wonder how flexible Tesla's neural net training setup is.

Is it relatively constrained to solving the Full Self Driving problem? Or is it possible they could sell neural net training as a stand-alone service product that people could use for all sorts of applications?

I'm imagining something akin to Amazon Web Services, but for neural nets.

I don't think the Project Dojo chip is quite finished yet.

I think on the whole the Dojo chip is likely to be very tailored towards training the specific type of neural networks Tesla has chosen for its software base. This is likely to make it more efficient that Google's TPU 3.0 and Nvidia's AI cloud chips for Tesla's specific needs, but for most applications Google and Nvidia are likely to be a better choice.

There may be a range of AI projects and applications that use similar networks to Tesla though and its possible Tesla's chips could also be the best option for some third parties if they were made available.
I think the profit potential Tesla has from AI in-house though is likely so large that any potential cloud revenue will be insignificant.

 

[humbaba]

Exxon's profits decreased by 50% YoY in Q3 (they report Q4 today) to 3.1Bn. I think they have better ways of spending their money than shorting Tesla.
I think there are enough idiots out there who think shorting Tesla is a good move without Big Oil having to foot the bill so directly.

Well... I think you just explained their profit drop -- I guess they shouldn't have been shorting $TSLA

 

[Pezpunk]

Utopia Planitia

sure hope their bots are better behaved.

 

[Chickenlittle]

I think you may be right. The question would be more about the Osaka plant. During the last ER call they were asked when S/X will move to 2170. Not only did they confirm, again, for the 100th time it is not happening/not important as the chemistry is the same between the old and new cells, but they also said (I think ti was "new JB"), that they would not want to give up the Japanese cell capacity. They seemed pretty determined to keep using those factories for S/X as they need everything else for 3/Y and the upcoming products.

So, going with your logic, they either buy those facilities as well, or S/X don't get the updated tech, which would leave them behind 3/Y and further decrease sales.

No buying out Panasonic at gf1 doesn’t preclude them continuing to buy Pam a sonic batteries made elsewhere. Could even sweeten deal by paying higher price plus LG could provide more

 

[Krugerrand]

Pitbulls time to drop the bone, seriously.

No, Tesla is not getting rid of the 18650 form factor. Get over it already.

No, Tesla is not going to raise capital to buy back shares, pay down debt, or to open a sushi bar.

No TSLA stock is not going to split nor will dividends be paid in your lifetime.

Yes, I’m taking the names and numbers of those who just can’t let go of these boring, archaic thought processes and having @Unpilot bring you to one of my islands where you will be forced to participate in my own version of Maze Runner meets Hunger Games.

Trust me, I’m way more dastardly than Tarantino. I make him look like a chocolate sundae on a perfect Saturday afternoon at the beach on a private island in the Caribbean.

Possibly, if fate in on your side (though why would it be?!), you’ll luck out and I will be able to buy the superpower of my choice at which point I will simply blow you up with my mind when I tire of your pathetic attempts to escape.

I trust this now ends all the silly talk.

 

[Chickenlittle]

Musk flew to Japan. On C/C he stressed the Panasonic partnership.
So I think there are on good terms, and IP might be shared going forward. cheers!!

Yes but I love you is very common speech before and during relationship break ups. Musk is loyal but when layoffs required he doesn’t hesitate to act

 

[Krugerrand]

Cramer on his redemption tour just blasted oil and gas stocks. Basically said everyone is devesting from owning these, managers are tired of being told what is right or wrong with the world and hedge funds are putting their money into clean energy. Called them tobacco stocks and said it’s the other side of Tesla, young people are betting on Tesla and have denounced oil and gas it’s happening faster than you think, this is the nail going into the coffin.

Becky on Squawk Box was shocked that he’d say that. She said “well you mean the stocks are dead, we will be on natural gas for a while” and Cramer just said “eh it’s happening faster than you think”

Maybe he had brain surgery?

 

[mrdoubleb]

No buying out Panasonic at gf1 doesn’t preclude them continuing to buy Pam a sonic batteries made elsewhere. Could even sweeten deal by paying higher price plus LG could provide more

You were saying they would not want to share the new tech with 3rd parties, so they would probably by Pana out and just own the whole E2E process at GF1.

I was referring to this when I said, that this implies, they either do the same with the Japanese plants, or, if they just continue buying the 18650s from Japan, but don't want to share the new "Maxwell tech", S/X remains on the old tech, which will not help perception/sales of those vehicles.

 

[LJS22]

I have no idea how today is going to go haha this is a strange Friday

 

[davepsilon]

I do think Model 3 residual values will be higher than used in their lease modelling even without FSD, so little to worry about on the lease returns. They can also be used in a pre Robotaxi human driven ride hailing network.

Where do you get an acknowledged delay in FSD schedule though?
Elon said the feature complete driver assist features are likely to be ready in a couple of months and that the foundational re-write of the Autopilot software is nearly complete.
How long it takes to get from feature complete to a level of accuracy/disengagements rates that can convince regulators to allow Robotaxis without driver monitoring is just as uncertain as ever.
I don't think there will necessarily be any Robotaxi design tweaks. Model 3 was designed from day one in 2015 to be a Robotaxi from the bottom up. Future cars may however move to the million mile battery which is primarily an optimisation for Robotaxis.

I am taking the delay from the Earnings call. Feature complete FSD was “close” by end of year. But now feature complete is a “few months out.” From Elon. The major technical thrusts mentioned are currently in labeling. Put it all together and that is a delayed, open ended project.

Elon’s track record on FSD schedule has been abysmal. I understand it’s an important piece of motivating and organizing his engineering teams to have these ridiculously accelerated schedules. But for investor communication and for customer communication around FSD it is a negative.

They should just acknowledge it’s an open ended schedule and their near term goal is to continually deliver improvement as a driver assist system. Which will be released when ready. With a long term goal of using driver disengagements/behavior to inform improvements and satisfy regulations that ultimately allow full self-driving. No we are almost there. No so close. No just a few months. No thinking about dropping self driving to Early access, just kidding.

These public schedule statements that are never met make the big money FSD option seem more like a vapor ware product. I think FSD option has a compelling value proposition but that isn’t communicated very well.

 

[Krugerrand]

So one future negative to think about is with the acknowledged delay in FSD schedule and more generally in the large uncertainty in timing what is Tesla going to do with their leases that have no customer buyout option? The “turn them into Robotaxi” always seemed like too much of a timing bet to me anyway. And Tesla has a factory if they need Robotaxis just divert some of the new production, complete with Robotaxi specific tweaks, or even a dedicated design.

So it’s probably no change to their internal plan which I suppose was always to sell the lease returns as used cars. This could even be a positive for financials, if value is higher than what they used for original lease residual value then Tesla can keep the difference. Used values are currently sky high but should come down further along the s-curve of Model 3 output.

Tesla’s online sales method for new cars is great. For used cars they could improve it. I hope they do before being flooded with used lease returns to sell.

Easy. If it’s getting close to the time for leases to be returned and they aren’t ready to use them, offer those people a chance to renew their lease or buy the car or Tesla will have used Model 3s for sale. No biggie.

 

[Tslynk67]

He is now a true believer. He's talking about Elon Musk's vision. And the talking heads aren't attacking. I think we have hit a true turning point. He also revealed he uses Sensodyne toothpaste. Very informative show today.

I think his daughter has convinced him of all this. The kids are the future, not use crusty old dudes.

If Foolproof, everybody would be doing it, and they wouldn't be any more Fools around. cheers.
Every Strategy works until it doesn't

However, selling PUTS is one way to diversify your option strategy.

Success is all dependent on how correct/lucky you are in guestimating Market antics.

I nearly lost it all selling Puts last year. My OTM 320 SP Puts went into the money and got assigned before the expiration date and before I could roll them. I thought no problem, I'll sell covered calls. The SP kept dropping so selling covered calls for the stock price I paid became worthless, and I didn't want to sell the stock at a big loss. Ended up with margin calls every week. Your plan works if the SP doesn't drop quickly, which is definitely NOT guaranteed with TSLA. Be careful.

Yes, I understand this, but I'm a HODL guy normally, my core account I just accumulate $TSLA, I rode it all the way down to $177 and all the way back up to now. So if I'm assigned 100 shares at $600 and it then drops to $300 (or whatever), I'm fine with that, I have equity that I believe will bounce back.

In the past (=now), I bought calls and if the stock goes the wrong way you lose it all.

 

[MP3Mike]

Easy. If it’s getting close to the time for leases to be returned and they aren’t ready to use them, offer those people a chance to renew their lease or buy the car or Tesla will have used Model 3s for sale. No biggie.

Or they will actually start to have a service loaner fleet...

 

[humbaba]

[snip] Is the current hardware powerful enough to run what is needed without being rat-holed into some crazy optimizations to get acceptable performance? All that remains to be seen.

By "crazy optimizations" did you mean "too high of an error rate"?

Neural networks aren't like traditional programming, there aren't 'crazy optimizations' you just adjust your "compilation" parameters. In the case you are talking about you tune the error rate so that it can run on the current hardware. Which leaves you with one question: is that error rate acceptable? If it isn't then your only option is to revisit the architecture, but re-architecting is still different than "crazy optimizations."

Can the current hardware (HW3) work? Based on my understanding of the situation I would think that it is plausible, but unknowable until Tesla gets it working. I base the "plausible" on the performance gap between HW2 and HW3, and HW2 is currently still capable (though there are indications the limits are being hit).

If HW3 is not sufficient the question becomes will the second generation FSD chip be good enough? That is already under development and IMO may be in production before Tesla has a self driving. After all, chip design is a solved problem -- while a project can certainly slip there is no reason to not expect it to be completed. On the other hand self driving is not a solved problem so no one really knows how long it will take. This is why I expect Waymo (or maybe even Cruise) to get approved in at least one market before Tesla. The problem for them is that their growth into new markets can reasonably be expected to be slow whereas once Tesla has working FSD there's no more development required (not that I expect them to stop) and its just a matter of convincing the regulators.

IMO the correct way to value Tesla's FSD program is as driver assistance where it has a real present value as opposed to an estimated value at some unknowable point in the future.

Looked at this way, a Tesla vehicle derives significantly greater value from its driver assistance than other vehicles and the lead appears to be increasing. This is a competitive advantage that seems likely to remain for the foreseeable future. No one else is trying seriously: Waymo and Cruise are about FSD, no driver assistance component. IIRC VW is trying to do something, but they still think software problems can be solved by hiring more developers.

 

[MP3Mike]

And the story changed already... makes it sound like the other car's fault. Still, no details.


"Vehicle crashes into Waymo car in Tempe, police say"

Vehicle crashes into Waymo car in Tempe, police say

No, that is a story from December. Different collision.

 

[davepsilon]

Easy. If it’s getting close to the time for leases to be returned and they aren’t ready to use them, offer those people a chance to renew their lease or buy the car or Tesla will have used Model 3s for sale. No biggie.

I think that was always the plan, and I think it was because Tesla felt forced to use a low residual value for the lease terms (due to no sales history). If you look at it that way, no buyout in the contract means Tesla can lose or win on residual value difference. Typical lease with buyout automaker can only lose.

Now what I was pointing out as negative is they could be too busy growing new car business to remember they will have a sales job to sell all these cars coming back in. Lease holders are the obvious first source of customers I'm sure many will buy and keep their lease car when given the option.

 

[Krugerrand]

I see Spiegel has gone from constantly tweeting (retweeting) random Tesla/Musk fraud conspiracies to constantly posting coronavirus conspiracies. He's convinced that it is much worse than China is telling and that they are burning bodies to cover it up. I think he has given up on all the Tesla conspiracies and is now praying this virus will do to Tesla what his lies/FUD couldn't. I think more importantly, he hopes he can at least convince people the situation is dire - whether it is or not.

What is up with people who see these weird conspiracies and negativity in EVERYTHING? Is is just a personality? Or is it a mental illness? I used to work with a guy JUST like Spiegel. He was constantly warning me of the impending financial collapse and telling me I needed to be stocking up on survival items like dried food and packaged meals. To this day, he is 100% convinced that it's not a matter of if, but when. And, every day, it's surely closer to being almost here. I can't imagine living in that kind of fear.

Negativity is actual built into us as part of our survival instincts. It’s actually those of us who can find the positive in things/events who are ‘unbalanced’ - for lack of a better word. I like to think we’re more evolved and sophisticated.

We’re the people who’ll want to trust other humans in a zombie apocalypse to band together and look out for each other right before they cut our throats and take our last can of Spam. But we won’t. I won’t trust @Unpilot as far as I can throw him.

 

[electracity]

We will find out in April, but consider that Tesla, even with building Panasonic a frigging gigafactory, has STILL been cell constrained. Elon is not known for waiting around for others to ramp up and fix strategic problems like cell supply.

I think Tesla will enter cell manufacturing with a next gen form factory. I doubt they get into the business of manufacturing cylinders. Where Tesla has wasted it time in the past is trying to substantially improve a process that is relatively mature like making the body in white.

I doubt that they are ready to talk about next gen battery making this year. Most likely they would enter cell manufacturing on either the low or high end. Perhaps a lower cost cell/pack for the model 2, or a high performance system for the roadster and other higher end cars.