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

[bhtooefr]

I found this the most interesting comment. What is not stated is how Tesla managed around this financial and structural business barrier?

Paraphrasing from memory, but essentially, Tesla sold a premium enough car that there was room to profit on the car itself.

nobody else is using cylindrical cells in volume for automotive. What other industries would even use 2170s in any sort of volume? power tools?

Rimac is using them, and has connections to Jaguar (who IIRC said that they will use them in the future) and Porsche.

Electric bicycles are using cylindricals in volume, although AFAIK they're still mostly on 18650s.

I know Gogoro is switching their swappable scooter (seated, not kick) packs from 18650 to 21700.

Similarly, e-cigs have historically used cylindricals - again, 18650s - although AFAIK the disposable pod style are using small pouch cells because a cylindrical is too big.

 

[HiTechRedneck]

Not at least in the US market as fractional share buying is available. If you want to invest $50 in Tesla, you can. Unless there is some bizarre regulation, i imagine fractional shares will roll out over time internationally. It makes sense for exactly the reason you mentioned.

there was a pretty detailed discussion on 1/13/20 about the idea of TSLA splitting:
Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the 2019-2020 Investors' Roundtable
(replies spread out over the course of that day)

there was also an interesting idea in the following post as well about BRK.A and the benefits of not splitting:
Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the 2019-2020 Investors' Roundtable

Fidelity just announced fraction share buying joining a few others.

Fidelity now lets investors trade fractional shares of individual stocks and ETFs. Here's what that means for you

 

[dww12]

Sometimes some spectacularly ignorant posts happen from otherwise thoughtful people:
HondaJet | Official Site of Honda Corporate Jet Aircraft
As a longtime (sadly, now former) pilot and aircraft owner/operator I know the Hondajet personally. Everyone knowledgeable I know shares my opinion that it is quite advanced and innovative in a seriously slow-to-innovate industry. Only avionics has advanced for GA.

Your ultimate point is mostly what Elon has said a few times. Factually, the real impediment to investment in anything aviation related is scale. Were the scale large enough major innovation would be easier to justify. The regulatory issues are more consequential today than ever before because the entire industry has tried to evade rules, often with honorable intent, but evasion corrupts, and successful evasion Breda contempt. That is the lesson of Boeing.

We should be fully aware that all the same negatives apply much more in space than they do for aircraft. Thus, the obvious example: SpaceX. Every single negative that applies to aircraft applies more to rocketry.

So, despite Elon’s protestations, if he saw a sound reason to disintermediation the commercial aircraft market he certainly is well equipped to do so. The engineering base is closely analogous to the Hawthorne/PV/Long Beach talent pool. The huge opportunities are in propulsion systems, materials, controls and maintenance. Were the time available and the talent also we can be assured that we’d see marvels. Imagine transformation of predictive analytics to automate most maintenance checks. Imagine aerodynamics done originally rather than recycling ancient airfoil designs.

I do not suggest this is something he’ll do. I am positive that as an operator of Falcon and Gulfstream he is acutely aware of how hidebound the industry is today. The majority of SpaceX Hawthorne engineers had origin with Northrop, McD/Douglas, Hughes etc. Those people knew tradition and successfully upended with SpaceX.

Doing the impossible and/or wildly improbable is Elon’s history, from zip2 until today. No wonder when he likes:
Infinite Improbability Drive

Planes are not worth the investment. Tesla is not doing busses because autonomy +RT will do it better. Autonomy + RT + Boring Network will do city to city travel better. 250mph in a reduced pressure tunnel with wireless charging will get you between cities faster and without all the aviation regulation. Boring will do continental travel, Starship will do intercontinental. Where is the first 100+mi tunnel going to be? Can we get some Chinafast Boring tunnels?

 

[1101011]

... All those engineering resources at CATL and LG would get diverted to lucrative Tesla projects. You make some good points that all these large investments by suppliers shifts towards Tesla.

Leaving only the D-team available for Mercedes, GM, Audi...

 

[nativewolf]

Planes are not worth the investment. Tesla is not doing busses because autonomy +RT will do it better. Autonomy + RT + Boring Network will do city to city travel better. 250mph in a reduced pressure tunnel with wireless charging will get you between cities faster and without all the aviation regulation. Boring will do continental travel, Starship will do intercontinental. Where is the first 100+mi tunnel going to be? Can we get some Chinafast Boring tunnels?

At 100' a day of boring per machine pair and some millions per mile you'll being a few centuries solving the problem. Flight could solve this in 5 years. I believe it is not an 0 threat to Tesla. 90 miles from sacramento to san fran and you could fly it in 30 min in an electric taxi. San Jose to Monterey would be 15 mins. Imagine...15 mins to home and a view and not f all for traffic. Closer to home for me it work would take 30 mins from Middleburg to Charlottesville area instead of 2 hours. Cut my commute by 3 hours a day and keep me from spending $ on airbnbs. Anyhow no matter how large an organization gets one can always innovate around them. Tesla is proof of that and somebody will try to innovate past Tesla. Electric flying cars seems a possible contender.

 

[nativewolf]

@dww12 Oh and I agree with you on busses. Seems to me self driving taxis will kill this business. Will it kill school buses? Who knows, maybe. For rural areas it would surely be a possible savings...I'll have to look at these numbers.

 

[ZeApelido]

They say the current models take 70,000 GPU hours to train. So 400 of those units should be able to train the network in ~21 hours.

So no, I don't think they need 10s of thousands of those units. Even doing a build every day is probably too often, as you need time to test it after you build it. But still 400 of those would cost them $60M. (Assuming no discount for volume purchasing.)

Of course from the picture they showed it looks like they are using AP2.5 style units for their training. And with two GPUs in each one they would need ~1,600 of them to train the network in one day. At $500/each that is only $800k. (Plus the infrastructure/power supplies/etc. to support them.)

So you can guess they didn't buy the expensive off-the-shelf solution.

Training on 6 seconds of video vs a few frames (current) requires a massive difference in training compute power. No one has been doing it for this reason.

The accuracy should significantly improve using Dojo.

But I have no idea if the trained model size will be anywhere near what HW3.0 or 4.0 can handle.

 

[dww12]

@jbcarioca to your point there is clearly opportunity in flight. It solves many of the transportation challenges that Elon has sought to address with Tesla and Boring.

Home - Lilium

Is to my eyes one of the most interesting flight startups. I could see this being a very serious competitor to self driving taxis and the need for tunnels. It is an infant company in a field of many competitors. Truthfully I am surprised that Elon and Tesla are not doing something related. SpaceX has aerospace talent and Tesla has the battery management talent. Anyhow flight is clearly a competitor to driving and likely better for the environment (roads are terrible).

How many drones with obstacle avoidance still end up in a lake? How do you land in a congested city or a mall parking lot or keep people from flying in fog/rain/high wind? How useful is a vehicle that is grounded in those conditions? High speed long distance is going to be mostly EVs in tunnels.

 

[dww12]

How many drones with obstacle avoidance still end up in a lake? How do you land in a congested city or a mall parking lot or keep people from flying in fog/rain/high wind? How useful is a vehicle that is grounded in those conditions? High speed long distance is going to be mostly EVs in tunnels.

Baller early TSLA investors will have electric planes.

 

[Fact Checking]

Einhorn’s Greenlight Hedge Funds Start Year With 7.6% Drop

"Greenlight Capital fell 7.6% across the funds in January, according to an investor update on Friday"

Einhorn must have been out in the backyard lighting money on fire.

Fortunately he actually did something useful with those funds: he transferred them to Tesla bulls writing his put options.

 

[Artful Dodger]

Training on 6 seconds of video vs a few frames (current) requires a massive difference in training compute power. No one has been doing it for this reason.

The accuracy should significantly improve using Dojo.

But I have no idea if the trained model size will be anywhere near what HW3.0 or 4.0 can handle.

I think the new approach (if I understand correctly) is to take about 1K frames total from all 8 cameras and build a 3-D model of the car's surroundings. Then, the labeling engine is run to tag each object in the model. The path planning code will be integrated with this model as a part of the neural net, rather than some separate process. Overall, this approach is said to provide 3 orders of magnitude (~1,000x) better performance than the original way of analysing each separate frame of video to extract objects.

And its sounds like they've been moving toward this technique for at least a year. It just takes time to implement such a big project. They'll get there, and in the mean time Tesla grows the fleet each quarter. Its a virtuous circle.

Cheers!

 

[sparcs]

Fortunately he actually did something useful with those funds: he transferred them to Tesla bulls writing his put options.

don't leave Chanos out from November:

Tesla Stock Is Soaring, but Short Seller Jim Chanos Is Still Betting Against It

“Tesla is and remains one of our biggest and our best short positions,” he said. “We’re still bears.”

and this is the Chanos logic at the time:

According to Chanos, it’s just another car company, and if that’s the case, he says it’s probably worth zero based on auto industry valuation.

 

[RobStark]

Tesla Has Started Producing the Model Y, and Its Stock Is Worth More than Detroit Three Combined

Tesla Has Started Producing the Model Y Earlier than Expected - Automobile

 

[Cirrus MS100D]

For those interested in Electric Plane discussion:
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/electric-planes.1307

 

[CorneliusXX]

@jbcarioca to your point there is clearly opportunity in flight. It solves many of the transportation challenges that Elon has sought to address with Tesla and Boring.

Home - Lilium

Is to my eyes one of the most interesting flight startups. I could see this being a very serious competitor to self driving taxis and the need for tunnels. It is an infant company in a field of many competitors. Truthfully I am surprised that Elon and Tesla are not doing something related. SpaceX has aerospace talent and Tesla has the battery management talent. Anyhow flight is clearly a competitor to driving and likely better for the environment (roads are terrible).

I get why Elon isn't touching it. Batteries aren't there yet for a truly great product. His time is more valuable focusing on SpaceX and Tesla. As Tesla progresses with battery density I'd expect flight startups to flourish - although not necessarily within Tesla.

There's a great product to be had for a small electric drone big enough for half a dozen people and quiet enough to land in densely populated cities while travelling up to 500 miles. I could see the wealthy commuting to a country residence or regular people getting away for the weekend using this sort of product. Operating costs would make this cheap enough to be a lifestyle enabler.

I'd love to have a few acres 100 miles out of London and do a commute via a vtol drone that could do the trip to my door in half an hour.

 

[Lessmog]

Maybe he had brain surgery?

Who, Cramer? Nah. He just saw the writing on the check, retiring.

 

[nativewolf]

How many drones with obstacle avoidance still end up in a lake? How do you land in a congested city or a mall parking lot or keep people from flying in fog/rain/high wind? How useful is a vehicle that is grounded in those conditions? High speed long distance is going to be mostly EVs in tunnels.

I guess I don't see tunnels breaking through anything other than the dense inner cities. Even that...decades and decades to build out anything useful. Boring is interesting (had to say it ) but not earth shattering.

The other issues you mentioned seem to me to be very solvable if engineering excellence is directed in that direction. You'll find out in about 5 years or so when these services start. How long from there to drones? No idea. It might not be advantageous to be first mover..it might be. Something to watch.

 

[nativewolf]

I get why Elon isn't touching it. Batteries aren't there yet for a truly great product. His time is more valuable focusing on SpaceX and Tesla. As Tesla progresses with battery density I'd expect flight startups to flourish - although not necessarily within Tesla.

There's a great product to be had for a small electric drone big enough for half a dozen people and quiet enough to land in densely populated cities while travelling up to 500 miles. I could see the wealthy commuting to a country residence or regular people getting away for the weekend using this sort of product. Operating costs would make this cheap enough to be a lifestyle enabler.

I'd love to have a few acres 100 miles out of London and do a commute via a vtol drone that could do the trip to my door in half an hour.

That's basically Lillium, vstol, electric, very compelling time in air story. Only 300km I think but that gets you out of the urban core. I could see wanting to use that as a daily commuter if I had stayed miserable in legal discovery work and had to commute to NYC and DC. I'd have paid $100/day to skip traffic. I can imagine many attorneys, consultants, etc would as well.

 

[Unpilot]

Thoughts on that carnival barker showman Jim Cramer. Yes it is positive that he changed his tune.
Sure I grant a loud mouth that has a platform helps if he is singing the praises of TSLA.

But IMHO we don't need him. Any "help" he gives to the mission pales in comparison to the harm he did for how many years?
How much did he hurt the planet by delaying Tesla...and the whole industry by standing on his soap box and screaming (yes that is what he does...scream) that Tesla was a dud.

Tesla is succeeding now because of the incredible hard work of Elon and all the folks at Tesla. THEY are driving the mission forward THEY had to push up a very steep slope that in large part was made steeper due to the crap Cramer and his kind spewed day after day after day.

Now he sees that the tide has turned and the future is better for Tesla and he want's to jump on board. Smells a little to strong of a opportunistic prick.

I for one don't like rent seeking opportunistic pricks.

 

[ZsoZso]

I wonder why they are so pessimistic?

Unfortunately, even their most optimistic bull case will fail to get me to billionaire status.

Then you better hurry up and buy more shares while they are still cheap!