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

[KarenRei]

European January registrations are in (only missing Portugal which should be negligible) at about 10% below October 2019 (1939 vs. 2141). January 2019 was 760, but that was just before Model 3 deliveries started.

Tesla Europe Registration Stats

Expect February deliveries to be somewhat down due to the late shipping start this quarter.
Expect shorts to scream "NO DEMAND!" because of that.

 

[Sudre]

OT:
Good news for SpaceX, very bad news for Boeing:

There have just been a press conference with Boeing and NASA, where it turned out that there were multiple software issues with the Starliner crew capsule. Starliner flew an uncrewed test flight in december, but had multiple failures which meant they couldn't proceed to the International Space Station, and had to abort the mission. Now it turns out that they will, among other stuff, have to review 1 million lines of code, and very possible refly the uncrewed test flight.

So, unless SpaceX has any critical failures (they shouldn't - they have passed all major milestones, but never say never), they should be the first commercial crew program to get to the ISS, and get the flag kept there. It'd be a huge prestige win for them.

In this case if I was a software writer and I had a CEO who could probably write my code better but he just doesn't have time.... well, I'd make sure my code was top notch to keep my job. Also, Boeing only has the left overs after Tesla, Apple, Google and many others have picked through the graduates.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

The HWY range test is close to the best case conditions. The average speeds are relatively slow when I last checked, not the 70-80 mph that exists on many of the nation's highways.

That is correct. The cycle I was referencing maxes out at ~50mph. Even at that speed the aero effects are pretty evident based on the result. Once the full Model Y data is published I’ll dig up the US06 results and tabulate it - based on an earlier post here it looks like we’ll be able to get some raw numbers.

I bet the actual range is very close, if not identical, to an AWD Model 3.

The data (projected/back calculated from published data, so extremely likely correct in my estimation - I am about 99% sure it will be within 2%) shows Model Y will get 15% less range in the above mentioned test as compared to Model 3 P 18”. Accounts for all the efficiency improvements. See the tracker. Leftmost columns are raw data test results. City is great, highway not so good, not surprisingly.

2020, 2019, 2018 Model 3 Battery Capacities & Charging Constants

More batteries make the car heavier and more expensive, neither of which make the car better.

I meant better *density* long term, though I admit what I said was ambiguous.

An SUV is not designed for long, high-speed trips anyway.

Many people do not have the money or the space to spend on one vehicle for each type of trip. I already said the range of the Model Y was fine. Just not as quite as convenient, and could be an issue for the masses (even you mentioned you are looking forward to more range).

Overall it doesn’t sound like there is much to disagree on here - seems like maybe you just had not been tracking the Model Y data closely.

 

[PeterJA]

...I'm sure there are plenty of investors who just looked at a guy landing rockets on barges...

Imagine when SpaceX starts cranking out Starships... and even CNBC nitwits stop sneering at the Mars mission... and macho truck-buyers can buy a vehicle made of the same steel as Mars rockets.

The automakers that spend billions on ads claiming their trucks are Built Tough will have a snowball's chance in Falcon 9 exhaust.

 

[Quesder]

That's an excellent learning on how markets are manipulated. But I have mixed feelings on how it impacted Tesla. Let me explain.

First of all, I dumped all my call options on Wednesday. They lost half (or more) of their value from Tuesday's peak (but were still up around 20-30X). So this manipulation was a HUGE loss of profit potential for me. I could buy the late Feb. 2020's back for less right now but I don't want to. Market makers cut potential losses in half or more, a huge savings for the bastards.

But, for those TSLA investors who are only long TSLA, this is making a "prettier" long-term chart with less volatility than it would have had if there was no manipulation using the "Madoff" rule. The run past $900 was largely based on the underwriters of the options needing shares to hedge their losses. So it probably would have run to $1100 (or higher) before crashing back down. That does not make a "pretty" chart.

In the long-term, the manipulations now do not impact the value of the shares down the road. They will settle into a valuation based upon projected growth rates, margins and potential size of the market. So while I hate the manipulations and believe in transparent markets, it mostly impacts the short term. It's greedy people manipulating for their own benefit. But I like that it's smoothing out the price action. The fact that options underwriters mispriced the options and found themselves in a bind can disrupt the normal functioning of markets. Ideally, they wouldn't misprice the options to begin with (but then our profit potential would be much less). The options markets introduce price volatility in the underlying shares that otherwise wouldn't be there. This manipulation was the "solution" to that. I'm not saying it was a good or proper solution, just that it did solve their problem (which wouldn't have existed if they didn't misprice the options to begin with). They should have had to pay the price for their mispricing. What this illustrates is those playing the game at the highest levels, the market makers, actually don't know what they are doing. But that they can hack together a corrupt solution to "fix" their gross negligence.

All I'm saying is the manipulations reduced the impact of the options mispricing on the underlying shares which is actually a net positive for those only long TSLA (for the long-term). And, what a "pretty" chart it's shaping up to be!

Hi, you kept mentioning the mispriced option ,
but what is that? Call or put? What do you base one?

 

[CorneliusXX]

Jim Keller is more than a rock star of chip design, AFAIK he designed the AMD64 architecture, which was the David against Intel's Goliath, and they won - Intel had to abandon its 64-bit design and is using AMD's 64-bit design today.

And Jim Keller was thinking outside the box there: Intel's 64-bit chip was a first principles redesign from scratch, but x86-64 was designed to be very easy to migrate to, where the 64-bit instructions are extensions and can coexist with 32-bit instructions, without compromising 64-bit performance.

This allowed AMD to build chips that had excellent 32-bit and 64-bit performance as well - while Intel's 64-bit chips emulated 32-bit instructions.

Jim Keller, somewhat ironically, is working for Intel currently.

Do you know what he is doing for Intel? Is he building chips for Mobileye?

 

[Foghat]

The new "universal income" is everyone creating value from/off their own production of energy. Tesla developing the upgraded hardware for this next software rewrite.

"People are how constrained... as opposed to what do I actually want, then figure out how to build it. It's a very different mindset." --Jim Keller on Elon Musk (Lex Fridman podcast)

 

[StealthP3D]

Friedmen did not get owned. The interview was great. FSD is not easy. If it was it would be done already and it’s nowhere near done.

really liked much of this guys insights, but like most people, he’s not 100% right on everything.

He didn't get "owned"?

Call it what you will but it was plainly obvious that Freidman knew he was up against someone much greater than himself. Jim Keller walked all over him and he knew it.

 

[ABCTG]

TSLA is 47th by market cap in the US

United States Stock Market Capitalization of the 50 Largest American Companies - iWeblists


based on the number of shares held by Vanguard in their Russell 1000 index as of DEC 31st 2019, TSLA would rank 57th in their holdings,

so does that mean the Vanguard Russell 1000 index fund would have to purchase more TSLA shares to have the correct weighting in their portfolio?

 

[capster]

OT more FSD discussion:

I am very bullish that if Tesla can achieve accurate FSD, it will be very bullish on share price.

I am not confident at all that this is happening soon. Frankly, I have no idea how anyone here can have high confidence, unless you work in computer vision and are familiar with this specific type of problem.

As background, I work in building machine learning / deep learning algorithms that end up running on memory constrained systems.

I was always skeptical about FSD on HW2 in 2016 because of computational limitations. Images weren't even proccessed at full resolution - they were downsampled. Not a good start.

Before HW3 came out, @jimmy_d was excited because some big neural net was uncovered that was used for all cameras and took not one, but 2 full scale images as input.

Exciting yes, but 2 full sized images is a far cry from 6 seconds of video (if say that is what Dojo is going to be training on).

My point being, I think we should be excited that Tesla has the data and possibly getting the computational resources to train a great FSD net. But I don't see any evidence that it would work on HW3.

I am curious about peoples thoughts on why they think differently, other than "Elon said so"

Here are the reasons I believe we’ll see FSD sooner rather than later:

1) There should be enough compute power available today to not only train networks, but also to evolve novel and suitable networks. This assumes Tesla has the data and I believe they do, though, yes, labeling is likely a serious bottleneck. Mammalian vision is an evolved system; it should be possible to evolve a suitable system with enough compute power.

2) There are decent models of a lot of the functions of the human brain, including vision, memory, sensorimotor control, and reinforcement learning. These models could be used to guide or seed the evolution of the networks. That many people are unaware of these models is no reason to believe that Musk and Tesla are unaware of them — even if they don’t speak about them. I’m partial to the work of Stephen Grossberg (Stephen Grossberg - Wikipedia) and his colleagues at what was once the Cognitive and Neural Systems Department at Boston University (CNS Classes | Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems).

3) Thinking like a futurist, we are overdue for this development as I estimate human technological progress. Read Kurzweil ( Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia ) as a starting place on estimating technological progress. Remember, experts tend to overestimate what can happen in the short run and underestimate what can happen in the long run. I’m afraid I was a couple decades early on neural networks, so for me this is the long run. I was a few years late on coming to mobile and iOS. I like to think I’m getting more accurate at forecasting and that I’m bang on with Tesla.

Since Musk appears satisfied with their sensor suite and now aims for people to be able at least to commute to work without a single intervention, I take this to mean FSD is working quite well though still needing (relatively few ) corrections. Thus, I think Tesla is actually far along a viable path, but not quite there.

They are now working, in my guesstimation, to slay a couple more 9’s in their FSD March of Nines. Perhaps it’s still just a way of saying "Elon said so," but if anyone can fight exponentials with exponentials it’s Tesla (referring for example to the three orders of magnitude improvement in labeling mentioned by Elon in the most recent earnings call).

 

[Curt Renz]

I just got off a half-hour phone conversation with my Illinois state representative.

We discussed:
tax credits for purchases of EVs
tax credits for 240-volt outlets installed in older home garages
mandatory 240-volt outlets for brand new home garages
incentives for companies to build charging stations
incentives for Tesla to build a factory in Illinois
autonomous driving regulations
eventually replacing the gasoline tax with alternatives to pay for roadwork

Since Tesla has always been allowed to sell and service in Illinois, there was no need to provide encouragement.

I suggested he test drive a Tesla. He said he will.

One of my state representative's potential election opponents has alerted me to the Clean Energy Jobs Act HB3624, which will shortly come up for a vote in the Illinois legislature. Although my state representative did not mention this, I presume it is why my he phoned to question me about EVs.

I have since emailed him to say that my vote in November may depend on how he votes regarding this bill. Any other TMC Illinois residents may want to send their opinion on this matter to their state legislators.

Citizens Utility Board: What is the Clean Energy Jobs Act? – Citizens Utility Board

 

[Artful Dodger]

It would be kick-a$$ if this were true. Being one of your men-on-the-ground, I wonder what the best sources to pick up rumors and tidbits would be? I have heard zero scuttle-but about this so far.

Also, maybe I’d better train as a drone-pilot...
(Actually, if the location was in the industrial or Port of Houston area, dronage would be VERY frowned upon.)

Yeah, no idea either but suppliers provided some hints regarding the accelerated Model Y rollout. So maybe construction general contractors, or permit registrations? Telsa is leaky as a sieve for email, and tight as a drum for plans and prototypes.

Let us know if you get a whiff of any juicy rumors.

Cheers!

Mod: sexist image deleted. Don't do this in future. --ggr

 

[Fact Checking]

Do you know what he is doing for Intel? Is he building chips for Mobileye?

Almost certainly not, designers of his class try not to burn bridges with past employers (it's a closely knit community) - and him doing that would possibly also be legally iffy. (Tesla owns the various FSD chip secrets.)

Also, I'm quite sure he was looking for a new challenge.

IIRC an article mentioned that he went to the Intel server chip division?

 

[phantasms]

Expect February deliveries to be somewhat down due to the late shipping start this quarter.
Expect shorts to scream "NO DEMAND!" because of that.

Expect me to buy more TSLA

 

[SageBrush]

which may be calculated off of 2018 5-cycle testing?

Are you talking about the coefficients used for the dyno ?
They are a best fit polynomial that matches the coast-down test

 

[Fact Checking]

LOL, Papa Musk is partying:

Spoiler: What you probably didn't notice.

Check out Elon's shoes ...

Also, WSB's take on it:

TESLA TO THE MOON! Papi musk wearing the “cybershoes”, gonna sell more than Jordans : wallstreetbets
​

 

[ZeApelido]

You don’t need all those frames at the same time, as long as you have some recurrent layers in the network. My guess would be that Dojo uses 6 seconds of video as the sample for training a recurrent net, vs passing all 180-360 frames as input for a single feed forward.

Agreed but of course the RNN will be proportionally larger. Still small enough for HW3?

 

[rsm287]

He didn't get "owned"?

Call it what you will but it was plainly obvious that Freidman knew he was up against someone much greater than himself. Jim Keller walked all over him and he knew it.

It appears to me (as someone that is not knowledgeable in this field) that Fridman is more of an 'academic', whereas Keller is an 'engineer' who gets things done (and I'm not trying to denigrate academics here because both academics and engineers serve an important function). Fridman is perhaps more interested in the theoretical, whereas Keller is more practical and pragmatic perhaps.

 

[KarenRei]

I would never choose c++ over c

That's a whole different can of worms that we probably shouldn't open

 

[ABCTG]

There are Tesla owners who paid for FSD and have the latest FSD chip,
are there are Tesla owners who paid for FSD and are waiting for the chip upgrade.

but nobody really has FSD yet, since the only usable FSD options available are smart summon, lane change, and self parallel park.

Maybe Tesla is really close to FSD, but is holding off to give time for those who need the chip upgrade...