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

[brian45011]

Super quick jump ball question. Did Deepak sell any of his shares following his announcement? What does he currently own #wise?

No form 4 filed since early December. (Once he is officially replaced as Tesla's top accounting/financial executive I do not think he has any further obligation under Section 16 to disclose transactions in Tesla's securities.)

The December form 4 showed 38,789 shares owned outright and 23,997 zero cost RSUs.
http://ir.teslamotors.com/static-files/bb52d07e-1c95-47b8-ae20-8ef117a28d04

An October form 4 showed he owned 2,000 vested ISOs.
http://ir.teslamotors.com/static-files/d6b63ef3-86f5-4513-b843-1e51e81d7f03

He might also have some NQSOs and a minor amount in ESPP shares.

 

[NicoV]

Thorium reactors are used very similarly in pro-nuclear arguments, but if they are so amazing, why doesn't everyone build them?

I would also love to know the answer to that question.
That’s why I think it doesn’t hurt to have a billionaire that supports developing thorium reactors, the US government isn’t interested because it isn’t possible to make weapons with it.

 

[Dan Detweiler]

Dang, up almost $4 in premarket trading! Seems like the spike hasn't stopped yet. (yeah, I know, I probably just jinxed it.)

Dan

 

[CaliBear1]

You've really outdone yourself here FC.

Since LEMUR was basically an (imperfect) acronym of "LE MidRange", there's a chance that TUSK is going to be an acronym as well. (Would be pretty ironic, given that Elon hates acronyms.)

The official TUSK acronyms are:

TUSK

TUSK Tank Urban Survivability Kit (US Army)
TUSK Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase (online health and medical database)​

Tesla announcing electrified stealth tank production would sure catapult the stock price, but I consider it rather unlikely at this stage. (It's a nice business idea to keep in mind nevertheless.)

But in LEMUR acronym the 'U' was 'silent', so let's remove the 'U' fro TUSK as well, and see TSK acronyms:

TSK

TSK Task
TSK Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
TSK Tasking
TSK Temporary Session Key
TSK Tsukishima Kikai Co., Ltd. (Japan)
TSK The Sleuth Kit (UNIX)
TSK The Silent Killer (gaming clan)
TSK Tesked (Swedish: teaspoon)
TSK Tall Skinny Kiwi
TSK The Subtle Knife (Phillip Pullman book)
TSK Skin Temperature
TSK Turk Silahli Kuvvetleri (Turkish Armed Forces)
TSK Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (fuzzy network model)
TSK Tekniikan Sanastokeskus (Finland)
TSK Tampa Scale for Kinesiophobia
TSK Typgeprüfte Schaltgerätekombinationen (Type-Tested Switchgear Assembly)
TSK Time Stranger Kyoko (anime)
TSK Telcordia Standards Knowledgebase
TSK Transmission Security Key
TSK Tang Shiu Kin (school)
TSK Time Space Knowledge (inquiry method)
TSK Three-Second Kiss (band)
TSK The Screaming Kidneys (band)
TSK Team Silent Kill (Airsoft team)
TSK Touristik-Service-Kühlungsborn (German)
TSK Tokyo Senpaku Kaisha, Ltd
TSK Top Secret Kid (gaming)
TSK The Softkiller Crew
TSK Thou Shalt Kill (record label)
TSK The Serial Keeper
TSK Takarazuka Sakudokan K.K (now Hi-Lex Corporation; Japan)
TSK Table Space Kitchen (real estate)
TSK Truk-Soft Köln (German)
TSK Team Swiss Kart (gaming)
TSK Tallinna Sikupilli Keskkool
TSK Tiger Shulmann's Karate
TSK Trade Services Contract
TSK Technical Society of Knoxville
TSK Telekommunikation Service Kaya
TSK Towarzystwo Szkolne Kociszew (Polish)
TSK Transport Service Külbleck
TSK The Suicide Crew (gaming)
TSK Tongue Smart Kids
TSK Total Street Knowledge (clothing company; Cleveland, OH)
TSK Technické služby mesta Karviné
TSK Twiztid Serial Killa (Insane Clown Posse)
TSK The Sound Key (band)
​

Oh my, possibilities abound! As much as I'd like to see Tesla make a 'Team Swiss Kart', or Tesla release a 'Three Second Kiss' video showing his wedding with Grimes, let's filter out the ... less likely solutions, which gives us:

TSK Task
TSK Time Stranger Kyoko (anime)
TSK The Sleuth Kit (UNIX)
​

'Task' is rather boring.
'Time Stranger Kyoko' is a story about telepathy, which I might buy in the context of a Neuralink announcement, but probably not in the "Some Tesla news" context.
'The Sleuth Kit' is a forensics tool (or a spying tool, depending on which side of the indictment you are on), and while I'd like to see a stealth Tesla, it's probably not very practical as Teslas are pretty damn silent already.

So I'm afraid that while this was an amusing excursion into the world of known acronyms, but it appears to be an ultimate dead end. Tsk tsk ...

New acronyms are still possible though:

Tesla UK Sales (the order of the letters is wrong, but that's normal in the UK where traffic is in the wrong side of the road already)​

Pretty exciting news for our lunatic wrong-hand-side driving friends (some of our down under friends are even doing it while upside down, which is like totally crazy), but probably not that interesting to 95% of Tesla fans who are driving on the correct side of the road.

Having exhausted the most obvious angles of the acronym, how about the literal meaning of 'tusk':

1. An elongated pointed tooth, usually one of a pair, extending outside of the mouth in certain animals such as the walrus, elephant, or wild boar.
2. A long projecting tooth or toothlike part.​

Let's assume that Elon is his usual stealthy self and the very visible animal tusk references he made are just misdirection. The real meaning would be the second one: "a toothlike part" of a vehicle.

So my hypothesis based on linguistic analysis: Hawthorne demo of Teslas convoying at high speed in the test tunnel, keeping very tight distance with a 'tusk' tool that is extended automatically as they enter the tunnel. This allows very high speed yet safe transport: the 'tusk' would be strong enough to carry the force of even a collision or most other types of malfunction.

They would be the Tesla equivalents of train couplers:

If that's what the demo is going to be about today then you heard it here first.

A cool demo, but a bit of a letdown in terms of stock price impact though, and primarily Boring Company related, not a core Tesla competency.

Still totally not advice.

 

[CaliBear1]

And you'll be here all week?

1. I can't wrap my head around how clueless you guys all are when it comes to todays announcement. It's so obvious what the twitter message is. Elon will announce that he will nuke mars to start and accelerate the terraforming process,

Proof: latest pic, Revive Mars.

View attachment 381358
..aarggh i forgot, it's supposed to be Tesla related...

will try again later

 

[KarenRei]

No one wants to invest the money. Thorium reactors work, but they need to be designed and extensively tested. The US could have gone that route in the 50s and 60s. Instead they created nuclear reactor designs that yielded copious amounts of fissionable materials to produce stockpiles of nuclear weapons. As bad as that sounds, they then allowed the companies involved to go out and market these same designs to the rest of the world to sell only for ‘energy production’. Every now and then the US decides we may have to nuke the countries that we sold the designs to because they seem to be using the nuclear waste produced to produce nuclear weapons.

OT:

There is no economic case for it. There just isn't. The fuel is more abundant but fuel rod fabrication costs are higher, which offsets it. The waste rods are more hazardous to handle and reprocess (due to the very thing that resists proliferation, U-232 - and its proliferation resistance can be bypassed, turning a proliferation hindrance into a proliferation benefit). You can run it as a breeder, and create less waste, but you can do the exact same thing (only more effectively) with U-238, and we generally don't do that either. Yes, every new thorium reactor design makes all sorts of "we're super economical and safe" argument, but so does every new uranium reactor, and in general, they're all BS in practice.

(These sorts of claims tend to cause nerdy but non-industry-savvy people to glob onto them as the Next Big Thing - you see the same thing as well with various types of "trendy" uranium reactors, like PBMRs)

The simple problem is the very nature of fission. Whatever method you use. Fission creates every isotope on the table lighter than your fissile material (and indirectly, some heavier ones). Most of these are exceedingly toxic, in vanishingly small quantities. But you're simultaneously creating new byproducts with every chemical property in existence in your fuel rods - solids, liquids, gases, things that readily convert between different states, things that corrode various other things (whatever you make your reactor out of, you're also generating its worst enemy), etc. On top of that you're simultaneously bombarding your reactor (solid structures and working fluids) with an intense neutron flux, which is first off changing what it's made out of, via neutron capture, and secondly altering its crystal structure, which not only can severely harm its material properties, but can also store energy inside of it which can be released suddenly (Wigner energy), depending on the material. And you can't just use whatever materials you want to make it, because you also have to take into account how they're going to affect fission inside the reactor.

The economics problem is far worse than the physics and engineering, however. The lead times on reactor construction and necessary operating lifespans are so long that if you get your demand or price forecasts at all wrong, you're totally screwed. Nuclear power has also undergone something extremely rare in industry: a negative learning curve. That is, the more you deploy the tech, the more expensive it gets. In the case of nuclear, it's due to the process of learning all of the things that you didn't forsee that start to affect your reactor with time, and new hazards or costs that you didn't expect previously. The way to overcome this is with new reactor generations, but then with each new generation, you reset your learning curve and have to start over from scratch. And then we come back to the lead-time problem - you've invested countless billions before you discover what you did wrong.

Nuclear power has always had far more support on K-Street than Wall Street. Many of the most expensive structures on Earth are nuclear reactors. The price is mind-boggling - even with government subsidies (like the US indemnifying reactor operators from catastrophic damage liability - no insurer would ever insure them without that). And it doesn't even pair well with renewable power - response times to increase or decrease generation are usually slow, and they have to run at high capacity factor to get even their already-poor economics, while renewables need to pair with generation sources that throttle up and down.

In general, the "you can't fight climate change without nuclear power" advocates' arguments are almost always "argument via incredulity". Aka, of the form "I can't imagine deploying that much renewables power!". Well, sorry, but that just means that your imagination sucks. The simple fact is, you can build more renewable power capacity - paired with peaking, storage, and HVDC for reliability - for much cheaper and faster than you can with nuclear. One's incredulity doesn't change economic reality.

... and that's all I have to say on the topic.

 

[lklundin]

Uhhh...ok, but why?

Dan

On this day of idle speculation, maybe it's Audi's way of saying:

"We cannot just give up in trying to stay ahead, so instead we deliberately speed backwards".

 

[aubreymcfato]

Karen, just thought I'd let you know I just had a hot turkey sammiche, and damn dude, it was goooood!

my god, how old are you?

 

[Artful Dodger]

Driving "at speed in reverse" doesn't sound as if it is the best plan to obtain old age.

Not sure its allowed by the software either. The gear oil pump for the transaxle doesn't work in reverse, so I think Tesla limits the max speed in reverse.

 

[LST]

And you'll be here all week?

Yep, all day and all night, but i need more sleep than Karen ; )

 

[KarenRei]

Yep, all day and all night, but i need more sleep than Karen ; )

People keep talking about this whole "sleep" thing; I'm still trying to figure out what it is. Maybe I should just look it up on Wikipedia...

 

[agloutney]

You forgot to take into account how quickly those Vermont ice lake rocks can sneak up on you from behind.

Vermont ice lake rocks maybe but not the metric ones in the rest of the world was my point.
Kinda like airplanes having bird strikes from behind!

 

[dw4ngg]

my god, how old are you?

My god how old are youuu??

 

[UncaNed]

Tusk rhymes with Truck, and close spelling. Elephants, like trucks, are also big and can push and move things around. The tusk could also symbolize a truck's tow-hitch.

Elon also mentioned that this was his favorite project, even more so than the Y. Though he did say that it may only be revealed this summer (perhaps with the Y). Maybe not a live reveal tomorrow, but some teaser images and specs and perhaps reveal, production timelines. He may want to stay abreast of the recent developements with Rivian, GM, Amazon, and also Ford. JM2C

And Trucks would pull forwards into a megacharger stall- hence a vehicle-mounted tusklike charging plug- necessary because the wires are too heavy to pick up and manhandle and truckers time is valuable so they wanna pull into the stall and get tusked into the outlet for instant charge up start!

What do I get if I'm right?

 

[Artful Dodger]

Pre-market 318.25 +3.51 (1.12%)

We're primed to break out above the Upper-BB at 321.83

How far can we roll today? 325? After-hrs avalanche? C'mon, Elon!

 

[lklundin]

Pre-market 318.25 +3.51 (1.12%)

We're primed to break out above the Upper-BB at 321.83

How far can we roll today? 325? After-hrs avalanche? C'mon, Elon!

Just jumped to 319.61 ...

 

[HG Wells]

People keep talking about this whole "sleep" thing; I'm still trying to figure out what it is. Maybe I should just look it up on Wikipedia...

The best way I can describe it is the funny feeling you have when you reach the last post on TMC and your eyes close for just a second.
When looking back at the screen, you find you are now four or five pages behind.

 

[Dan Detweiler]

People keep talking about this whole "sleep" thing; I'm still trying to figure out what it is. Maybe I should just look it up on Wikipedia...

You might be more familiar with the chemically enhanced version...passed out drunk? lol!

Dan

 

[KarenRei]

Wonder how long after paying the $920M it'll be before Moody's upgrades....

 

[Artful Dodger]

Just jumped to 319.61 ...

"It's good" -- God