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

[CorneliusXX]

"chink of calls" - Ill let this comment slide since i feel like i know you and there is no ill intent

Otherwise they would have said indecent

 

[scaesare]

Why does it seem everybody else's hobbies are better than mine?

 

[dgodfrey]

Yeah, it does require setting aside the better part of a day, but good excuse to get together with my buddies and drink beer while we brew beer. And a when we do 20-30 gals at a time at least it lasts a little while...

I don't even like beer nor do I have a prostate but if you can lure 20-30 gals to show up, I'll learn to like it.

 

[ZsoZso]

I was looking for the reasoning to why Tesla was worth less or slowed down by the merger. You are not providing that. The reason Elon did not settle is because the Unions suing him do not know what he is actually talking about because he never speaks clearly... and to that extent even you are potentially putting words in his mouth.

Let me translate. When Elon testifies all he has to do is clarify what he meant..... altho I can't know what he meant with the way he speaks so I will throw out one example, "But I just didn't realize the battery line supplier would completely fail and the Model 3 program would be so difficult. And so the Model 3 program was just a big distraction towards the solar side and sort of offset a lot of the solar business by more than a year, year and a half maybe."

Companies can not know the future. If the Model 3 battery line had actually worked and the supplier had not failed solar products might have ended up ahead of Solar City schedule. There is no way Elon or the board knew the Model 3 ramp was going to have the vendor side fail.
"The primary production constraint really, by far, is in battery module assembly," Musk said on a conference call with analysts..." from a Business Insider article in 2017.

Do not cut out the part about it making strategic sense for the companies to merge.... because it did and does. It did not hurt Tesla. It slowed the Solar City portion. IF the Model 3 battery line had not failed miserably they would have executed better altho not perfect. There is no way Elon could read the future so at the time of the merger no malice was intended.

The board member settlement I am reading in short says (what all settlements say) the Plaintiffs believe their accusations to be true but like money more than proving their case so they are going for the money and the lawyers will go chase more ambulances.
The defendants still say the accusations are false but don't want to waist the money and resources defending against a frivolous lawsuit so they are settling to get back to work at making cars and solar products.

Sure, in the long term the merger worked out and it made strategic sense. However, you cannot say that taking over the messy debt structure of SolarCity did not slow down Tesla. They could have achieved 4 consecutive profitable quarters years ago and get included into S&P500. Another important consequence was the "importing" of more aggressive, manipulative short-sellers such as Chanos who had a well-tested plan to drive SolarCity into bankruptcy. The merger saved SolarCity from that and turned them into blood-thirsty Tesla shorts (not that Tesla was lacking shorts before, but a new revenge-hungry flock was added).

It is impossible to predict or model what would have been the TSLA price without the merger. It clearly took a short term beating at the time and the debts dragged down Tesla and the more shorts dragged down the SP for years. In this year we had a huge breakout which probably reversed all that damage. Perhaps without the hold-back (spring not being compressed for so long), it may not have risen this high, we will never know.

 

[Krugerrand]

I voted against the Solar City acquisition and feel it was dilutive to Tesla's value as well as disruptive to Tesla's execution on its own business. The roof tiles Elon showed on the movie set were apparently fake and not operational. Tesla had to lay off a large number of Solar City workers, stopped a number of the businesses that generated cash flow, and it seemed as if they really did have to start over with the solar roof tile technology post-merger, which is part of the reason everything took so long.

Tesla should have let Solar City gone bankrupt and then buy up any worthwhile assets for pennies on the dollar, and hire the good people who become unemployed. Frankly,my view is that Tesla paid too much for the company.

Musk didn't want to let Solar City go bankrupt, as that would be a bad look for him personally. Maybe more critically, Space-X had bought hundreds of millions of Solar City bonds (Elon Musk's SpaceX will buy another $90 million in solar bonds from Solarcity (SCTY) - Electrek ), so if Solar City went under, Space-X might have ended up with worthless paper, which might have affected Space-X's ability to execute. Tesla closed the bonds early, including interest, but did so only after dong a capital raise itself (Tesla is discharging Solar Bonds early with interest, but converting Elon Musk's [updated] - Electrek ).

Those were tough times for Tesla, and for us as Tesla stockholders.

The disagree is for many things but summed up in Zen; everything happens for a reason.

The biggest reason I see is that the whole sequence of events turned Tesla onto the beastly capital AND manufacturing efficiency road. That distress forced Elon and the company to re-evaluate absolutely every single aspect of the business and manufacturing. It won’t be a lesson ever forgotten and it’s made the company one ginormous middle finger that all long term investors benefited from.

 

[Boomer19]

IMO the impact is that 24 August is a hard date by which they need to achieve 5#, 6#, the only way (I can see) to do that is buy in the market.

no,
theres a cutoff to be included in the split which is close of friday 8/28


as of open 8/31 all positions are new price and new share/contract qty

the open fails (fail to deliver fail to receive) are adjusted, along with the stock loan/borrow contracts

everything within rule 204 and broker to broker buy in requirements will stand. but that doesn’t mean that all short have to deliver the shares back as of any date. they can remain open as long as they are within the framework of all the buy-in rules depending on use case

so there’s no date or cutoff for that part

 

[StealthP3D]

Agree with that there has to be a non-market maker real buyer on the other side.

What you're describing is basically a broker taking on a naked TSLA short position as result of a FTD. The broker in this case will be on the hook. But again, the split changes nothing about the dollar value of this debt. It simply goes for 1 share @ $1,500 to 5 shares @ $300.

I appreciate your skepticism on this matter (I have a fair amount myself). However, I haven't seen a single person comment on this that appears to me to have enough knowledge of the subject to be able to rule it out. I think the kind of basic analysis you have outlined would miss the mark if something like this was occurring. Only someone deeply involved in the underlying system would know what it's vulnerabilities are, and those who might be actively participating in such schemes are not about to talk about it or daylight the techniques used.

This kind of scheme would certainly be illegal without needing to stretch the reading of current laws but the opaqueness of the system and the almost complete lack of oversight is staggering. As long as everyone was getting what they thought were valid shares, no one would likely be the wiser. It's splits such as Tesla has announced that might require a more complete accounting of all the shares.

 

[StealthP3D]

Tesla should have let Solar City gone bankrupt and then buy up any worthwhile assets for pennies on the dollar, and hire the good people who become unemployed. Frankly,my view is that Tesla paid too much for the company.

On the surface, absolutely Tesla should have let Solar City go bankrupt (and they did pay "too much" for it).

But the world is never simple or neat and everything is connected. Going back to that time and place, Tesla was fragile and still had need for massive amounts of investor financing and growing companies need to constantly hire new talent. The loss of confidence in Elon and associated people that certainly would have happened had Solar City gone bankrupt would have certainly made it more difficult for Tesla to raise money and continue to attract top talent at a critical time in Tesla's history.

Elon understood this and took the safest most direct route to protect the things he had created and increase the success of the overall mission. It was not "by the book" or technically the "correct" thing to do, but this is what makes Elon such a valuable leader - he can pull off stunts that would cause others to crash and burn (whether they attempted the stunt or decided it was too improper). It's almost like he can see the future of every possible path he could take and is then able to chose the path with the most happy ending. It's an exceedingly rare quality and is the very definition of "vision". And Elon has it in spades.

We don't need to debate whether this was the technically "proper" thing to do, I'm willing to concede it was not - and we don't need to debate whether it was the best path either - the proof is in the pudding.

 

[ggr]

Dear Smorgasbord, this sounds logical to me, but how do you know that the par value of each new Tesla share is 0.001$ ?

It is in all of Tesla's official filings, like the most recent 10Q:

 

[printf42]

Have you ever seen Elon weigh-in on the cloud computing market in any manner or is this pure speculation?

Pure speculation so far, but at some stage it would become like “why not”.

They would have hardware around not utilized 100% all the time. His people will see the value and propose to him, and he is good at listening.

Letting more people on board to their platform will also accelerate their own efforts, as part of the framework could be open sourced, Tesla will still control core IP through hardware.

 

[Knightshade]

Weekend ATH cheers!

And with that, Elon tweeted about something I believe people are not paying enough attention to:

Possibly because Dojos been known about for quite a while already. It's not news.

Dojo was explicitly mentioned at Autonomy day early 2019.

Here's a reddit thread from late 2019 linking to other elon tweets about it from 2019, a presentation from Karpathey in 2019 about it, and the stuff from Omar about it.

Tesla's Dojo Computer : teslamotors

Pertinent Elon tweets from today:


Elon: "Tesla team is working hard on increasing Powerwall production"

This one's open to tons of speculation on if he means more existing PW, or some next-gen product using something announced at battery day (and hence why orders are being pushed to 2021 as some are reporting).

Elon: "Significant improvements coming to S/X air suspension soon via software update! Will simultaneously improve performance handling & ride comfort & enable user customization of height & damping, geocoded for relevance."

Teslarati: 'Tesla Model S shows drastic consistency improvements after update, ties Taycan Turbo S in Car & Driver test'

That one was weird- since that update began rolling out weeks ago already... either he's been so busy with SpaceX he wasn't aware of that, or he means it's rolling wider than it has been and it's "coming soon" to the % of fleet that hasn't gotten that update yet.

Elon: "More software improvements coming"

I mean... that's always true

Elon: "Tesla is developing a NN training computer called Dojo to process truly vast amounts of video data. It’s a beast! Please consider joining our AI or computer/chip teams if this sounds interesting."

See above- this has been known for well over a year now (and Elons been asking AI folks to apply at Tesla for at least as long)

Elon: "The FSD improvement will come as a quantum leap, because it’s a fundamental architectural rewrite, not an incremental tweak. I drive the bleeding edge alpha build in my car personally. Almost at zero interventions between home & work. Limited public release in 6 to 10 weeks."

Also 100% already known info- though at least the 6-10 weeks remains "in line" with his previous time estimate for the initial release, so I guess "there's been no unexpected delay in the last couple months" is news?

Tweeter: 'Will it be able to do roundabouts?'
Elon: "Not perfectly at first, but yes. Will take maybe a year or so to get really good at roundabouts worldwide. The world has a zillion weird corner cases."

This one is... eh, kinda also not news? He said a while back discussion the re-write they're expecting feature complete end of this year (which 6-10 weeks gets you) and then perhaps another year to get GOOD at it.... so again the only news I guess is there's no change from previous timelines given.

Tweeter: 'Will it be able to get around potholes to avoid possible damage..?'
Elon: "Yes! We’re labeling bumps & potholes, so the car can slow down or steer around them when safe to do so."

Again not at all news.... he's been telling folks this for WELL over a year- that the system will be able to avoid potholes, here's one of the many times he mentioned it from April 2019-
https://twitter.com/kkarthi002/status/1114721775877742592

Tweeter: 'Elon, say something about the two factor authentication man ... is it happening? Last year it depended on some IT system overhaul ...'
Elon: "Sorry, this is embarrassingly late. Two factor authentication via sms or authenticator app is going through final validation right now."

This one approaches being actual news Or at least a timeline change/update to previously known news... personally I don't care about 2FA, but I do care if Tesla has finally gotten their internal IT out of the stone age, because it's been the cause of a lot of other problems (the cars getting sold at auction by Tesla with FSD and then having it pulled later for example- that's 100% an internal IT screw up.... as well as lots of other issues with sales, parts, service, etc that're well beyond scope of this thread).... so if they're on new, much better, internal IT systems now that's excellent news for the company.

Tweeter: 'At one point there was silly talk of making the horn honk like a goat -- is it an Easter Egg or wide release software update?
Elon: "Also definitely coming haha. Will only be on relatively recent cars, as we didn’t have an outside speaker until about a year ago. Can change inside sound easily."

I expect this'll get added to the games as a thing people complain about Tesla doing instead of improving FSD... Much like the games though this requires very very very little actual human effort to roll out so it's not a valid criticism.

It is the one time I'll be sad mine was built before the external speaker though.... I wonder how easy it is to add?

Tweeter: 'Dojo is used to increase training speed & enable self-supervised learning. This is at server side, so no upgrades required on individual cars (IIRC)'
Elon: "Exactly"

Tweeter: 'they use the cars to sort through clips. so for example they say “send me videos that match this neural net detector of a “parking meter” and then the car does inference on the footage to find anything matching and upload if needed
Elon: "Yup"

Yup, see above, this is already known stuff.... the cars getting campaigns to "send pics of X" has been going on before even Dojo was a thing- Greentheonly describes it in his "debunking shadow mode" stuff.

 

[StealthP3D]

Possibly because Dojos been known about for quite a while already. It's not news.

Dojo was explicitly mentioned at Autonomy day early 2019.

Here's a reddit thread from late 2019 linking to other elon tweets about it from 2019, a presentation from Karpathey in 2019 about it, and the stuff from Omar about it.

Tesla's Dojo Computer : teslamotors




This one's open to tons of speculation on if he means more existing PW, or some next-gen product using something announced at battery day (and hence why orders are being pushed to 2021 as some are reporting).




That one was weird- since that update began rolling out weeks ago already... either he's been so busy with SpaceX he wasn't aware of that, or he means it's rolling wider than it has been and it's "coming soon" to the % of fleet that hasn't gotten that update yet.




I mean... that's always true





See above- this has been known for well over a year now (and Elons been asking AI folks to apply at Tesla for at least as long)




Also 100% already known info- though at least the 6-10 weeks remains "in line" with his previous time estimate for the initial release, so I guess "there's been no unexpected delay in the last couple months" is news?





This one is... eh, kinda also not news? He said a while back discussion the re-write they're expecting feature complete end of this year (which 6-10 weeks gets you) and then perhaps another year to get GOOD at it.... so again the only news I guess is there's no change from previous timelines given.




Again not at all news.... he's been telling folks this for WELL over a year- that the system will be able to avoid potholes, here's one of the many times he mentioned it from April 2019-
https://twitter.com/kkarthi002/status/1114721775877742592




This one approaches being actual news Or at least a timeline change/update to previously known news... personally I don't care about 2FA, but I do care if Tesla has finally gotten their internal IT out of the stone age, because it's been the cause of a lot of other problems (the cars getting sold at auction by Tesla with FSD and then having it pulled later for example- that's 100% an internal IT screw up.... as well as lots of other issues with sales, parts, service, etc that're well beyond scope of this thread).... so if they're on new, much better, internal IT systems now that's excellent news for the company.





I expect this'll get added to the games as a thing people complain about Tesla doing instead of improving FSD... Much like the games though this requires very very very little actual human effort to roll out so it's not a valid criticism.

It is the one time I'll be sad mine was built before the external speaker though.... I wonder how easy it is to add?




Yup, see above, this is already known stuff.... the cars getting campaigns to "send pics of X" has been going on before even Dojo was a thing- Greentheonly describes it in his "debunking shadow mode" stuff.

If I may sum up your super-long post for those who may not want to read it "Well, we already knew these things at least a year ago and thus they are not important to re-consider now."

Thank you for your insight.

 

[Knightshade]

If I may sum up your super-long post for those who may not want to read it "Well, we already knew these things at least a year ago and thus they are not important to re-consider now."

Thank you for your insight.

Indeed.

It actually offers a very useful insight.

Folks who are paying attention have known most of this stuff for quite a while- while those who haven't been have lacked this very relevant-to-investing information.

It's a good reason to keep an eye on a few specific sources of info who pretty reliably mention this stuff when it happens so you're not behind on the information curve.... good of you to recognize the value of that

 

[printf42]

Possibly because Dojos been known about for quite a while already. It's not news.

Dojo was explicitly mentioned at Autonomy day early 2019.

Here's a reddit thread from late 2019 linking to other elon tweets about it from 2019, a presentation from Karpathey in 2019 about it, and the stuff from Omar about it.

Tesla's Dojo Computer : teslamotors




This one's open to tons of speculation on if he means more existing PW, or some next-gen product using something announced at battery day (and hence why orders are being pushed to 2021 as some are reporting).




That one was weird- since that update began rolling out weeks ago already... either he's been so busy with SpaceX he wasn't aware of that, or he means it's rolling wider than it has been and it's "coming soon" to the % of fleet that hasn't gotten that update yet.




I mean... that's always true





See above- this has been known for well over a year now (and Elons been asking AI folks to apply at Tesla for at least as long)




Also 100% already known info- though at least the 6-10 weeks remains "in line" with his previous time estimate for the initial release, so I guess "there's been no unexpected delay in the last couple months" is news?





This one is... eh, kinda also not news? He said a while back discussion the re-write they're expecting feature complete end of this year (which 6-10 weeks gets you) and then perhaps another year to get GOOD at it.... so again the only news I guess is there's no change from previous timelines given.




Again not at all news.... he's been telling folks this for WELL over a year- that the system will be able to avoid potholes, here's one of the many times he mentioned it from April 2019-
https://twitter.com/kkarthi002/status/1114721775877742592




This one approaches being actual news Or at least a timeline change/update to previously known news... personally I don't care about 2FA, but I do care if Tesla has finally gotten their internal IT out of the stone age, because it's been the cause of a lot of other problems (the cars getting sold at auction by Tesla with FSD and then having it pulled later for example- that's 100% an internal IT screw up.... as well as lots of other issues with sales, parts, service, etc that're well beyond scope of this thread).... so if they're on new, much better, internal IT systems now that's excellent news for the company.





I expect this'll get added to the games as a thing people complain about Tesla doing instead of improving FSD... Much like the games though this requires very very very little actual human effort to roll out so it's not a valid criticism.

It is the one time I'll be sad mine was built before the external speaker though.... I wonder how easy it is to add?




Yup, see above, this is already known stuff.... the cars getting campaigns to "send pics of X" has been going on before even Dojo was a thing- Greentheonly describes it in his "debunking shadow mode" stuff.

Cheers mate!

 

[Mike Smith]

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1294607951357870082

Elon: "I want to do electric vtol supersonic sooo bad, but my brain will overload"

 

[BioSehnsucht]

Weekend OT
Svenska Spel a Swedish government run gambling company has a scratch ticket out now where you can win a Tesla. And best of all they're running tv ads for it

Thumbnail reminds me of Kavinsky - Protovision

 

[Prunesquallor]

Man, I'm seriously considering starting an EV startup.. just need some even way more crazy ideas. How about a floating one? Solves parking space problems since you can just leave it to float?
Could travel across water too. Lets utilize earths very strong magnetic field.
Funding secured.

Mine has a propulsion system based upon tractoring along lines of longitude and latitude (old Arthur C. Clarke joke).

 

[Drax7]

That and “electronic car”

The detractors have hardly any ammunition left so they have to say something. Tesla's not going away anytime soon; there's no fires anymore; the only demand issue is lack of production; the SEC is no longer a problem; claims of fraud and similar are discounted by everyone because no company can build multiple factories without a solid track record, resale value is better than most, etc.

Elon buying his secondaries is the most anti fraud action I can think off.

 

[Off Shore]

weekend OT

Omg, another Tesla killer is coming

Home

Light-weight hydrogen indeed! (I thought all hydrogen was light-weight).

 

[Off Shore]

Just like most corporations, unions

That's a rather broad brush. Presumably you have data to support it.