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

[EVNow]

"The new exchange would have extra rules designed to encourage companies to focus on long-term innovation rather than the grind of quarterly earnings reports by asking companies to limit executive bonuses that award short-term accomplishments.

"It would also require more disclosure to investors about meeting key milestones and plans, and reward long-term shareholders by giving them more voting power the longer they hold the stock.

Most important question : Will they ban shorting.

 

[MP3Mike]

Hm, especially since they’re supposed to be replacing all of those come July.

Yep, current screens develop yellow bands around the edges after a while(mine did after ~2 years). Support has said they’ll replace all MCU screens with new ones that won’t have that problem in July.

The SCs had started replacing yellow border screens, but as of today people are reporting that service centers are now telling people that because it is just a cosmetic issue that they will not be replacing the YBS screens under warranty or goodwill. (But you can pay them to replace it if the yellow border bothers you enough.)

I'm not sure if the warranty excludes cosmetic defects or not... So we will have to see how this goes...

 

[JRP3]

Most important question : Will they ban shorting.

That would help. Unfortunately they can't ban the SEC.

 

[RobStark]

That is one interpretation. Another is that Tesla wants to become Daimler to lead by example and force a change by attacking highest margins down. For example, they are going after high margin luxury cars which is forcing Daimler, Audi and BMW to counter. With S3XY, this basically covers 90% of the profits of European Autos and forces them to react in a meaningful way and not in a half-assed compliance way.

Pickups are to target the Margins of the big 3 US Autos. Model Y will help some with SUVs but they will need help from someone like Ravian to build more traditional SUV

Tesla is not going to make every car, they are going to make every car with >X margin and they are going to force a reaction which should lead to their goals being achieved, which is to accelerate the transition.

Tesla is making the Semi because frankly, no one else can. Tesla is not making buses, because those are already being made and are already getting traction. Tesla is not trying to solve problems that do not exist, they are using a scalpel to dissect the problem like a surgeon removing all the phat margins from the dying patient that is the auto industry.

The Tesla network should replace cars for everyone else. Meaning that car ownership goes away for many in a world where Tesla Network can take you where ever you want to go for 25c a mile, its to expensive to own a car.

For example if you commute 30 miles a day for work and 30 miles a day of errands, thats $15/day for 22 days a month or $330. You cant buy a car and pay insurance for that price. You can rent a Tesla on Turo for road trips.

In short order, Tesla will basically have a solution for all green transportation and will have set the standard which everyone else will have to achieve to survive. Will all car ownership stop, of course not. People still own horses. I know because my daughter is a person with a pony. Wish her luck in her horse show this weekend.

That was the entire plan circa 2016.

Elon not impressed with foresight of automobile industry.

That is still part of the plan.

But Elon now is talking 10M plus cars per year in the foreseeable future.

In evidently a shrinking market due to TaaS.

That is ubiquitous IMO.

You don't get to the $650B-$1T market cap by simply being a catalyst.

 

[RobStark]

By becoming the "electric Mercedes Benz" it will "transition the world to sustainable energy ASAP."

Leverage effect.

Electric Mercedes Benz doesn't scare the bejezus out of Toyota nor Detroit.

You need a compelling $25k CUV/hatchback and a compelling $35k Pickup for that.

 

[MattD]

Hey guys,

Long time lurker here... but yesterday my friend spoke with a VERY high up C level executive at Maxwell who said the deal with Tesla is done.

Happy Friday...

 

[Boomer19]

LoL, there is zero chance to oppose a tax in Illinois. Even when the Governor was a republican billionaire, they forced him into raising taxes. Taxes only go one direction here in IL, up. Good luck, I'm getting the f out ASAP.

as am i from ct!

 

[Zhelko Dimic]

Autopilot reorganisation.
Tesla restructures Autopilot software team, Elon takes the reins

Why does stuff like this come out early in the morning.
They must be releasing info at like 12 AM California time.

Not a great news. You don't reorg team that's working great.

 

[Boomer19]

1. Summer 2018 - 10 lines @ 300k cells/line/day. 19.7 GWh peak output, 17-18 GWh sustained.
2. Late 2018/early 2019 - installed 3 new lines @ 400k cells/day each. 27.6 GWh/year peak rated output.
3. Today - at least one of the new lines is not operational, the others are struggling. Actual peak output ~24 GWh.
4. June - new "jig" installation begins. This will fix 400k cell/day lines and upgrade the 300k lines to 400k.
5. Later in 2019 - all 13 lines @ 400k cells/day = 5.2m cells/day. 34.2 GWh peak output.

yes that’s the way i interpreted it..
how certain are we that this is pretty much the case right now? thoughts?

 

[EVNow]

Not a great news. You don't reorg team that's working great.

LOL. Moving one guy up means nothing - as I said earlier could just be a simple promotion.

 

[Zhelko Dimic]

The thing that makes me more optimistic this time is that Elon is now the head of the Autopilot team. He obviously knows the history of his missed promises and being way over-optimistic. I don't think he was this involved with Autopilot in 2016/2017 when he said they would be ready to do a coast to coast drive by the end of 2017. He went through the failure to deliver on that promise, changed much of the Autopilot/AI team, and shifted to becoming the head of the team himself. He has now very closely followed the ensuing progress over a couple of years. With all that in mind, he is very confident in FSD coming soon. He has indicated his confidence in it many times over the last month. Should we believe him this time?
...

This worries me.

His approach is from the the first principle, one of science, and not engineering. That produces awesome proof of concept systems, but not great production-ready code.

I'm worried we'll get quicker delivery times, but end up with more brittle codebase; such that Tesla will end up paying technical debt for years to come.

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

Not a great news. You don't reorg team that's working great.

I take it you don't work in tech? Been in it for over 10 years........re-orgs happen all the time, to bad teams and great teams. Re-orging is all about gaining efficiency and dropping dead weight. The tech field can be pretty brutal

 

[Remus]

Not a great news. You don't reorg team that's working great.

I am not arguing this is great news, but your argument does not hold water at all. Microsoft reorg the azure team (with layoffs) when their cloud business is growing at pretty high speed.

 

[MarcusMaximus]

Not a great news. You don't reorg team that's working great.

Sure you do. What are you talking about?

 

[neroden]

Semi OT

To be slightly fair to the PTO, they generally don't have the funding to hire the necessary people to begin to understand which patents are ridiculous and which aren't, so they just keep rubber stamping them rather than denying them as it's safer for them to do that and let the courts sort it out, than to deny it and get into trouble themselves - they're just doing what they can with what they've been given. Ideally together with legislative fixes to the patent system and courts, we'd also better fund the PTO so it had the subject matter experts it needed.

This problem was created by the Federal Circuit. Previously, the Patent Office was safer *denying* patents, and the courts rarely reversed them, but when the Federal Circuit started bending over backwards to allow obviously invalid patents, the Patent Examiners threw up their hands and said "Why did we bother, we might as well rubber stamp these".

 

[neroden]

And there’s the funny thing. We know all about the march of nines. Regardless of readiness for the cars to ‘go it alone’, a year from now the cars will have an amazing array of party tricks. e.g. 4000 cars driving on and off boats, cars coming off the assembly line and performing their own stage one track test, cars in open spaces doing weaving manoeuvres, etc. Some vids will go viral.

Yep.

Joe Average (who may not know the diff between mean and median) will be convinced that FSD is imminent. Neroden will be adamant it’s still years away and I imagine he’s right. What I can’t imagine is Joe Average reading or accepting anything written by Neroden.

Fair 'nuff.

 

[schonelucht]

I dedicate this tweet to you

S Padival on Twitter

It’s not about Musk. It’s about those here who can’t distinguish where he’s doing his unique thing and where he is just muddling through.

 

[printf42]

Not a great news. You don't reorg team that's working great.

Remember in autonomous day they showed that graph that NN is slowly taking over more and more of the AP software stack?

People who wrote those obsolete modules would fall in two groups, some would embrace the change and adapt themselves to do something else, some would resist and eventually be let go.

Nothing to be surprised with at all.

 

[neroden]

@neroden you are the new $TSLAQ poster boy:

Polixenes on Twitter

It appears they troll this forum and cherry pick content to post on twitter now.

Funny. Cherrypicking. And yet these people still can't do basic financial math. Here it is, my investment thesis in its most simplistic form:

Gross profit of 20% (this embeds pessimism bias vs. Musk's optimism)
ASP of $50K
Fixed costs of about $6 billion/year, which are pretty stable with increasing volume.
So very very roughly, profit means selling 600K cars per year.

But Model S, X, and Semi count as two cars each (ASP twice as high), so 100K S&X means that 400K Model 3/Y is the profit point.
After that, it's cash factory time: every car is $10K to the bottom line.

Assuming they line up the battery supply, Tesla has a clear path to produce and deliver 100K Model S & X, 1 million Model 3 & Y, and 100K Semis, circa 2021. That's 8 billion/year in profit, disregarding any stationary battery or solar roof profits, and disregarding plans to raise gross margins. So Tesla's forward-looking P/E multiple looks a bit low to me.

 

[neroden]

Delivery numbers. I think the apparent lack of demand is the biggest sword hanging right now.

Yeah. It's actually lack of supply, but it's being reported as if it's lack of demand.

The fact it that lack of supply is a serious problem, though. Gotta manufacture those cars!