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

[gtrplyr1]

At this point ... Apple should just buy the freaking company. IF Apple really has any designs on the auto market it would be a no brainer.

Apple's money, marketing and manufacturing expertise and Tesla's product ... would be a match made in heaven.

Of course now you have to take Elon and lock him up in a room somewhere in the Apple campus with no internet available and just tell him it's his own skunkworks lab .... yeah that's it .... a "secret" project.

Really I love Elon but I'm just a little pissed at him right now ...... Losing a small fortune will do that to you.

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

Thank you! I do appreciate your post. It makes sense, from that point of view. However, is the cost of getting international logistics figured out so high as to cause the huge difference in quarters?

Also, a question I left out of my previous post, that was key to the post:

If demand is fine, why the huge price reductions in 2019? If the company is struggling to be profitable and demand is good, then why would you cut prices?

Well demand for the high end variants WAS an issue for the US market in Q1. They flooded the market with $60k+ cars in Q3 and Q4. There's only going to be so much demand for a car that expensive. The 500k model 3 demand that is often quoted is for all variants, I'd say 50% or more of that is going to be just the Short Range variant. Then you had a combination of expectations for a S/X refresh, the tax credit getting cut in half......yeah there is going to be blimp in demand for S/X. The hit on S/X wouldn't have been nearly as bad if they hadn't tried to do the refresh in Q1.

And yeah, getting your logistics for overseas started from practically nothing to 3k a week is a lot. There's the cost of shipping, hiring tons of staff and then making them do overtime, lots of rework to cars that were hurriedly moved from ship to delivery service, etc....But the biggest hit from trying to start overseas production and deliveries within the same quarter is that there's no existing inventory that Tesla was selling through to buffer the vehicles in transit....the transit time takes like 3+ weeks. Combine that with the fact that they were going from 0 model intl model 3's to 3k/week.....there's going to be big loss from vehicles in transit.

 

[Dutchie]

We now know that it will be a while before SpaceX goes public, if ever.

 

[Boomer19]

I will say that for all the faults of Electrek I trust them to report accurately more than I trust Reuters. I suspect Electrek is correct and Reuters is wrong.

EDIT: Now that CNBC has posted the full email, I find that both Electrek and Reuters were wrong. :sigh:

Musk listed the net proceeds of the capital raise (2.4 billion, after paying for all the hedges and fees) and stated that this would last about 10 months if they kept doing as badly as in Q1 ( -$700 million/quarter)... which is simple math. (It's actually 10.2 months.) It was clearly an attempt to give employees perspective on how much money it is.

Nobody serious believes that they're going to do as badly as in Q1, which had two tax credit hangovers (US and Netherlands), seasonality, a delayed Project Raven, delivery failures, and writedown of old cars (though this last will happen repeatedly). But the point made to employees is that they must do better -- they have to get back to +$XXX per quarter rather than -$XXX per quarter.

It seems like a perfectly reasonable way to motivate employees.

i saw nothing wrong with the email.

the rest is nonsense

 

[Singuy]

i saw nothing wrong with the email.

the rest in nonsense

Perhaps one of the more responsible emails written by Elon. Man the market (and some members here) overreacted.

 

[Nocturnal]

Thank you! I do appreciate your post. It makes sense, from that point of view. However, is the cost of getting international logistics figured out so high as to cause the huge difference in quarters?

Also, a question I left out of my previous post, that was key to the post:

If demand is fine, why the huge price reductions in 2019? If the company is struggling to be profitable and demand is good, then why would you cut prices?

My .02

Price reductions were to offset the tax credits. If demand was unchanged, then losing the tax credits would mean lower sales, so offsetting them with price drops should even things out.

I also get the sense that they added more "bad medicine" to Q1 when they realized it was going to be a big loss. Just conjecture but that makes sense to me.

 

[Alphacrux]

Yes.

TSLA closes the week at 211.03 (down 7.58%). Nasdaq down 1.04%.

Gee, thanks Elon (not a disagreement with Elon himself, but rather how the shorts pounce on his Twitter and leaked emails).

 

[Nocturnal]

What huge price reductions?

The very tippy-top-end Performance models saw huge price reductions. Apparently Tesla's run out of people with more money than sense. That's too bad, I guess.

The other models saw what I can only call extremely modest changes in price.

That isn't accurate either. Taking into account the tax credit, my exact P3D is about 4k less now than when I ordered it in last June.

Perhaps one of the more responsible emails written by Elon. Man the market (and some members here) overreacted.

Usually a company trying to cut costs is a good sign. Tesla usually doesn't get those same benefits...but given the context I can sorta see the concern. ​

 

[M3Rider]

There are already splitters available now though, I have one on my 14-50 splitting my range and charger. <https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07D4PT7T6/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1>

Please don't promote these, they can cause fire as there's no prevention for electricity being drawn from both ends. These are really unsafe.
Dryer buddy or neocharger make sure only one cord out of two can draw and the other one is disabled.

 

[Starno]

Shortsville population took a few months vacation to Hawaii apparently ...

 

[wipster]

Well this is a hell of a way to end the week... and this after such a good series finale for The Big Bang Theory too. Feeling like a neutrino right now.

 

[Singuy]

Gee, thanks Elon.

The shorts and the negative media is working. They literally turned a letter about maturity of a company into FUD. The shorts and media criticized Tesla for being wasteful. Now Elon is doing everything he can to reduce waste and gets hammered because now the narrative is "if they were printing so much cash, why are they cutting cost?". Another damn if you do, damn if you don't nonsensical bullsh%t.

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

One more thing to add......I'm super jelly of everyone and anyone here that is and has been adding to their positions at this price. Even if it drop to 200/share, just incredible value of any share you buy right now. Some of us, including myself, did not see the Q1 fiasco coming or at least think that Wall St and the FUD would be able to break down the stock like it has...…..and thus I'm not in a position to really add to my shares for the next couple of months. If the share price were to stay below 250/share by end of Sept, I'll be accumulating like a mad man.

 

[Causalien]

Actually, turns out that Reuters was right and I was also wrong to trust Electrek! CNBC has the full email and Musk references the recently-raised cash, not the end of Q1 amount.

Or it could be that they are both righr and it is two different leaks fron 2 different employees with 2 different versions of content.

 

[MartinAustin]

Apparently Tesla's run out of people with more money than sense

As someone who paid over $100K for my Tesla, I take exception to your silly comment.

$60K Model 3 didn't exist at the time I bought my Tesla.

The key point was, I stopped driving fossil fuel cars forever in 2013. It doesn't really matter how much you spend on a Tesla as long as you get one and never drive fossil fuel again.

The common sense is to buy a Tesla... not to hold off until it is cheaper.

Yes, ugly day on the stock market - if you're selling stock. TSLA will climb back again. It has done this many times.

The vast majority of the action today IMO was by short sellers feeding on the mis-reporting from yesterday, They will regret getting involved.

 

[ZeApelido]

Ok just got done taking a walk with a former Tesla employee. Worked at Gigafactory. On battery pack assembly.

So some juicy tidbits I got (I don't think I heard any of these detail before).

Some reasons why the original pack assembly failed.

1. The original system relied on computer vision to place the cells in the exact correct locations (within spec). The algorithm (which sounded basic IMO) relied on detected the location of the coolant tubes that ran between cells. Well I guess it also depended on the color of the coolant tubes to be consistent (blue?), but sometimes they would be heated up too much and changed color. So then the algorithm didn't recognized properly and just effed everything up. Made it sound like this wasn't discovered until they were in production (oops!)

2. Also something about the process required them to vertical move the fixture. The original plan was to build an elevator to lift the fixture, but they ran out of time and decided to just use some robots to lift it. This was less precise and apparently very dangerous.

3. As you might have guessed, timeline goals were extremely aggressive resulting in skipped steps.

So yeah, move fast and break things will incur some disasters like this. Luckily they got past it. But I was interested in hearing some detail of what the eff went wrong!

 

[Dutchie]

I bought the stock @ $293 last year. My financial advisor advised against it. Said he liked the product but did not like the stock. I did not get it. If the product good and desirable thenhey would the stock not follow?

I still don't get it. The product is amazing. When I drive around, people still point fingers at the car stating: "Look, a Tesla" even when there are already driving quite a few around.
Whenever I see a Tesla store there are alway at leas five people in there, no matter what time of day. So what is it with the stock? Why the discrepancy?

 

[tschmidty]

Please don't promote these, they can cause fire as there's no prevention for electricity being drawn from both ends. These are really unsafe.
Dryer buddy or neocharger make sure only one cord out of two can draw and the other one is disabled.

Whether it is drawing power from both ends is irrelevant, the danger would be in the total amerage drawn. There are numerous posts about splitting dryer outlets and the only difference here is the amp rating.

You aren't wrong in that you could certainly get yourself in trouble but with some common sense it is a good interim solution for me. I had a longer post which I'll just copy here

Yeah, not saying it is an ideal solution, but scheduled charging is helpful to mitigate possible overloads. But in any case a range circuit is designed to handle all 4 burners and an oven running. I live with my wife and my typical cooking pattern is one burner at a time. A typical burner is somewhere between 1200-3000 watts so 5-12.5 amps give or take. So even using a large burner and charging full rate (32A) gets you to 44.5 amps, which isn't great since you would prefer to draw 40A total over an extended time, but still OK. A range will pull about 45 watts with all burners + oven broiling so well within usable amperage.

The dryer buddy is nice solution but at that point just pay an electrician to install a separate circuit already! You could also use a manual transfer switch and wire something up which is what I initially looked at doing but again it gets a bit expensive.

All that said it is a short term solution for me since I am having trouble getting any of my electrician buddies over to do the work and I want to remodel the kitchen at some point anyway and will probably go to gas then (freeing up the circuit), although induction looks interesting also.

 

[Driver Dave]

Elon's email is no different than any other CEO saying "watch costs". Especially in a growth company that just got to the end of huge lift (model 3)

The market still can't comprehend what Elon and Tesla team has built here.


How truly insanely great and fun to drive this cars are.

How they make all other gas cars old and obsolete.

How behind the old auto manufactures are and might never catch up (aka Nokia)

How game changing Tesla's machine learning connected to fleet is.

How far autopilot has come doing things I never thought possible. changing lanes, windy roads, taking exits!


Sure, scaling up and running a global auto manufacture while innovating is multi-variable calculus level 100, but compared to just creating an electric car that makes you never want to drive a gas car again, it might be the more do-able, know-able challenge.


The market just can't comprehend what's going on.

But I can, so long I go.

 

[⚡️ELECTROMAN⚡️]

Pretty brutal day. Glad I got out when I did a few weeks ago. Anyway, I wouldn't consider buying again now. If it hit's $180 or close to that maybe, but I will still wait and see at that level, but it could bounce up quick at 180, or fall more....a gamble at this point!

Remember: Buy low, sell high! If you are stuck now in the red I feel for you! The market manipulators want you to sell low...remember that.

Good for you. Don't forget to pat yourself on the back.