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

[Artful Dodger]

Does anybody have a link to the Adam Jonas’ analysis?

It's not Public. You have to be a paid subscriber to his "Letter" to read it. Members could invoke copyright wrath for posting it in full ("fair-use" citations are allowed under U.S. law)

 

[Steve m]

Maybe, but - to play devil's advocate for a moment - Samsung had a few problems at one point, so you can't rule out Apple doing so either.

OF COURSE the decision to build in China or not has a lot less to do with that than how much QA you're willing to pay for and the quality of your initial engineering, etc. If you're cheap, your Chinese partners aren't going to sacrifice their margins for you - why should they? Instead your product quality will suffer. If you built in the USA instead, perhaps you'd avoid these problems, but that would have more to do with the differing negotiation tactics and how willing your partners were to sacrifice their margins to build your product at the price you desired. (and to be clear, I'm not stating these are the particular issues that caused Samsung's problems - but they are common problems when contracting out manufacturing to Chinese firms, due to a failure of understanding in how things work)

Incomming inspection... China or the US even in Nevada.... You know... Trust but verify.

Find anything wrong... Send the entire lot back... The suppliers will fix their problems rather then sacrifice their margins... Right?

 

[AcesDealt]

I suspect because literally everything you wrote about the AI chip in that comment was wrong that you are genuinely confused about neural networks in general, and your lack of substantive counter-arguments and the pivoting to personal attacks against me is only strengthening that impression.

Thats funny. You would be surprised by how much I know about machine learning. I was writing bare metal CUDA and SSD library optimization code for factor analysis, multilayer nn libraries, and even generative restrictive boltzmann machines in 2012+ before any of today's kiddie python libraries were conceived. I've interacted with many of the major names particularly those from university of Toronto including Geoffrey Hinton as well as the Yahoo research wing in Israel, and I came close to winning a relatively famous million dollar prize. I even knew, casually, one of the deepmind founders before they were acquired. I assure you my comment made sense and had an important point.

I get that you impress a lot of people here but I generally find your remarks follow from the conclusion that Tesla is perfect back to the argument instead of vice versa. Your thoughts on the FSD chip likewise tow a narrative. Interested observers should be advised that neroden is the more accurate sage on this subject.

 

[Vaamo]

Tesla releasing a wireless charger for phones in the console gap at 125$ a pop. This is the right idea. Humorously Fred spends a good amount of time advocating the cheaper non OEM version on amazon. Apparently he won’t be bought easily. He fights for the people!

I wonder if Tesla will sell an upgrade that allows people other than Zen masters the ability to close that console lid on the first try.

I bet Fred motivation can be also steered by the affiliate link on amazon. It was a bit too suggestive of an article for my taste.

The lid. Isn't the lid supposed to be closed by the button on the screen?

 

[CyberDutchie]

Thanks - really looking forward to the public appearance of the news.

You know that the media will find something negative in there to use for the headline. Adam Jonas often appears on the news channels to explain his notes.

Is the note a paper note or email/web based? If latter, can you link to it?

These are research notes that get emailed to Morgan Stanley’s clients and subscribers, they are not public. Moderators here do not allow me to post them because of copyright, but I can voice my opinion and will sometimes quote some paragraphs from the note for context.

 

[Danny Griffin]

I would argue in the case of driving, humans too are actually poor at figuring out how more than 4 or 5 objects (if that) would interact and take timely action to avoid crashes.

Even when you consider the infamous scenarios like the traffic in India, i’m Still only considering a couple of vehicles and a few pedestrians at a time. Or you group them and judge when a set of vehicles are turning or pedestrians as a group are crossing.

Hi. I'm a new TMC member and have had some lingering questions for a while. If I get something wrong, please correct me.

I currently do not own a Tesla nor do I have any positions, and although I do like EV I have some reservations about Tesla's promises. Maybe because I am not as educated as many of you, but reading and listening to Elon's promises there are some things I do not understand.

Let' start with robotaxis. Am I to believe that there will be driverless taxis? In my investigation of Tesla I have been extremely impressed with Tesla's auto-pilot. True, there's some major glitches, but Tesla is pretty good. In any type f auto-pilot scenario, the driver can take over if something abnormal is up ahead. How does that work with FSD and driverless taxis?

What happens if a stop light is out? What happens if a stop light is out and a cop is directing traffic? What happens if there is a traffic accident and a cop is directing traffic? What happens if there is an event and a cop is forcing people to turn right when the AP route says to go straight? What happens if there is road construction and you have a stop/go sign-man off to the side? I could think of many more scenarios that happen every day and a single misstep could cripple the entire company. Am I missing something?

For those interested, I love performance cars. I currently drive a Corvette, but my bet is I was driving EVs before any of you were. I was driving an EV-1 back in the 1990's. How many of you were driving EVs back then? I actually have a picture of me back then.

Anyway, sorry to make my first post a somewhat negative one, but that is what drove me to sign up and post. Thanks for your consideration.

Dan

 

[AcesDealt]

Wow, the last few pages can be summarised thus: "You're wrong. I could easily refute everything you said. But can't be bothered. You're a child". Very convincing arguments.

Yeah that's accurate. Sorry. You have to admit it isn’t very rewarding to bring opinions to this forum that are even slightly out of favor of dogma though. Closer you get to truth the more hostility.

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

Hi. I'm a new TMC member and have had some lingering questions for a while. If I get something wrong, please correct me.

I currently do not own a Tesla nor do I have any positions, and although I do like EV I have some reservations about Tesla's promises. Maybe because I am not as educated as many of you, but reading and listening to Elon's promises there are some things I do not understand.

Let' start with robotaxis. Am I to believe that there will be driverless taxis? In my investigation of Tesla I have been extremely impressed with Tesla's auto-pilot. True, there's some major glitches, but Tesla is pretty good. In any type f auto-pilot scenario, the driver can take over if something abnormal is up ahead. How does that work with FSD and driverless taxis?

What happens if a stop light is out? What happens if a stop light is out and a cop is directing traffic? What happens if there is a traffic accident and a cop is directing traffic? What happens if there is an event and a cop is forcing people to turn right when the AP route says to go straight? What happens if there is road construction and you have a stop/go sign-man off to the side? I could think of many more scenarios that happen every day and a single misstep could cripple the entire company. Am I missing something?

For those interested, I love performance cars. I currently drive a Corvette, but my bet is I was driving EVs before any of you were. I was driving an EV-1 back in the 1990's. How many of you were driving EVs back then? I actually have a picture of me back then.

Anyway, sorry to make my first post a somewhat negative one, but that is what drove me to sign up and post. Thanks for your consideration.

Dan

If a stop light is out it is a stop.
If a cop is directing traffic the car will have to follow instructions from the cop.
It's just another case to handle.

 

[Right_Said_Fred]

Hi. I'm a new TMC member and have had some lingering questions for a while. If I get something wrong, please correct me.

I currently do not own a Tesla nor do I have any positions, and although I do like EV I have some reservations about Tesla's promises. Maybe because I am not as educated as many of you, but reading and listening to Elon's promises there are some things I do not understand.

Let' start with robotaxis. Am I to believe that there will be driverless taxis? In my investigation of Tesla I have been extremely impressed with Tesla's auto-pilot. True, there's some major glitches, but Tesla is pretty good. In any type f auto-pilot scenario, the driver can take over if something abnormal is up ahead. How does that work with FSD and driverless taxis?

What happens if a stop light is out? What happens if a stop light is out and a cop is directing traffic? What happens if there is a traffic accident and a cop is directing traffic? What happens if there is an event and a cop is forcing people to turn right when the AP route says to go straight? What happens if there is road construction and you have a stop/go sign-man off to the side? I could think of many more scenarios that happen every day and a single misstep could cripple the entire company. Am I missing something?

For those interested, I love performance cars. I currently drive a Corvette, but my bet is I was driving EVs before any of you were. I was driving an EV-1 back in the 1990's. How many of you were driving EVs back then? I actually have a picture of me back then.

Anyway, sorry to make my first post a somewhat negative one, but that is what drove me to sign up and post. Thanks for your consideration.

Dan

Welcome to TMC. Although I understand your wish to get answers, this is not the best place to get them. This is the market/investor thread. You can hop over to this section and (re)post your questions in a thread you find suitable: Autonomous Vehicles

Mod

 

[heltok]

Not sure if this one has been posted yet:

 

[Fact Checking]

All top game-playing engines in Go and Chess still evaluate multiple orders of magnitude more positions and playouts than humans. Extensive tree traversal is indispensable to counteract AI weakness in static analysis.

While it is a fact that the currently strongest chess engines are using alpha-beta search and not neural networks, this is basically an artifact of history combined with the desire to utilize the hardware the most optimally. It's not a value judgement on AI's ability to play chess:

Deep learning chess playing AI like AlphaZero use neural networks and not tree traversal:

AlphaZero - Wikipedia

"Danish grandmaster Peter Heine Nielsen likened AlphaZero's play to that of a superior alien species. Norwegian grandmaster Jon Ludvig Hammer characterized AlphaZero's play as "insane attacking chess" with profound positional understanding."

"Former world champion Garry Kasparov said it was a pleasure to watch AlphaZero play, especially since it plays in an open and dynamic style, as he does."​

Those characterizations by human chess grandmasters do not suggest that AI has fundamental weakness in static analysis. And note that this was the ultimate NN exercise:

"AlphaZero was trained solely via "self-play" using 5,000 first-generation TPUs to generate the games and 64 second-generation TPUs to train the neural networks, all in parallel, with no access to opening books or endgame tables. After just four hours of training, DeepMind estimated AlphaZero was playing at a higher Elo rating than Stockfish 8; after 9 hours of training, the algorithm decisively defeated Stockfish 8 in a time-controlled 100-game tournament (28 wins, 0 losses, and 72 draws). The trained algorithm played on a single machine with four TPUs."​

The AlphaZero paper was published only a few months ago. I expect hybrid engines to emerge - but in the end pure NN's will probably win on a power efficiency level - but for that NN acceleration hardware functionality has to be more widely available, most chess engines strive to be able to run on commonly available computing platforms.

 

[RobStark]

Maybe, but - to play devil's advocate for a moment - Samsung had a few problems at one point, so you can't rule out Apple doing so either.

OF COURSE the decision to build in China or not has a lot less to do with that than how much QA you're willing to pay for and the quality of your initial engineering, etc. If you're cheap, your Chinese partners aren't going to sacrifice their margins for you - why should they? Instead your product quality will suffer. If you built in the USA instead, perhaps you'd avoid these problems, but that would have more to do with the differing negotiation tactics and how willing your partners were to sacrifice their margins to build your product at the price you desired. (and to be clear, I'm not stating these are the particular issues that caused Samsung's problems - but they are common problems when contracting out manufacturing to Chinese firms, due to a failure of understanding in how things work)

A few sensationalized incidents are irrelevant.

Yet again. The Chinese themselves are willing to pay more for an identical car made in the West vs one in China.

Elon Musk said the Chinese made cars are for China/Asia region only.

It is a tougher sell. Not impossible but tougher. Usually needing a discount.

 

[Thekiwi]

Apple are flogging "dark mode" as one of their main features this year. Last year it was AR emojis.

Last year Apple put an ECG machine into a $400 wristwatch. This year they made a screen with better tech than a $42,000 studio reference monitor for about 1/10th the cost, while continuing to screw with facebook and googles data snooping business models just because its the right thing to do.

Anybody that mocks Apple does it at their own peril. The best result Tesla shareholders can ask for is if Apple and Tesla become partners in some manner, because Apple would likely be the hardest competitor for Tesla if they chose to enter the car space. Their brand is 2nd to none, they have excellent designers and supply chain experience, and they have virtually unlimited cash to play with, (Plus the overlap of Tesla & Apple users is large).

 

[Danny Griffin]

Welcome to TMC. Although I understand your wish to get answers, this is not the best place to get them. This is the market/investor thread.

Thanks for your advice. The reason I posted here is BECAUSE this is the market/investor thread. First of all, the reason I initially came to Tesla is because of TSLA. Who better to get answers from than those who have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money in the company? Or even if less, they believe in the company and have researched it from top to bottom.

I didn't want fanboi stuff, I wanted info from people who had actual money on the line. Perhaps I was mistaken.

Dan

 

[sixela]

Who better to get answers from than those who have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money in the company?

You don't know their positions, and whether they would benefit from the stock price moving up or down. Heck, I'm pretty sure there are people with positions that make them money as long as the volatility remains high...

 

[Danny Griffin]

You don't know their positions, and whether they would benefit from the stock price moving up or down. Heck, I'm pretty sure there are people with positions that make them money as long as the volatility remains high...

True, I suppose. I've been reading this thread and I thought there were primarily Tesla supporters. I suppose I could have been mistaken and My apologies for not posting to the correct forum.

Although there has been post after post after post after post with auto-pilot type stuff here, so you can forgive me if I was mistaken that this was important.

 

[LN1_Casey]

It was already in the secret master plan. For everybody to see.

Whitestar (Model S mule) was already roaming about 5 months before Daimler gave Tesla a dime.

Having a plan and prototype vehicle floating about is hardly indicative of actual production and success. Look at Faraday Future, they were all the talk a few years ago, even going so far as to get a building contract in my old hometown. Yet to this day, the factory is unused, and Faraday has gone silent from most news except for the occasional death rattle.

 

[Fact Checking]

You have to admit it isn’t very rewarding to bring opinions to this forum that are even slightly out of favor of dogma though. Closer you get to truth the more hostility.

Now you are outright trolling this forum: to long time readers of TMC it's readily apparent that while there's a natural bullish bias (well, duh), there's regular disagreement here about basically everything, including key Tesla features and businesses, except maybe that there's a commonly held conviction here on TMC that the basic TSLAQ premise that Tesla is valued $10 or lower is malicious nonsense - which shouldn't surprise anyone reading a Tesla investor forum, right?

Yes, there are periodic waves of bullish optimism on TMC, rather muted at these price levels though - but generally everything is being questioned.

Also note the quality of arguments you are offering on the other hand:

• innuendo you are not willing to back up,
• out of context quotes,
• bravado and personal attacks combined with a condescending tone.

 

[j6Lpi429@3j]

Last year Apple put an ECG machine into a $400 wristwatch. This year they made a screen with better tech than a $42,000 studio reference monitor for about 1/10th the cost, while continuing to screw with facebook and googles data snooping business models just because its the right thing to do.

Anybody that mocks Apple does it at their own peril. The best result Tesla shareholders can ask for is if Apple and Tesla become partners in some manner, because Apple would likely be the hardest competitor for Tesla if they chose to enter the car space. Their brand is 2nd to none, they have excellent designers and supply chain experience, and they have virtually unlimited cash to play with, (Plus the overlap of Tesla & Apple users is large).

if apple ever went into a close partnership with tesla I would sell all my stock. Sorry but apple is a horrible company that hasn't innovated in decades. I used to be an apple hardware engineer BTW. Everything they make is overpriced, underfeatured trash sold on hype and bullshit.

 

[Singuy]

A few sensationalized incidents are irrelevant.

Yet again. The Chinese themselves are willing to pay more for an identical car made in the West vs one in China.

Elon Musk said the Chinese made cars are for China/Asia region only.

It is a tougher sell. Not impossible but tougher. Usually needing a discount.

True to an extent. Elon played this card pretty well. He left the higher end longer range models to be U.S only. People who are more affluent and cares a lot about quality would pay the extra $ for an imported performance/awd model.

However there are also a huge amount of people who are just looking to get into the brand/ecosystem and paying the least amount possible utilizing all the local incentives and lack of tax duties. I frankly wouldn't be too concerned for the warranty are all the same.