Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

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

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
The story doesn't make sense. It says Tesla was only able to average 700 model 3's per day vs 1000 model 3's as required, yet 3 weeks later (halfway from then to the end of the quarter) Elon said at the SH meeting that they were still on track. BI has made these types of predictions before (always negative) and been completely wrong.
700 * 7 is only 4900/week. Tesla is way past that.
 
seems about right timing for that one.
Yet another hit piece. Right on cue.

Indeed, when TSLA shares have swift up moves, heavy short sellers undoubtedly shovel dubious dirt to their allied media eager for clicks. The dive that follows allows smart short sellers a chance to cover their positions before the usually quick to follow rebound.

 
[snip]
There has to be a good reason why we saw on autonomy day is same as the one in production - and why a much better version, if it exists, wasn't shown during the demo. The simplest explanation is dev on those features are over, so they have been merged into master branch and then released to production for use in shadow mode (or for whatever reason).

Yes, as I wrote the actual "dev" branches will be a few weeks more advanced. Conveniently, we know the production branch is 20th week's (sometime in May).

Bottomline, there is no evidence that there is a secret super-duper FSD software we haven't seen. Afterall during annual day, Musk said his City NOA needs interventions to complete his daily commute to office. If it rarely needed intervention (or just once or twice), he would have said so. He is talking about teaching the car not to run on grass / recognize the curb - that doesn't sound like a very advanced version.

I should also say, it is this kind of optimistic thinking that didn't prepare us for the Q1 shocker. All the evidence points to fairly basic stage of city NOA. Personally, I look forward to city NOA being similar to (or somewhat worse than) Cruise/Waymo when released after FC (hopefully sometime early next year).
Well, this video from the Tesla Autonomy Day, starting at 1:34:35, where Elon talks about the HW3 used in the demo cars, along with the IMPROVED DEVELOPMENT VERSION of the S/W, would be used in the test drives, not a production version as you seem to want to keep insisting was being used.

Production version has to "fit" all AP H/W revisions. The more complex NN under development will only fit AP3 H/W, and is what was used during the test drives. Not hacked AP2 production S/W.
 
Bear Attack in full force as Business Insider publishes hit piece claiming they have documents that "suggest" Tesla is falling short of production goals. No direct quotes from purported leak, piece is light on details: Leaked documents suggest Tesla has not met a Model 3 production goal set by Elon Musk in recent weeks

Elon Letter - May 22.
Annual Shareholder - June 11.

This FUD is so off base... why would Elon announce the potential for record deliveries right after having internal production issues? Ans: Because there was no problem.
 
Formeth thine own conclusions...

Wikipedia: Business Insider - Wikipedia

Business Insider is an American financial and business news website published by Insider Inc. It operates international editions in the UK, Australia, China, Germany, France, South Africa,[2] India, Italy, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Netherlands, Northern Europe, Poland, Spain and Singapore. Several International editions are published in local languages: Chinese, Dutch, French, Italian, German,[3] Polish[4] and Japanese.[5] It is owned by the German publishing house, Axel Springer SE.

and,

Henry Blodget is not only one of Business Insider’s three founders, he is currently its editor and CEO.

Who is Henry Blodget?

“He is a former equity research analyst who was senior Internet analyst for CIBC Oppenheimerand the head of the global Internet research team at Merrill Lynch during the dot-com era.[1]Due to his violations of securities laws and subsequent civil trial conviction, Blodget is permanently banned from involvement in the securities industry.[2] Blodget is the CEO of Business Insider.”

Henry Blodget - Wikipedia

isn’t running a large media entity that smears public companies “involvement in the securities industry”
 
Surprise...
Someone didn't delete his Twitter account :rolleyes:


Screenshot_2019-06-18-19-51-35-738_com.twitter.android.jpg
 
I'm actually a bit concerned about Model 3 deliveries in Europe - over 1000 new cars showed up in inventory sometime last week and there are still 964 there now - I think they've sold barely 10 per day, if that.
Looks like sales of new European inventory Model 3s have finally picked up today after being really slow the last few days, or else it took a while for some of the sales to be recorded - now down to 899 remaining from 964 when I posted my previous message a few hours ago. A big improvement on barely 10 per day over the last few days.
 
Elon Letter - May 22.
Annual Shareholder - June 11.

This FUD is so off base... why would Elon announce the potential for record deliveries right after having internal production issues? Ans: Because there was no problem.

Don't need leaked documents. Elon's said 10k/week production of model 3s by the end of 2018. They are not at 10k/week. Hey look I have "insider secret information" on the level of no *sugar* Sherlock.

This just in. Elon's goal is to have every car on the road to be a Tesla. Tesla falls short of goal by 99.99%.
 
Last edited:
So, this happened today:

Nafnlaus on Twitter

Ars Technica openly endorses its reporters building anti-Tesla bubbles and daily retweeting short sellers. :Þ Well, I guess it's better than not admitting it...

I believe it's part of a pattern of illegal stock bashing and market manipulation at Ars Technica:

So I got some push-back for my criticism of Timothy B. Lee's Ars Technica article about Tesla, so let me list a fuller analysis of the various levels of false, dishonest and misleading factoids his Tesla articles are often riddled with.

Firstly, I value Ars Technica for most of their excellent non-Tesla content - it's the reason I even mentioned them here.

Regarding Timothy B. Lee's articles about Tesla, here's a quick list of distortions just from his last article:

Musk defense “borders on the ridiculous,” SEC tells court

'Musk has been battling the SEC since last August, when he tweeted that he had "funding secured" to take Tesla private. That turned out to be untrue,'​

The "funding secured" tweet wasn't untrue - Elon had verbal commitment from the head of the Saudi PIF, and as @neroden pointed it out back then:

TSLA Market Action: 2018 Investor Roundtable

"A verbal agreement means secured according to the M&A lawyer with 30 years experience quoted by ArsTechnica (in an otherwise pessimistic article)."​

The Saudis also bought 4.9% of Tesla shortly before the $420 tweet for an estimated ~3 billion dollars - which, combined with Elon's decades of track record of successfully securing investment rounds is additional 3,000,000,000 valid reasons for "funding secured".

Timothy B. Lee is presenting this at minimum hotly contested topic with a curt and false "it was untrue" summary, which is disingenuous and creates a pattern of distortion that goes through his other Tesla articles as well.

He continues with:

'and it's illegal to publish inaccurate information that has the potential to move markets.'​

This is a false statement too, it's not illegal. Here Timothy B. Lee is knowingly or unknowingly misleading about the legal standard, which is way more relaxed than that, even under SEC enforcement. There's a requirement of "gross negligence" and intent to deceive - which can be read from the SEC's initial filing.

Companies are posting "inaccurate" information all the time: predictions about the future are, according to the known laws of physics, inaccurate by definition.

Then he continues:

'Last month, Musk tweeted out a prediction that Tesla would produce "around 500k" cars in 2019. Hours later, Musk followed up with another tweet clarifying that Tesla was aiming to achieve an annualized production rate of 500,000 cars (10,000 per week) but was projecting 400,000 cars produced during the 2019 calendar year.'​

This too is a false claim, Tesla was projecting to deliver up to 400,000 cars, but this was carefully made conditional on a worst-case recession event in the Q4 conference call.

The actual production guidance was more optimistic, 350k-500k for Model 3's alone:

Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) Earnings Conference Call Transcripts - Nasdaq

Elon Musk: "Yes. Maybe in the order of 350,000 to 500,000 Model 3s, something like that this year."
Firstly, deliveries != production, there can be several tens of thousands of units difference in a global supply chain, especially if the China Gigafactory is ramping up at the same time with a lot of produced but not yet deliverable cars.

Secondly and more importantly there's also the guided 100k Model S+X production which goes on top of the Model 3 guidance - so the true guided range is 2019 production of around 450k-600k cars.

So Timothy B. Lee is (again) presenting the factual record in a highly misleading fashion and is adding literally false snippets of characterization.

Timothy B. Lee doesn't stop there:

'But the SEC argues that allowing Musk to unilaterally decide which tweets are material before submitting them for review "renders [the] pre-approval requirement meaningless."

Indeed, the SEC noted, Musk tweeted about a number of other seemingly material topics without seeking pre-approval.'
Note how the "Indeed" from Timothy B. Lee lends support to a one-sided (and ultimately false) narrative from the SEC. He doesn't mention what Elon's filing made abundantly clear, that Elon didn't seek review of tweets because early on he decided to apply self-censorship and not tweet ANY material information whatsoever.

So basically by omitting Elon's decision of self-censorship to not tweet any material information, the SEC (and Timothy B. Lee) creates the false impression that Elon was careless or reckless in just tweeting material information and didn't want to seek approval.

This pattern of manipulative misstatements might be genuine errors, but if we take a look at past articles about Tesla, Timothy B. Lee is erring almost exclusively against Tesla, which suggests it is a pattern, not just the noise of journalistic carelessness.

For example note Tim's reporting about Elon's previous filing:


Here too his article is misleading about the true guidance range:

These figures aren't quite the same, as the SEC pointed out in its original filing. There's a difference between producing 500,000 vehicles in 2019 and reaching an annualized production rate of 500,000 vehicles (in other words, 10,000 vehicles per week) by the end of 2019. Moreover, Tesla's earlier disclosures actually said that Tesla would achieve that rate "between Q4 of 2019 and Q2 of 2020."

But Musk's lawyers argue that Musk was speaking loosely. They say that Musk's statements were close enough to Tesla's earlier disclosures that Musk could have reasonably believed that he wasn't providing the markets with new information.​

No, that's not true at all, Elon's lawyers are arguing that Elon's "about 500k" figure was within previously disclosed production ranges:

"Musk's statement that Tesla would make 'around 500k' 'cars' in 2019 was within previously disclosed ranges,"​

Note the subtle slant accusing Elon of speaking "loosely", and the actual false statement of "close enough" numbers, which characterization appears nowhere and is not intended in their filing - it's a creation of Timothy B. Lee and falsely presented as if it's Tesla's legal argument.

Anyway, there's countless such examples in most of Timothy B. Lee's Tesla reporting ... just wanted to point out the subtle and damaging disinformation Timothy B. Lee is spreading under the disguise of factual reporting. I noticed that pattern months ago.

Also note that I find most of Timothy B. Lee's other articles just fine, which makes me suspect it's probably not some kind of political or professional bias but maybe a personal dislike of Elon?

Beyond Timothy B. Lee's biased articles I've also personally witnessed Ars Technica editors such as Jonathan M. Gitlin showing open bias and mocking Tesla supportive commenters in the Ars Technica comment threads and accusing them of being company shills...

So yes, the evidence is overwhelming that something's deeply corrupt in Ars Technica's automotive reporting section: it's not just random disinformation, but highly targeted anti-Tesla FUD often correlated with key TSLA price levels.
 
Who at Ars responded to you, @KarenRei? I'm a subscriber there and would like to express displeasure.
Ars is just getting defensive now. They're trying to muddy the waters and mix up the issue of random tweets of Tesla fans wanting Gitlin fired. Rather than look at the core problem with Gitlin and his coverage of Tesla. Especially with him now even blocking positive comments on twitter.
 
Last edited: