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

[sundaymorning]

If anyone wants a good laugh, give Montana Skeptic a visit on his twitter page:

Montana Skeptic (@montana_skeptic) on Twitter

What a total nut job.

 

[MTL_HABS1909]

Looks like Tesla just added $2K Acceleration Upgrade for AWD (non-P) owners. Pure profit.

Really disappointed. Not going to pay that much for 0.5s quicker 0-100km/h....

Was hoping it would be the same/much closer to performance acceleration. Oh well.

 

[mongo]

After the bailout, I think many of these shorts converted to a short position in Tesla, believing it was unprofitable, would need capital from time-to-time, and was also a good target... and at the time that may have looked reasonable...

After the merger all Solar City positions, both long and short, converted to TSLA shares.

 

[ggies07]

My wife finished her gingerbread Christmas display just in time for market close today. Cybertruck and TSLA share price delivering some holiday cheer:
View attachment 489802

That's awesome, but what's equally awesome is that view! I wanna be there....its going to be ****ing 68 here in Texas on Christmas.....

 

[sundaymorning]

yeah. in the CNBC piece earlier today with Bethany and Colin Rusch, Becky Quick set up the segment by saying Tesla was up 70% (or over 70%) since June... uh, up over 120%

I don't see this misinformation programming campaign ending for years even if the stock price continues rapidly increasing.

Although CNBC and others can misinform as the price keeps increasing; the expensive they’ll pay is that they’ll continue to look like a bunch of imbeciles who got fired because they were friends with management.

 

[SteveG3]

Although CNBC and others can misinform as the price keeps increasing; the expensive they’ll pay is that they’ll continue to look like a bunch of imbeciles who got fired because they were friends with management.

confused, who do you think is getting fired?

 

[BenPrice]

I guess the difference to me is that an entity taking a new stake or upping their stakes has much more significance than normal Wall St buying and selling because they provide a lot more stability to the stock. Typically entities taking a stakes in a company gives much more a solid foundation for base. Again, could just be the normal buying volume just at a higher volume. It just looked to be certain repeated characteristics of the buying action over the past 2 weeks. Could be that I'm just reading way too much into it.

But if there's a discloser in a couple days...….I called it!

I’m with you.

At first I was thinking it would be a cool surprise but now I’m thinking it’s totally possible.

Maybe a Chinese entity has taken a sizable position - seems like a mutually beneficial arrangement. China is a net importer of oil. It is in China’s interest that Tesla grows as fast as possible, as it simultaneously hurts Russia and US, the worlds largest exporters. Wouldn’t be like mind blowing news, but probably a 3-10% boost, but maybe shorter lived.

Could be some surprise from a US tech company with cash. If Apple paid 100 billion for Tesla they’d still have 130 billion cash not counting the holiday season addition. That’s probably a 3-10% day too, but maybe stronger after.

Could be VW doing something - seems like those rumors were shot down but here we are months later. No clue how this would be received.

Warren Buffet has a pile of cash, lithium investments which are in talks with Tesla, and his experience with BYD must show Tesla’s current technology advantages. This could be the largest rally as it legitimizes and stabilizes.

 

[dmckinstry]

Perhaps you can have your Model X run around town and pick up a few fares for you to earn those shares back sometime soonish.

Nobogy but family and personal friends in my X.

 

[Bet TSLA]

I mentioned TSLA to a friend after the close today. He told me I should sell because his stock app told him "The last time it got this high it was quickly cut in half".

Your friend sounds to be a formidable investor. I'm sure he has much to teach you.

 

[Off Shore]

lols. I appreciate your humor, but, I’ll still say again, I think it’s a bigger conspiracy to think the media coverage of Tesla is not to a large extent a bought and paid for misinformation campaign, than to think it is.

I think it's a confluence of many things: the media gets no money from Tesla, and has no reason to defend it. The Solar City rescue attracted shorts, as several members have noted. And Musk is an upstart foreigner who's elbowed his way into two highly profitable industries and is banging on the doors of a third and fourth, and I'll bet some powerful people hate him for it. But a constant flow of funds from Chuck & his dead brother has been (and continues to be, of course) the life-blood of the enterprise. My presidential candidate has called for the prosecution of oil-company executives, and I heartily agree.

 

[Creekstalker]

Really disappointed. Not going to pay that much for 0.5s quicker 0-100km/h....

Disappointed?

Holy schnikes! As if any other car ever had the ability to improve so drastically at such a low cost.

My God the rate at which we become spoiled is staggering.

This capability, by which a car improves as if by magic, which did not even exist a few years ago is already disappointing.

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

If it was a single entity (or coordinated group) you would not see the price rise so quickly.
IE: Why bid it up ? Slowly buy your shares.
Dont drive it up.

If its several people, they are competing and are driving the price higher.

Actually with the way Tesla trades and how it gets sold off and/or capped, if you were smart you'd do it the way I describe. If you spread out your buys evenly, it'll eat up the bears capping method and minimize it's effect. If you play "their" game, you schedule your buys in groups so that there's a small pop, but then you stop buying and let them walk it down....at which point you do another group of buys. Rinse and repeat.

 

[Thekiwi]

Wow I definitely didn't expect this.
What insane timing

?

 

[Remus]

Never knew revenge can taste so sweet

 

[MC3OZ]

After the merger all Solar City positions, both long and short, converted to TSLA shares.

The choice for shorts then was to stay or go, but going probably meant taking a loss..

 

[BenPrice]

Looks like Tesla just added $2K Acceleration Upgrade for AWD (non-P) owners. Pure profit.

Thanks for the heads up. Bought when I saw your message.

 

[Ulmo]

Btw, I am impressed that this Club was formed in 2006, wow. That is like seriously, seriously way way back in the days of Tesla.

Most things are obvious. Evil people just try to pretend they aren't obvious and try to convince you of that. Witness Television, Facebook, Twitter, Google search results, etc.

===
2006 August 2, Elon Musk:

"Build sports car
Use that money to build an affordable car
Use that money to build an even more affordable car
While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options"

The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me)

===
Today, Elon Musk:

"Never trust cynics, as they excuse their own bad deeds by telling themselves everyone does it"

Elon Musk on Twitter

===
2019 August 10, Jack Rickard:

"Let’s take a look at the awl bidness. Currently we are at 100 million barrels of oil used each day worldwide – 20 million here in the U.S. At $55 per barrel, that’s about $5.5 billion per day. That’s another $2 TRILLION world market business. As the percentage of all automobiles that are electric grows, the demand for oil will diminish. Fully 50% of all oil goes to road transport. That is $2.75 billion per day. And for every day that future is delayed, is another $2.75 billion. It would be a $2.75 billion win if the adoption of the electric car could be forestalled for ONE DAY. The incremental growth of the automotive market is as I stated, inevitable and unstoppable. But for every day it is delayed, there are BILLIONS of dollars at stake. Literally the clock is running at $1,909,722 per minute on just that part of oil used by automobiles.

And it would be unlikely they would find that beneath them. Texaco bought the entire Ovonics nickel-metal hydride battery business from General Motors, with the patents of course. They allowed this battery chemistry for camera and laptop batteries, but specifically REFUSED to license it to anyone in larger sizes suitable for electric cars and that continued until the patents ran out. By then it didn’t matter, the lithium battery was ascendant. But it absolutely delayed the development of electric vehicles by many years.

Stanford Ovshinsky, inventor of this nickel-metal-hydride battery died in 2012 at the age of 89 still deeply embittered by what General Motors and Texaco, later acquired by Chevron, had done to his baby. It’s greatest potential use and the use Ovshinsky specifically developed it for was never realized. They simply bought it and shelved it.

Does that make sense? To spend hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire a promising technology and then shelve it and not worry AT ALL about selling any products from it? Just park it?

...

In May, the stock dipped to its lowest value in years, a great opportunity to cover and take your victory lap. Barely 400,000 shares did just that. But out of 37 million. Indeed they shorted AGAIN to 43,664,833. This is 34% of the tradable shares. Understand that NO company in the HISTORY of the stock market has ever carried 34% short sale. It’s not unusual. It just doesn’t happen at all.

In June, Tesla announced an all time high water market for auto deliveries of over 95,000 cars. And the shorts remaining got out. Well down to 41,459,952. Where it has held steady for over a month while Tesla crushes it on one announcement after another. They have now introduced a 3MWh 1.5Mw battery pack aimed directly at competing with natural gas peaker plants that basically cannot ever lose a cost comparison.

Shorts don’t behave this way. They sell high, buy low, and pocket the difference. That is if they are in it to make money. These shorts keep doubling down and they INCREASE their sales AS TESLA succeeds. At this point you have a company that is growing its production at an exponential rate, growing its revenues at an exponential rate, has the best product in the entire market, with unlimited demand in a market it owns outright just 0.46% of. It is the ultimate growth stock in the ultimate market with UNLIMITED BLUE SKY – room to grow.

Oh, and did I mention they can raise ANY amount of money they like, at any time, on three days notice? There last three calls for capital have taken less than a week and were oversubscribed in all cases. They raised MORE money than they asked for.

So we have exponential growth, into an unlimited market, with unlimited capital ready and waiting to invest. What kind of moron bets against that?

Well the concept of them BEING a moron implies the assumption they are trying to make money in the first place. What if they had NO desire to make money at all?

The entire 41 milion short interest represents an investment at the current $235 per share of $9.635 billion.

What if it’s not an investment at all? What if it’s an expense?

Elon Musk has since upped his stake to 38.6 million. Why? Did he need more shares? The cash was clogging up the vacuum cleaners in his house?

The company can’t BE bought. And Musk doesn’t want to die a bitter old man at 89. But the SEC CAN be bought apparently. And while they investigate, fulminate, and litigate Musk’s tweeting style, what starts to look like the largest stock manipulation in the history of the United States of America is going on as we speak. Is it POSSIBLE they don’t know about it? In a word, NO. It is not possible that a stock swindle of this proportion could be going on without the express and direct participation of the Securities and Exchange Commission charged by law with preventing it. Absolute corruption corrupts absolutely, to misquote a phrase.

The nickle metal-hydride battery was purchased in an asset purchase between two publicly traded corporations. Tesla is itself plublicly traded and Musk owns enough of it that purchasing it and dismembering it is just not conceptually feasible. But this level of stock manipulation, coupled with a funded and directed disinformation campaign, could conceivably drive it to failure.

And at $5.5 billion dollars per day, simply delaying the inevitable is very profitable on a total expense of $10 billion dollars. The payback period on that is less than two days."

The Tesla Conspiracy... or Am I a Dead Whistleblower? - EVTV Motor Verks

===

 

[sundaymorning]

Something dawned about that CNBC interview today with Bethany McClain (Jim Chanos' favorite journalist, and someone who became a millionaire via her being his journalist of choice during the Enron collapse) and Colin Rusch of Oppenheimer.

Throughout the interview, her phrasing, and delivery sounds noticeably like Chanos (if I had to bet, I'd say there were tutorial sessions with talking points when they found out Bethany would be on CNBC today).

Then at 6:27, she says,

"I think its going to be hard to kill Tesla, flat out kill it."

She did not say, ~I think it's unlikely Tesla is going to die~


Tesla has made it through its most difficult days, analyst says


Many times we've discussed Chanos and Fairfax Financial as a potentially a model for his short position in Tesla. In Matt Taibbi's book, Matt lays out his case that Chanos took a perfectly viable Canadian insurance company, shorted it heavily, and then pumped out false information in an attempt to create a crisis of confidence that would have customers walk away from fake claims of financial distress in order to create real financial distress.

That is, per Taibbi Chanos wasn't going after a dying company, he was trying to kill a healthy one by pumping out misinformation.

In this context, McClain's comment may be quite telling for two reasons if she really is mouthing the thoughts of Chanos.

1) Plans of killing Tesla look out of reach and have been taken off the table.

2) That's what the plan was... not shorting a company falling out of viability, but, through spreading falsehoods fabricating a crisis of confidence that really could kill a company.

Final thought- Fairfax was a small insurer in Canada. Tesla was already worth tens of billions when Chanos started shorting it, and growing revenues at better than 50% per year. Tesla does not at all resemble the little known, modest sized prey that Chanos sought to take down in the case of Fairfax (if Taiibi's theory is correct). Why would Chanos target a company worth $30-50 billion for such a take down? Isn't that way to large for that sort of con game? This would be consistent with the idea that Chanos' short position is actually just a tool within a much larger job he may have been hired for. Taking out an elephant by entities for whom an elephant is a realistic sized prey, ie, fossil fuel interests.

Exactly, using the terms “kill it” was quite sinister and shows evil intent behind her fake smile. This may be her downfall as well as Chanos. Going after a billionaire and a larger than life figure like Elon will be their biggest miscalculations. There’s certain things you can’t touch, don’t touch and don’t go after no matter how much the pay, and that’s Elon.

 

[Tim S]

Your friend sounds to be a formidable investor. I'm sure he has much to teach you.

I should clarify that I'm pretty sure he was joking. I just thought it was funny because I'd already read that quote from CNBC on here.

 

[sundaymorning]

$393.60 after hours, we’re positive again. Looks like more shorts covering and Kong’s buying after the brief pullback to $390.

I don’t see the stock dropping anytime soon. Momentum buyers are also piling in, i think shorts are really going to capitulate in a big way. Does anyone here think this could be a long journey of an upward short squeeze dragging out for months like 2013? It sure feels like it.