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

[Todd Burch]

A sign from God:

 

[Mich]

so why this 422 stopover?

 

[VValleyEV]

I first worked in Japan in 1967. From then until now I deeply resent people who regard politeness as a mark of "caution, adverse 'sic' to risk..." . Those who do not understand cultural differences tend to dismiss differences as marks of inferiority.

I love this bit.

I have a small amount of experience doing business in Japan and dealing with the cultural differences in the process. And I have family ties through a marriage of a nephew 20+ years ago. All of the above gave me great respect and affection for the people and their culture, and I would caution anyone to be wary of underestimating them.

 

[deffu]

420 secured. Finally a good time to smoke some w**** after 1 and half years.
The Chinese banks lended 1.5b to Tesla and its market cap went up ~3 billion.

others banks should seriously consider lending Tesla money then go buy some call options.

 

[SteveG3]

Rivian's business plan is about making expensive adventure vehicles. Not at all the business model that Tesla has. Tesla had their share of deals with Mercedes and Toyota so I wouldn't even put any value on the deals Rivian has with OEMs. What is the Rivian path to scaling after all this?

It looks like Rivian is competing with whatever ICE competitor there is in the adventure vehicle space. Land Rover?

not a Rivian apologist, but, pretty sure Amazon and Ford have put more cash in than Mercedes and Toyota did with Tesla (and fwiw, Elon credits Mercedes coming in as saving Tesla).

don't know how well Rivian will do. looks like they'll need big backing because with the value of the Cybrtruck, I think it's likely they're going to have to drastically cut prices on their vehicles or face lean sales (ie, deep pockets allowing them to take a loss on steeply cut prices). so, that funding today is probably much needed.

as to ramping up... 1) I suspect the founder first just wanted to be in the game by having a desired vehicle and being somewhere near profitability; quite an accomplishment if they can do it, 2) I think this largely depends on the intended scale of the Ford product based on the Rivian drivetrain. If it's only tens of thousands of vehicles per year, Rivian has a good deal of scaling hurdle still ahead of it. If Ford is willing to really make a move with its Rivian drivetrain pickup, supplying those drivetrains to Ford could give Rivian the scale to move to mass market vehicles of its own in house full production.

I'd put Rivian as somewhat over 50% to at least succeed to the point of being bought out by somebody at a good price for their founders and employees. Pretty good outcome, if it happens, among the startup EV companies.

 

[Thumper]

What's up with $422? We keep bouncing off of EXACTLY $422. Well, I guess it did hit 422.01. Still...

 

[lukex4]

"So the big surprise this week is this:

Even though only a select few Early Access users will have the code that actually stops the car enabled...

EVERYONE with Hardware 3 gets to see the full self driving visualization."​

If to believe @greentheonly on Twitter seems HW2.X is able to render the FSD visualization but Tesla decided to not enable it for that hardware. Is it to push more people to buy the FSD option and upgrade to HW3?

Paint me unimpressed.
If Tesla is deliberately crippling hw2.x experience in order to make hw3 look better (and make no mistake, hw2.x is fully capable of these things and been doing it for over 9 months), it suggests the AP hw was not a bottleneck for all this time.

A little bit confused why whould Tesla would do that (if greentheonly is right of course). My Model 3 was built March 2019 (bought FSD at order time) and got HW2.5. Even if FSD is still many months away, having the visualization is still a nice thing to have in the mean time!

 

[BenPrice]

What's up with $422? We keep bouncing off of EXACTLY $422. Well, I guess it did hit 422.01. Still...

Maybe the trajectory to close is motivating the cap now, hoping to push under 420 to close. Only “3” trading days left in the week, then following week should end with P&D.

 

[GBleck]

Christmas secured. Let the meme lord visit us the good little $tsla long twitter users with bountiful 420 jokes.

 

[Mike Smith]

Tesla is paying 90% of the China 1-year prime rate for the $1.4B loan. The prime rate is 4.15%.

0.9 X 4.15 = 3.74% !!

China Loan Prime Rate | 2019 | Data | Chart | Calendar | Forecast | News

 

[Nocturnal]

Can someone explain how they have no product on the market, yet they were founded over a decade ago (at some month in 2009)???

Even if they execute EVERYTHING with absolute perfection and brilliance from here on out, how can they catch up ... ?

Honestly I think that regardless of their promises I don't know how they won't be busy just building trucks for amazon for the first 5 years+. They won't be a meaningful player in the consumer auto market for a long time.

 

[StealthP3D]

There will be zero tax loss selling in TSLA during the last few days since no longs are currently down.
There will however be tax loss buying among shorts since they're all down.

That's a good point. However, there are bound to be a lot of TSLA shorts who have no net profit for the entire year. Some of them will postpone their covering until the beginning of the year so they can have some tax loss in 2020 (on hopeful anticipation that 2020 will be a better year for them and they will have some gains to offset).

It's gonna be an expensive delay for them. But they don't see it that way, they think there's a decent chance it will cost LESS to cover next year! It probably never occurred to them they shouldn't listen to someone who has been proven to be consistently wrong (themselves).

Edit: Correction, this makes no sense as tax losses can be carried forward to the next year anyway!

 

[Nocturnal]

If to believe @greentheonly on Twitter seems HW2.X is able to render the FSD visualization but Tesla decided to not enable it for that hardware. Is it to push more people to buy the FSD option and upgrade to HW3?



A little bit confused why whould Tesla would do that (if greentheonly is right of course). My Model 3 was built March 2019 (bought FSD at order time) and got HW2.5. Even if FSD is still many months away, having the visualization is still a nice thing to have in the mean time!

I'd guess that it might be wonky with HW 2.5 and they want to avoid any bad press.

 

[humbaba]

it's different, but it does not matter, the codebase is the same, they just compile it for different targets so all this stuff that's currently touted as for hw3 only works on hw2.5, they just don't expose it. The detection of signs, lights, stoplines, ... all of that.

With all respect to green, just because the "feature" (e.g., stoplight detection) has been there for months (I think he had it in March via hacking his car) doesn't mean the old March release is comparable to the new one. And saying its the same "codebase" is misleading at best.

Its rather like claiming that Win7 is no improvement on WinXP 64-bit because they both allow you to run 64-bit software. Or claiming that the gaming experience doesn't change when using a more powerful GPU.

3rd Row Tesla on Twitter

 

[RobStark]

Yes, Electrify America has made it so (far far better than before). However, this network is and will be totally lacking for customers throughout all of 2020 and probably long enough beyond that that it will collapse under its own weight as it raises its prices ever higher to bring in the revenue needed to sustain itself. Chasing away what few customers they get in the process.

VW built the network because they were forced to, but they aren't forced to sustain it. Only by building the cars will they sustain it. It does appear that they are serious about trying to build the cars, but all indications are that in the US at least they won't be big enough and competitive enough to get there. I expect their charging network to wither about as fast as it was built. Sad really.

1) This is just plain silly.

2) CCS Network is larger than Electrify America. There are at least 10 CCS Networks. CCS cars will need to charge, even if prices are double/triple what Tesla charges. CCS is not being subsidized by Tesla. Volta is offering free ad subsidized fast CCS charging.

 

[sundaymorning]

In the future , Jan/Feb 20 C/C
AJ, Morgan Stanley -- Elon, do you need to do a capital raise? We at MS can do it for you, and manage it for you ..
EM -- F**King, Hell, NO

I remember when Morgan Stanley was begging for a capital raise on the CC and Elon says he’ll look to local banks instead. That’s was probably a whole year before they took the loans from China. Never doubt Elon, and keep AJ at arms length...

 

[pz1975]

Where are all our care bears and birds? They are always so plentiful during downturns, meanwhile we are all here no matter what. Shows how much we should listen to them when they inevitably crawl out of their roach lairs next time the stock drops.

 

[SpaceCash]

420 lol haha lmao

 

[Wooloomooloo]

People have explained it, maybe you weren't listening or you want an explanation that fits your world view?

Maybe.

 

[humbaba]

If to believe @greentheonly on Twitter seems HW2.X is able to render the FSD visualization but Tesla decided to not enable it for that hardware. Is it to push more people to buy the FSD option and upgrade to HW3?



A little bit confused why whould Tesla would do that (if greentheonly is right of course). My Model 3 was built March 2019 (bought FSD at order time) and got HW2.5. Even if FSD is still many months away, having the visualization is still a nice thing to have in the mean time!

So while I was writing my own response to some of his posts I missed yours.

He hacked his car around March 2019 and, IIRC, Tesla closed the hole in next version so he kept on the older version where he had things enabled. He seems to be going on that data point rather than actually comparing the neural nets. He says "same codebase" which may be a fair assumption, but it is still an assumption. And it completely ignores the reality that using same code base can provide different results when compiled for different platforms.

As an example, when talking i386 vs x86 (approximately, 32-bit vs 64-bit platforms) you can run a 32-bit app on 64-bit processor, but it will perform better because of improvements (e.g., registers) and that isn't even getting into gains based on actually compiling code for 64-bit. Same code base but, depending on the needs of the application, sometimes seriously important performance improvements. Take 3d rendering: I have projects that won't even load in a 32-bit application (due to memory constraints, lets ignore some of intel's foot dragging where they extended addressing in 32-bit).

I don't know for sure what his "issue" is, but his posts are conflating HW2.5/HW3 and March 2019 with December 2019 neural nets. It is, at best, misleading. Even if his assumption about "code base" is accurate (it probably is, but that isn't a given) that doesn't prove anything about the capability for that code base on HW2.5 vs HW3.