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

[Mo City]

Congratulations to all the longs. Let's get through this current Quarter and then take over the world.

The next stop is actually Battery Day (assuming it happens in May).

 

[Singuy]

As we celebrate, we should have all thanks rdalcanto again for his sacrifice.

 

[ByeByeJohnny]

I presume whoever sold 170k shares for $800 -> $765 five minutes before the earnings came out has been fired?

That's about $12 million or so lost.

Edit: The 170k was in the final minute which was a few minutes earlier. Not sure about the actual volume to sink the price from 800 to 765. A big pile of money was lost for someone. That's for sure.

 

[ZeApelido]

Side note before the ER: there might be some merit to stock going up based on AP progress. From the financial perspective it is a nuclear bomb. Just in short term (year or two), even if we think very conservatively, say .5M existing vehicles that didn't already pay for AP will decide to pay lump sum of $30K, that's $15B in the bank with next to zero marginal cost. Plus a large proportion of them will likely be profit sharing in the ride hail network. Silly money and that's just very short term. Any progress on AP should be priced in with an eye on how is that affecting probable future cash flows. Unlike everyone else in the race, Tesla is now testing the actual real thing that drives cars on city streets with a massive fleet and geo coverage, experiencing real life situations and FREE and willing supervising human drivers. It's no small potatoes.

Edit: something that might not be obvious to non-experts: yes the tech and expertise to produce working neural nets is essential but it is just means to an end. What makes the whole thing possible is the training dataset. Given a good enough training dataset, there will be many teams capable of training a good NN out of that. It isn't exactly that simple but the "proceed through the intersection" confirmation that Tesla is collecting on every intersection now is a massive boost to their ability to create a good enough training dataset to solve this aspect of self driving.

General agreement here.

It is unclear what hardware training capacity, then hardware inference capacity (on each car) will be needed for FSD, but the demonstration of improvements throughout the year on a technology that could be worth trillions of dollars means even a perceived change from 5% to 10% chance that Tesla will get there would be a doubling of stock price

 

[H Mak]

Look at that AH volume!

 

[Todd Burch]

Note the call is at 3:30 PT, vs. the usual 2:30 PT.

Edit: Actually, it says the last call was at 3:30 PT. Maybe I have that wrong.

 

[wipster]

I sure hope the webcast goes well... you know Elon's going to get asked about his tweets...

 

[Todd Burch]

Up $63 now. Edit $67. Edit forget it.

 

[uujjj]

this will probably help macros over the next few weeks Remdesivir study: Fauci optimistic about treatment - CNN

I looked through the summary and I thought the results were kind of meh. Remdesivir IS useful in getting people out of hospital beds faster, but its effect on death rates is minimal. That means Remdesivir just moves the infection rate at which he health care system would collapse to a higher number, but it doesn't end social distancing.

 

[X Fan]

Anyone have a read on what happened to cash this quarter?

 

[JustSaying]

The real firework is 25.5% GM. Less car sales = higher GM. Unreal.

Holy Crap Batman.

 

[UncaNed]

The later the expiration, the more expensive the call. A Jan 2021 $800 call contract is worth about $19,000 right now. A Jan 2022 $800 call contract costs almost $26,000. So that extra security costs you about $7,000.

...which might save you losing the whole initial $19,000 thanks to the whole extra 12 whole months recovering time if there's a recession. Even more worth buying the extra time in a taxed account.

Sorry if OT, but compared to other posts, I think this should be OK.

 

[dl003]

Anyone have a read on what happened to cash this quarter?

Very healthy. 1B tied up in inventory. Cash 8.1B compared to 8.6B post cap raise. With neutral inventory level, would have gone up 500M.

 

[SOULPEDL]

Crazy thought. His tweet was board approved and their message will be that they should absolutely run Freemont AND they can contain covid at the same time... like they just did in China... with data. Not a key message, but I'll listen for it.

 

[Singuy]

I sure hope the webcast goes well... you know Elon's going to get asked about his tweets...

Seems like wall street liked his tweets based on the report prior to earnings no?

A CEO defending his company, don't know what the big deal is. Cali is setting a precedent of closing indefinitely until a vaccine is out which would be devastating to everything.

 

[bkp_duke]

I looked through the summary and I thought the results were kind of meh. Remdesivir IS useful in getting people out of hospital beds faster, but its effect on death rates is minimal. That means Remdesivir just moves the infection rate at which he health care system would collapse to a higher number, but it doesn't end social distancing.

As a physician, I can tell you this is common for antivirals. You don't see the same level of efficacy out of them that you do with antibiotics against bacteria.

The results for mortality were actually deferred, as Gilead said they could not power from the current study data for that at this time.

 

[Curt Renz]

Thanks Curt, I knew this song for 38 years and never learned its name. Now I know.
William Tell Overture Finale

You're welcome. Here's how I've known it for over 70 years:

 

[LN1_Casey]

Note the call is at 3:30 PT, vs. the usual 2:30 PT.

Edit: Actually, it says the last call was at 3:30 PT. Maybe I have that wrong.

I'll have to catch it in the morning, it's nearly midnight here.

I wonder how much deferred Revenue was brought forward after releasing the last Autopilot update?

I personally don't think they did, not for AP. They did recognize some with the previous releasing during Q1, but they only released city driving well into Q2, I think it was last week or so?

Now, they may have delayed results from last update in Q4.

 

[vikings123]

Anyone have a read on what happened to cash this quarter?

Yes, this is in the report: Quarter-end cash and cash equivalents increased by $1.8B QoQ to $8.1B, driven mainly by our recent $2.3B capital raise and offset by negative quarterly free cash flow of $895M

 

[Nocturnal]

This definitely makes Q2 more interesting. Yes, sales will be taking a hit, but that applies to almost every company on the planet. This completely validates Tesla's business, and we also have lots of information from competitors dropping their EVs. People expecting a big drop in Q2 are going to be very disappointed I think. Plus battery day will be some kind of bonus, maybe a big one.