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

[ZachF]

Elon also talked about HVDC transmission lines and I^2R. Doubtless went over many heads in the financial media, but you should see how he intends for the two to work in concert.

Cheers!

National HVDC grid is a piece of infrastructure we could be proud to leave for our children and grandchildren. 100% worth every penny.

 

[mekberg]

How about this for schadenfreude? Big Short: UBS, Top Broker Face $23 Million Claim over Tesla Trades - AdvisorHub

TL;DR- An advisor pushed shorting of TSLA to a client (who agreed). Client lost a ton of money and is suing UBS.

 

[elasalle]

MSFT also beat both top and bottom line and is down 3.28% AH
I see a trend here

 

[MC3OZ]

Things are this way in europe:
You got target CO2-Numbers for the Fleet of vehicles you sold. 90g CO2/km last year iirc. These are calculated with complicated formulas (heavy cars may emit more, small cars less etc.).
For every gram you land above that you have to pay a fine PER VEHICLE SOLD.

2020 the calculation was as follows: you can leave out the dirtiest 5% of your vehicles. For the rest: take the NEDC-Emissions (NOT WLTP!), plug it into the formulas and get an average.
Example calculations for e.g. a VW Family-Van go up to ~10.000€ of potetial fines PER VEHICLE (in 2020 those were the ones most likely to be excluded in the 5%). Small city-cars may land below the 90g so this can also offset these fines.

Now the extra-regulations for EVs: For the Phase-in every EV counts as 2(!) Vehicles with 0g Emissions. This should roughly be ~12k for every Tesla sold in credit-value.

This year things get harder: EVs only count as 1.66 Vehicles - so the potential credits of each vehicle for pooling on teslas side go down to around 9.6k. With enough vehicles sold this effect can be offset (and Tesla will offset it easily).

On the other hand: Do the other producers NEED those credits? Probably yes. I'm not sure on the timeline, but either this or next year the value you plug into the formula is the WLTP-number and not the NEDC. On that cycle ICE cars usually emit ~20% more CO2 per km.
And also the 5% dirtiest vehicles will be included soon and not left out anymore - upping the stakes again.

After 2022 they will shrink down the allowed CO2 gradually (90->80->70 or so over some years) keeping the pressure up.

Also 2021 every EV counts as 1.66 cars, but in 2022 EVs only count as 1.33 cars & 2023 onwards EVs just count as 1 car - so even with equal production ratio of ICE/EV as a manufacturer you pay more and more fines.

--
As always in europe: It is a bit complicated. But in the end they made a mighty hammer for decades. So hard that some manufacturers complained that they will never get their diesel clean enough & stopped research in it to transition to something else.

Fewer credits per EV might actually help Tesla.

It dilutes the effect of any EVs the other carmaker sells, overall they need more pooled EVs to achieve the same level of credits.

So it depends on the rate at which new production ramps, Tesla is well positioned.

The other likely alternative is fewer ICE sales.

The EU credits scheme is well designed.

 

[lafrisbee]

Imagine the Boston Dynamics robots with Tesla Vision. They could be taught to do just about anything without having to be specifically controlled.

I, for one, welcome our new...

and close to what I was thinking when I gave the decision by Tesla to rename FSD to "Tesla Vision."

 

[StealthP3D]

How about this for schadenfreude? Big Short: UBS, Top Broker Face $23 Million Claim over Tesla Trades - AdvisorHub

TL;DR- An advisor pushed shorting of TSLA to a client (who agreed). Client lost a ton of money and is suing UBS.

That's gotta hurt. The Iowa owner of two automotive related business who lost $16.5 million and covered his TSLA shorts in July 2020 [Mod edit: Tesla wasn't even in existence in 2000.] (against the advice of his broker) must have had an initial short position of around $3.3 million. If his broker had instead recommended going long TSLA when it was trading at $60, it would be worth around $38 million instead of -$16 million, a difference of $54 million. And now he's trying to sue his broker!

You just can't fix stupid.

 

[Nocturnal]

Not that I want to restart the conversation regarding SNL, but this article illustrates exactly why the general public needs to see more of the real Elon. If SNL writers, who probably represent the “woke left,” have such a poor impression and understanding of what Elon is all about, it’s a problem for the mission and all of the things Elon is trying to accomplish. The court of public opinion is important, and it’s often wrong.

I wonder if folks would be so upset or articles like this being put out if it were Bezos or Gates or Buffett hosting.

'SNL' cast members signal they're unhappy about Elon Musk hosting. He's not the first to cause a stir

In a surprise move over the weekend, "Saturday Night Live" announced that business mogul Elon Musk would be hosting the NBC variety show on May 8. Some "SNL" cast members didn't seem too excited about it.

www.cnn.com

I recently figured out why Elon wants to go to Mars. This planet is full of complete morons. "I read in a headline that he didn't close his business during covid and his workers have tough conditions! BRB, gonna sit at home and get Amazon deliveries while covid rages and type on my Iphone built by slave labor."

 

[Artful Dodger]

MSFT also beat both top and bottom line and is down 3.28% AH
I see a trend here

Alphabet Inc Class A
NASDAQ: GOOGL
Apr. 27, 4:52 p.m. EDT After hours
2,397.00 +106.02 (4.63%)

QQQ is nearly flat A/Hrs

 

[MC3OZ]

National HVDC grid is a piece of infrastructure we could be proud to leave for our children and grandchildren. 100% worth every penny.

What many miss is that HVDC can be deployed by simply dropping cables in the sea and cables can be run underground.

No need for expensive transmission towers, and linking coastal cities can be a quick project.

Many countries have a substantial portion of their population located near the coast.

The fact that Elon mentioned it is interesting, because the equipment at each end of the line is the major expense, hence the biggest opportunity to lower costs.

 

[CLK350]

Huh, isn't this exactly what Elon was talking about on the call yesterday about how this goes against the current () of the best way to upgrade the grid? Local, renewable energy is the cheapest and easiest way to go.

Great - hopefully the Biden administration will start by reactivating the best proposal our own Government agencies came up with - and which was buried by the previous oil & gas /coal bought administration - connecting the Western and Eastern grids. Its economic benefits were huge, still are ..

Even better, maybe Tesla Energy can come up with an all encompassing nationwide plan using Powerpacks for distributed energy storage and distribution, AND linking both West and East grids

Reminder about that West/ East grid connection:

Great - hopefully they'll also resurrect quickly a project that would have improved the US utility grid a lot .. but got buried by the coal interests in 2018 (more wasted resources and money, we pay federally scientific researchers to improve our economy and after they report results which do not please some industry, that whole study gets buried).

View attachment 649697 The Atlantic Aug 20 2020

On August 14, 2018, Joshua Novacheck, a 30-year-old research engineer for the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, was presenting the most important study of his nascent career. He couldn’t have known it yet, but things were about to go very wrong.

At a gathering of experts and policy makers in Lawrence, Kansas, Novacheck was sharing the results of the Interconnections Seam Study, better known as Seams. The Seams study demonstrated that stronger connections between the U.S. power system’s massive eastern and western power grids would accelerate the growth of wind and solar energy—hugely reducing American reliance on coal, the fuel contributing the most to climate change, and saving consumers billions. It was an elegant solution to a complicated problem.

...

Jereza fired off an email to DOE headquarters—before Novacheck had even finished speaking, according to sources who viewed the email—raising an alarm about Seams’ anti-coal findings. That email ignited an internal firestorm. According to interviews with five current and former DOE and NREL sources, supported by more than 900 pages of documents and emails obtained by InvestigateWest through Freedom of Information Act requests and by additional documentation from industry sources, Trump officials would ultimately block Seams from seeing the light of day. And in doing so, they would set back America’s efforts to slow climate change.

A nearly impermeable electrical “seam” divides America’s eastern and western power grids. These giant pools of alternating current on either side of the Rockies contain a total of 950 gigawatts of power generation by thousands of power plants. (A third grid serves Texas.) But only a little over one gigawatt can cross between them. Western-grid power plants in Colorado send bulk power more than 1,000 miles away to California, for example, but merely a trickle across the seam to its next-door neighbor Nebraska. That separation raises power costs, and makes it hard to share growing surpluses of environmentally friendly wind and solar power. And years of neglect have left the grids—and the few connections between them—overloaded and ill-prepared to transition to highly variable renewable energy.

View attachment 649698

The lab grounded Bloom and Novacheck, prohibiting them from presenting the Seams results or even discussing the study outside NREL. At the end of 2018, Bloom left NREL for the private sector. Dale Osborn, a retired grid-planning expert and a key adviser to Seams, says Bloom thought his career was over at NREL. “He told me, ‘I’ll never get a decent project again,’” Osborn recalls.

And the $1.6 million study itself disappeared. NREL yanked the completed findings from its website and deleted power-flow visualizations from its YouTube channel. An NREL document shows that Bloom and Novacheck expected to submit an article to a top grid-engineering journal within six weeks after the Kansas event. That paper remains blocked two years later. .
...
A few weeks before the Kansas summit, things were looking good for the Seams study. On July 26, 2018, Bloom was center stage at a grid symposium in Iowa, releasing the study’s findings. In invitations to the event, the transmission enhancements Seams described had been billed as a “trillion-dollar economic event.” Bloom was on fire, speaking on his feet without notes for nearly two hours. “We’ve been imagining cleaner, bigger modern grids for about 40 years,” Bloom expounded, “and now is the time to make it happen.”

Bloom showed off his team’s sophisticated methodology using high-resolution video simulations. One simulation showed a hypothetical heat wave in August 2038, causing air conditioners to drive up power demand. As the rising sun swept across the U.S., yellow circles representing solar plants expanded. Surplus power from solar plants in the West flooded eastward, limiting the need for pricier and dirtier midwestern coal power. And as the sun set, the Midwest’s expansive wind farms began to spin, sending power westward and minimizing use of the West’s coal- and gas-fired generators.
..
Even in the study’s less-ambitious scenario, the supergrid was saving consumers $3.6 billion a year by 2038.

But there was a problem: Improving the energy grid would reduce America’s reliance on coal. According to NREL’s simulations, coal-fired power plants would shut down en masse over the coming decades, and they would drop even faster with upgraded transmission. That proved to be a very inconvenient finding
...
PDF of the free Atlantic article at https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/08/how-trump-appointees-short-circuited-grid-modernization/615433/ in case that link isn't available in your country

 

[insaneoctane]

Anyone else notice how:

Tesla = Aims to do things NOW/tomorrow, so when they slip, it's a little late from NOW/tomorrow
Legacy = Aims to do things in 2-3 years, so when they slip, it's late from 2-3 years from now

Elon's "pace" is absolutely a force to be reckoned with

 

[kbM3]

If analyst discount reg credit as real revenue because it will one day go to zero, then they should discount all revenue from selling ICE from other manufacturers as that will also go to zero. Reg credit goes to zero approx the same date as ICE revenue goes to zero.

I would love it if you were correct, but European regulatory credits are just too good of a deal for Tesla to keep lasting. They have to be hurting European carmakers to An extreme extent and I would imagine Geo-politics will interfere at some point.

Tesla’s going to wipe out most legacy auto anyway, but if those credits continue in Europe and China, that will happen even more rapidly.

 

[ByeByeJohnny]

What many miss is that HVDC can be deployed by simply dropping cables in the sea and cables can be run underground.

No need for expensive transmission towers, and linking coastal cities can be a quick project.

Many countries have a substantial portion of their population located near the coast.

The fact that Elon mentioned it is interesting, because the equipment at each end of the line is the major expense, hence the biggest opportunity to lower costs.

I dare you to get a project dropping electric cables along populated coasts in Europe to be a quick project. Or major new ones over land for that matter.

Teslas issues with environmental permits for the Berlin factory wouldn't even register on that scale.

Actually. Wonder what the boring company would charge for a much smaller tunnel than they are doing now. Probably the cheapest. Almost certainly the fastest in many areas. Except there would be protests about damaging the groundwater etc.

Sigh, wonder how many solarpanels I can fit on my apartment balcony. I might have to soon.

 

[MartinAustin]

You mean Corolla, right?

Toyota sells like 20-30% more Corollas worldwide than Ford sells F-150s

I suppose you are right. I think there's a fair chance that next year, and in 2023, cumulative sales of Corolla+F150 will be less than 2019, because there are only a fixed number of people buying cars on the planet and not all of them are going to do the same thing in 2022/3 that they did in 2019. Am I right?

My general point is that one of the ways to become #1 is to reduce the sales of the encumbent #1. You don't just have to sell more than an encumbent #1 that is still selling as many as it always did.

 

[Skryll]

How about this for schadenfreude? Big Short: UBS, Top Broker Face $23 Million Claim over Tesla Trades - AdvisorHub

TL;DR- An advisor pushed shorting of TSLA to a client (who agreed). Client lost a ton of money and is suing UBS.

Next do CNBC

 

[Johan]

Anyone else surprised by how anemic the volume of trading has been both before and after this ER? No day we exceeded 30 million shares traded, today was only 29 million... In march we had a long period with 50-70 million shares per day traded.

 

[Johan]

How about this for schadenfreude? Big Short: UBS, Top Broker Face $23 Million Claim over Tesla Trades - AdvisorHub

TL;DR- An advisor pushed shorting of TSLA to a client (who agreed). Client lost a ton of money and is suing UBS.

"The lead name on the claim is Dennis Hansen, who, along with his wife, lost $16.5 million, the most of the nine claimants. Hansen is the CEO and owner of two automobile-industry-related companies—Precision of New Hampton, a torque-convertor maker, and HotFlush, Inc., a manufacturer of automatic flushing systems for oil coolers and heat exchanges, according to his LinkedIn page."

Welcome to the future Dennis.

 

[woodisgood]

Elon's "pace" is absolutely a force to be reckoned with

But he’s just an evil “ business mogul” who’s impatient to get his billions in riches so he can accomplish a vanity mission to colonize Mars. /s

I think it was @Krugerrand who recently wondered whether we deserve to get out of this mess we’ve put ourselves in. I’m done wondering - we just don’t.

 

[pz1975]

The longer TSLA stays artificially depressed, the more chance we all have to accumulate more shares. I remember being frustrated and incredulous between 2015-2019 that TSLA remained essentially flat. It just didn’t make any sense to me. Looking back, that was the luckiest thing ever for me and many of us here as it allowed us an extra 2-3 years to accumulate cheap shares. Without that, my TSLA (paper) profits would be less than 1/3 of what they are now.

Buy and hold and we will all be rewarded in the future.

 

[UnknownSoldier]

I really think we are going to be trading sideways for awhile yet. We are still growing into our current valuation and might be the rest of the year.

I guess it's back to playing meme stonks for lunch money. Wish I had gotten in on that MVIS nonsense, that was free money for the taking.