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

[Curt Renz]

MarketWatch - hour ago: 30 stocks that shined in the pandemic are still poised for huge growth through 2024

Tesla is among the 30.

 

[Artful Dodger]

Remember all the folks here trying to explain how a Model X could burn down on a frozen lake? Yeah, turns out it was fraud (like many other Tesla "fires"):

Alex on Twitter: "Remember the burned X on a frozen lake? The U.S. Secret Service found that the owner Michael Gonzalez, 32 tricked Tesla's purchasing system. He ordered cars and had them delivered, but never allowed the final payment. He then resold the vehicles to companies and individuals. https://t.co/ko5ezTYgAw" / Twitter

Elon Musk on Twitter: "@alex_avoigt Sigh" / Twitter​

​

Word.

 

[Rarity]

This is the perfect time for boldness from Tesla on the cell and pack front. LG is in a shitstorm of pending litigation and AFAIK the battery portion is now completely spun-off from the LG Chem parent company. Tesla should buy controlling interest in LG Energy Solutions, pre-emptively settle these outstanding recalls, and sign full pack, BMS and maybe even drivetrain supply deals with the likes of GM and Hyundai.

As a shareholder I have no interest whatsoever in manufacturing the Hyundai's of the EV world. Folks here are licking their chops at the prospect of a $25k Tesla, I think it's a waste of time and resources. And it really doesn't fit the mission. Let the Androids of the world do their thing, everyone has a role.

Owning LG Energy Solutions gives Tesla tons of leverage with other suppliers, further forces legacy automaker transition by making it stupid easy, and lets Elon scale the real business......the machines that makes the machines. Basically sell these idiots Gigafactories that pump out finished packs.

A bold move like that sends certainty to the mining sector as well. Next thing you know we're out of this cell bottleneck.

While LG's battery business has been spun off, it is still in LG's chaebol and under the holding company's control. In Korea, companies are often tied together with minority shareholdings. Sometimes these minority shareholdings are pretty small.

This doesn't happen too much in the US. It would be the case with Tesla, if Musk were to form his holding company X. Normally, it would be unwieldy to do this in the US. Once Musk passes on, X wouldn't be able to exert much control.

 

[Todd Burch]

Remember all the folks here trying to explain how a Model X could burn down on a frozen lake? Yeah, turns out it was fraud (like many other Tesla "fires"):

Alex on Twitter: "Remember the burned X on a frozen lake? The U.S. Secret Service found that the owner Michael Gonzalez, 32 tricked Tesla's purchasing system. He ordered cars and had them delivered, but never allowed the final payment. He then resold the vehicles to companies and individuals. https://t.co/ko5ezTYgAw" / Twitter

Elon Musk on Twitter: "@alex_avoigt Sigh" / Twitter​

​

Word.

I for one am shocked that none of the legitimate explanations that I had concocted in my head for why a new, burned-out vehicle would be found at the center of a frozen lake panned out.

 

[avoigt]

Great synopsis and I laughed out-loud so many times while listening to this. Kudos to @avoigt ! I was outside at my driving range with headphones and if someone had seen me shaking my head and then laughing they'd thought I'd lost my mind.

What made me laugh is many of your points above, but the gist of it is that this guy doesn't even know or realize what is actually happening. He seemed so proud of his company that is making something that Tesla considered tablestakes 12 years ago and folks like me in the software/service industry have done for nearly 20+ years. And it is so super easy that it is basically a line item on the feature spec with a few dev weeks of work to tie in the sub-components. And if this guy is a thought leader in the German auto industry then it is sooooo much worse than I thought. Even the progressive thinkers, like this guy, can't see how unbelievably behind they are and WILL NOT catch up as what is being talked about is infinitesimal progress relative to Tesla innovation.

TL;DR - Auto execs simply do not understand software AT ALL. The gap will continue to widen and seems to be accelerating based on this interview.

Thanks for your post and happy to hear you like it and had some fun too. I believe you summarized well what a lot feel, who listened to the interview. Peter is actually criticized a lot by his peers for example from VW for his opinions about the German Auto industry and for asking them to change. Thats what he told me after I stopped recording when the two of us continued chatting for another 30 minutes off-line. I'm certain you would have enjoyed that part too.

 

[StealthP3D]

So to be clear.....I should be putting my commentary around what TSLA options look appealing within the Intraday $TSLA Analysis thread, and this thread is reserved for discussion of non-Tesla battery tech?

Non-Tesla battery tech discussion is not very important? It looks like you are saying that the level of appeal that certain option contracts have to you is at least as important to a TSLA investor as the current state EV battery technology and the viability of different manufacturer's solutions. This tells me that you don't understand the most basic concept of what it means to be an investor and how value is realized.

 

[Rarity]

I felt a fair bit of the discussion was him giving his colleagues a spoonful of sugar so that the medicine would go down and also him talking his own book (not his actual new book he just published, but rather the companies he was involved in). These things are tolerable to me.

There were also a few headscratchers and things that made me chuckle.

 

[M|S|M MYP]

I for one am shocked that none of the legitimate explanations that I had concocted in my head for why a new, burned-out vehicle would be found at the center of a frozen lake panned out.

Tesla AI comes to my mind...."Hey (car name)....drive to the center of lake _____ and set yourself on fire....just do it"

 

[avoigt]

Thanks for posting that.

I find it very surprising that the idea of OTA update while driving is considered important by anyone. Especially for electric cars that routinely spend hours at a time charging (and therefore aren't driving). It is trivially easy to find a non-driving opportunity to apply an OTA update. The other claimed "features" of this "new OTA technology" - not needing memory for alternate copies of the software and patching "individual lines of code" also seem silly. It is a very rare software update where a single line of code is changed. The idea of changing running code on the fly is either ill-conceived or will necessitate that the original code (as well as updates) have a bloated footprint in order to safely allow such changes. That more or less wipes out any advantages of not needing "double memory" while simultaneously harming code execution speed.

I think that the OEMs licensing this will be regretting it pretty soon. Of course I could be wrong but I really doubt it.

Fair point. I believe it's an interesting approach that could prove valuable for some use cases but agree that vehicles mostly standing and that won't change. Because we may see more frequent updates it could be handy not to worry about timing but it's in my opinion all future talk anyway. Let's face it that most automakers are unable to provide OTA today and VW makes it extra complicated with their IDs.

Change of code lines instead of full scripts, programs ect could have some benefits too but I'm not an expert and others may know more about it for BEVs. It may depend again on what you update and in some cases, it won't be possible anyway but in others, it could help to push changes to vehicles faster. Time will tell but Peter works for start-ups that try to improve processes through technology and as always with start-ups they may fail or suceed.

 

[Todd Burch]

Overall, volume really hasn't picked up yet, but when the price sags we seem to have whales coming in for a good buy...

 

[M|S|M MYP]

Article is behind a paywall, but lemme guess....its our good friend Toni Sacconaghi predicting this....The FUD seems more and more desperate these days....Bullish AF for $TSLA!!!

 

[StealthP3D]

The main thing I got from the interview was the very high level of risk aversion. This tells me that the competition will continue to move slowly despite what they say.

Avoiding risk is actually a very good thing but I think Elon uses a different form of risk aversion vs. the large OEM's who avoid risk by not making any big changes or doing anything too quickly.

It appears Elon avoids risk by avoiding assumptions, personal biases, etc. while using first principles thinking to determine what is real. This helps ensure any conclusions drawn from this are valid. The better your decision making, the lower the risk. Large OEM's make a lot of bad assumptions and have learned the hard way not to act on their conclusions because so often it causes pain. Elon has learned to make a high percentage of good decisions and thus acting on them tends to be rewarding.

One method cannot compete with the other method because good decision making, and having the conviction to act on those decisions, is going to win overall. The big mistakes will be compensated for by the big wins. Excessive risk aversion is the natural result of being bad at your job.

 

[JRP3]

As a shareholder I have no interest whatsoever in manufacturing the Hyundai's of the EV world. Folks here are licking their chops at the prospect of a $25k Tesla, I think it's a waste of time and resources. And it really doesn't fit the mission.

Moving the world to sustainability?

 

[TheTalkingMule]

Non-Tesla battery tech discussion is not very important? It looks like you are saying that the level of appeal that certain option contracts have to you is at least as important to a TSLA investor as the current state EV battery technology and the viability of different manufacturer's solutions. This tells me that you don't understand the most basic concept of what it means to be an investor and how value is realized.

Haven't been the target of a Stealth logic rant in quite a while, sweet!

I'm simply saying long-winded technical discussions are so obviously OT to this thread that perhaps we should stop pretending anything even remotely related to Tesla is OT.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

Moving the world to sustainability?

Singlehandedly moving the world to sustainability at the execution level is less efficient than coercing adoption by means we might find less than palatable.
Like helping the utterly disgraceful and undeserving General Motors.

Was it the OT post? Sorry!

 

[GrandEnigma]

I see options have again turned funky today. So curious to see what is going on.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

I see options have again turned funky today. So curious to see what is going on.

Yeah, my LEAPs just closed 15 minutes ago out of the blue. A drop of about 5% from earlier executions at the same strike. Bizarre.

Again....the worrier in me smells shenanigans when bargains pop up.

 

[StealthP3D]

View attachment 703658

Article is behind a paywall, but lemme guess....its our good friend Toni Sacconaghi predicting this....The FUD seems more and more desperate these days....Bullish AF for $TSLA!!!

OK, this is a fun thought exercise. I don't think Apple will sell 1.5 million cars by 2030 let alone any. But let's roll with this as the future is hard to see with any kind of certainty. It looks like Bernstein is projecting annual sales (not cumulative) of 1.5 million cars on or before 2030. Let's envision that somehow Apple does make just 1 million cars in a year.

I'm going to go way out on a limb and predict if this does come true (I think chances are less than 10%), the only way it could happen is if the cars are all plastic. Injection molded and heat formed plastic. In other words, they could not be "cars" as we know them but personal mobility pods made of plastic. Maybe they have a hundred pounds of aluminum in them.

I know many of you are thinking this is a strange prediction because Apple is known for exuding quality, metal and glass, solid and timeless, not cheap plastic trinkets. But sometimes things play out in strange ways. The high end maker of expensive phones could become the cheap supplier of cute small cars for the masses. Little plastic cars that weigh closer to 1,000 lbs. than the 3-5K pounds current EV's weigh. The motor cases would probably be plastic as well. This seems far more plausible to me than Apple becoming a master of heavy industry. And it would be somewhat good for the mission (ignoring all the oil it would take to produce that much plastic).

Of course this is less than 10% likely in my mind, most likely outcome is that Apple realizes that automobile manufacturing is more involved than they realized and never produce cars in significant numbers. But if they made just 2,000 before they gave up, think how valuable/collectable they would become!

I still don't see this happening for a number of reasons but I think it's far more likely than them putting out a million steel and aluminum cars weighing 3,000 lbs. or more.

 

[snellenr]

Tesla AI comes to my mind...."Hey (car name)....drive to the center of lake _____ and set yourself on fire....just do it"

That command would violate the Third Law of Robotics:

“A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.”

Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics

 

[M|S|M MYP]

OK, this is a fun thought exercise. I don't think Apple will sell 1.5 million cars by 2030 let alone any. But let's roll with this as the future is hard to see with any kind of certainty. It looks like Bernstein is projecting annual sales (not cumulative) of 1.5 million cars on or before 2030. Let's envision that somehow Apple does make just 1 million cars in a year.

I'm going to go way out on a limb and predict if this does come true (I think chances are less than 10%), the only way it could happen is if the cars are all plastic. Injection molded and heat formed plastic. In other words, they could not be "cars" as we know them but personal mobility pods made of plastic. Maybe they have a hundred pounds of aluminum in them.

I know many of you are thinking this is a strange prediction because Apple is known for exuding quality, metal and glass, solid and timeless, not cheap plastic trinkets. But sometimes things play out in strange ways. The high end maker of expensive phones could become the cheap supplier of cute small cars for the masses. Little plastic cars that weigh closer to 1,000 lbs. than the 3-5K pounds current EV's weigh. The motor cases would probably be plastic as well. This seems far more plausible to me than Apple becoming a master of heavy industry. And it would be somewhat good for the mission (ignoring all the oil it would take to produce that much plastic).

Of course this is less than 10% likely in my mind, most likely outcome is that Apple realizes that automobile manufacturing is more involved than they realized and never produce cars in significant numbers. But if they made just 2,000 before they gave up, think how valuable/collectable they would become!

I still don't see this happening for a number of reasons but I think it's far more likely than them putting out a million steel and aluminum cars weighing 3,000 lbs. or more.

So you're saying there's still a chance......

I put the odds of them producing anything relevant at <0.000000001%, slapping an Apple logo on a OEM manufacturer does not count