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

[Cherry Wine]

TDA just showed a note that the stock of TSLA is trading down because Q4 earnings report would have noted its factories have been running below capacity for several quarters due to supply chain issues, which are likely to continue throughout 2022.

So what does that say about the value of the company that even with that restriction they are having massive free cashflow? SMH

Coupled with the fact that forward guidance was above our expectations ("50% annually on average"), which was already above consensus?!

 

[mongo]

The payroll tax thing hasn’t appeared in the P&L’s before? If not, what’s different about these tranches? Is it an end-of-year entry for all tranches recognized in 2021?

@JustSaying
The payroll tax was due to Elon exercising his 2012 comp plan options. First time that award had been in play.

 

[Singuy]

Largest drop in my portfolio since I measured. A couple of years ago I would have been starting to get nervous about this especially in combination with a lot of FUD added to it. Now I shrug it off - been there, seen it before. Wouldn’t be surprised If we would see a reversal tomorrow for the same amount.

I think Elon is right. People don’t understand the FSD and the effect it will have in using the car and transportation in general. I think a lot of posters here also don’t get it. We all understand that Elon’s timeline is off, however, he is getting better at it lately. Don’t forget, he knows much more than we do. He works with FSD team every day. He has seen the latest iteration of FSD. He is on an earnings call and he is extremely positive about FSD. Besides that, you are not allowed to make false statements on these calls. I am extremely bullish and excited for the coming months. Hopefully we will get FSD beta soon here in Canada too.

No no, everyone watches sci fi movies and understand exactly what a future of fully autonomous cars can bring. We just don't understand why Elon keeps talking about it as if it's solved.

Tesla hitting all these local maximums causing rewrites and upgrading hardware doesn't exactly communicate to people that it's solved. Regulators keep giving Tesla crap about their autonomous features doesn't exactly inspire confidence that this will be embraced unless it's problem free...even though problem free is not an achievable goal.

 

[Zhelko Dimic]

Just for context: $TSLA today is still trading at $4320 pre-split....let that sink in if you are crying about the Q4 Conf call.

But my friend emptied credit line to go all in at $5500 pre-split price, just couple weeks ago...
Do you think your argument will comfort her?

 

[Rarity]

Battery Day mentions a cathode being 2/3 Nickel 1/3 manganese, that seems to be what they are most likely to be using for Model Y.

If Elon is talking about scaling to really high to really high volume with relatively low costs cells I doubt they are using 2/3 Nickel.

This is another alternative:-

Lithium ion manganese oxide battery - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

LMNO is probably a more a likely candidate.

Limiting factor asked a good question, but Elon dodged it.

Thank you. I looked in the slide deck for Battery Day and it wasn't readily apparent there, but the keynote includes the discussion. Nothing definitive, but the slide deck indicates that Model Y cathode will include manganese. I do notice the steel stacking up at Austin for the cathode factory.

Elon Musk: (02:17:07)
So starting with iron, that’s kind of like a medium range, and then nickel manganese as sort of a medium plus intermediate and then high nickel for long range applications like Cyber Truck and the semi. Something like a semi-truck, it’s extremely important to have high energy density in order to get long range. And just to give sort of iron up a bit more time, if you look at [inaudible 02:17:37] per kilogram at the cathode level of iron, it looks like nickel’s twice as good, but when you fully consider it at the pack level, everything else taken into account, nickel is about maybe 50 or 60% better than iron.

Elon Musk: (02:17:52)
So iron is a little better than it would seem, when you look at it at the pack level fully considered. It’s not as good as nickel, nickel’s like 50 to 60% better, but it’s actually pretty good. Good for stationary storage and for medium range applications where energy density is not paramount. And then, like I said, for intermediate, it’s kind of a nickel manganese, and it’s a relatively straightforward to do a cathode that’s two-thirds nickel one third manganese, which would then allow us to make 50% more cell volume with the same amount of nickel.

Drew Baglino: (02:18:32)
And with very little energy trade-off. Just enough to have, you still want to use 100% nickel for something like a semi-truck, but really not much of a sacrifice at all.

 

[CHGolferJim]

@JustSaying
The payroll tax was due to Elon exercising his 2012 comp plan options. First time that award had been in play.

Thanks, I read an explanation after making the post. Interesting that this was never mentioned by the company at the time ~10% of EPS.

 

[Skipdd]

But my friend emptied credit line to go all in at $5500 pre-split price, just couple weeks ago...
Do you think your argument will comfort her?

The only comfort I have (was not stock invested pre-split), is their consistent actual performance and knowledge gained here regarding their prospects. I have accepted that it may take more quarters of continued growth and profit, and failures of other companies before the market values Tesla fully. Their loss, my gain. As funds become available I ramp my investment.

 

[AudubonB]

Either through zero humans, or possibly Primus complimented. Very cool thought.

Here's Elon's description from 2016, and he states this as a requirement to winning.

Musk: Tesla's factory will become an 'alien dreadnought'

"The point at which that’s what the factory looks like, that when you know you’ve won."

www.businessinsider.com

Bingo. You'll have noticed, I hope, that amongst my list of the non-bottlenecks, I included "(also not) labor". Yes, of course some factory-floor personnel remain essential but as has been discussed elsewhere (¿not in this thread? Mebbe, mebbe not), the real way that one gets the Productivity metric to rise is to use more robots (etc) per employee. Those poor, rolling, non-unionizable Jeeveses* of the world don't get the production credit; rather, it all gets divvied up amongst the humans.

*"Jeeves" is the name for our robot lawnmower. Tesla uses other names......

 

[Big Time]

Just open the factories already

 

[phantasms]

Since Jan 3rd
TSLA down > 30%
QQQ down ~15%

How far down does TSLA have to go for it to "catch up?"

Doesn’t TSLA usually move 2x-3x to QQQ?

Maybe we’re there now, maybe another 15%.

 

[LiveLong&Profit]

The biggest problem with FSD right now is bad map data. I don't know when Tesla will stop relying so heavily on map data but doing so will always result in drives full of interventions if that route has incorrect data. Right now FSD cannot complete my work drive because it thinks this on ramp to the hwy still exist which doesn't for more than a year now. And no matter how godly v11 or v12 is, I have to take over if it routes me to a barrier. Cities that are growing like gangbusters have new roads put in and old roads rerouted constantly. I don't know how Tesla can solve this issue in real time yet as I have seen zero progress in this area.

Hm.
My guess it that the Tesla FSD-team will have to do an abstraction layer or a set of hyper-parameters for the route planner.
Something like: "Drive me from A to be, using whatever legal roads, using these two GPS locations. Assume that the map is sufficiently true to be useful for planning a route but be very paranoid about what it claims to be ground truth and correct accordingly on the fly"

Alternatively, perhaps StarLink satelites can provide a 'almost realtime' updated map of all non-occluded roads in a couple of years.
(Yes, I know SpaceX is not Tesla, but they could probably provide an almost realtime map as a service)

 

[JustMe]

What is max pain for tomorrow?

I think max pain was today

 

[RobDickinson]

I think max pain was today

Narrator - It wasnt

 

[elasalle]

Tesla outsells BMW in luxury U.S. sales for 2021

Tesla outsold BMW to take the title of top selling luxury car brand in the United States for 2021, regardless or powertrain.

driveteslacanada.ca

 

[Artful Dodger]

@JustSaying
The payroll tax was due to Elon exercising his 2012 comp plan options. First time that award had been in play.

Elon executed a single tranche of his 2012 comp plan back in June 2019, but the SP at that time was so low due to the failed SCE lwasuit that payroll taxes were minimal. The record is available here:

Musk Elon (0001494730) | data.sec.gov

 

[FrankSG]

Spot on. There was too much "pie in the sky" with minimal substances for those items. That talk is great for Tesla enthusiasts, it's not for TSLA investors unless you can provide something concrete for them to focus on. And let's face it, Elon's timeline projections have a historically poor accuracy rate.

Optimus Subprime - who cares until you can show it working along side a human and doing at least as good a work as them?
FSD - this is getting old. We understand as core enthusiasts, but he needs to keep a lid on this until he's able to show it's 100X or more better than a human.


The fundamentals of the company are SPECTACULAR. THAT should have been the focus of the call. The rest should have been held back till "better cooked".

Earnings calls aren't there to pump up the stock price, satisfy short-term traders, or reiterate things covered in the letter. Earnings calls exist to provide additional details and to answer questions/alleviate concerns from long-term investors.

We have no interest in satisfying the desires of day traders. I couldn't care less. Please sell our stock and don't buy it.

 

[tivoboy]

Just open the factories already

“turn the machines back on!”

 

[Wooloomooloo]

Go back and read the CT forum when it was first unveiled. Why do you think people were ordering 5, 10 or 20 of them?

What do you think of that as an investment? Perhaps they should have spent that money on TSLA instead. $80k in TSLA stock in 2015 would be, well more than enough to buy a fleet of Plaids with FSD to serve a small town.

It was bad advice then and still is now. And when it was pointed out in 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019 the people pointing it out were laughed at, or worse.

 

[LiveLong&Profit]

For me, it has less to do with AI and FSD being amazing. I think it is!

It has more to do with the greater pressing problem of the intent of the mission for Tesla: to move the world to sustainability faster.

Does AI/FSD do that over building out EV cars and pushing the other automakers to do so? If both are being run in parallel, are resources being distracted rather than focused in highest priority items in the organization? As an investor, I'm trying to pay attention to this as Tesla gets bigger (now ~$1T market cap rather than $5B) and works to continue the mission until its done ... and how well it does that.

In the long-term, optimistic, non-dystopian scenario, Bots will greatly aid in solving global warming.

By lowering the cost of labour, whatever technology is developed to increase the uptake of renewables and/or carbon capture will all become cheaper.
But isn't that true for all labour? Maybe!
Tesla (and other robotics companies) can decide to support beneficial work directly by simply lowering the subscription cost of the bots.

So cleaning up environmental disasters such as oil-spills and doing carbon capture on a massive scale by planting untold billions of fast growing trees/plants such as bamboo can be directly supported by Tesla by giving a huge bot subscription discount - or even waving the subscription fee.

 

[insaneoctane]

Today made no sense.

I cannot for one moment be convinced by ANYONE that this price action was sensible, especially against a macro backdrop which wasn't a disaster.

This was absolutely, 100% against reason. Literally doesn't make ANY logical sense at all. Vulcans would be going nuts right now.

4680s are real and coming soon, record everything, huge outlook. Even a price target hike today. This almost feels like Wall Street is doing something contradictory and coordinated to scare retails out of shares. Maybe there's another big leg up coming?

I remember an earnings call a year or two ago where there was a big non macro-related TSLA drop despite nothing but good news coming out of the call. It was 100% against logic for a few days, then once the hoes in Wall Street repositioned themselves, we were off to the races.

I can only believe that's what is happening here. Is *EVERYONE* really this stupid? I mean really?

It seems WS can't see the forest for the trees. All the traditional technical measures were supplied in spades. But, there were some distractions that WS latched onto. Their were some disappointments (delayed CT, unconfirmed $25k schedule, 2170s in Berlin MY, emphasis on "robots" and continued FSD promises). The fundamentals are awesome and the drop in SP is yet another buying opportunity.