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Typical companies might have a project structure for Optimus like this:

Sponsor - maybe the COO or Engineering VP
Programme Director
4 Programme Managers (h/w, mech, s/w, integration)
10+ PMs
100+ Engineers
100+ Manufacturing Eng, buyers, QA etc.

Optimus probably has Elon, one PM and 20 multidisciplined Engineers. Dave just wants to confirm that there are at least a few leaders that will push at least the non critical path stuff. The answer will be yes.
 
I think Elon is completely uninterested in the share price. He pays the same amount (in shares) for income taxes no matter what the share price.

Lol, of course Elon is interested in the SP. :p Back in May 2019 (~3 weeks after the NYC hearing with the S*C), Elon executed exactly 1 of his 9 vested 2012 Stock Option tranches. That was when the SP was about $36 (split adjusted). It only cost him about $20M to exercise those options, and he paid both the exercise cost and his Income Taxes in cash (ie: he borrowed the money against his shares). Even better, Tesla didn't face a large bill for payroll taxes like 2021Q4.

Back then, Elon paid 53% Income tax on just a few million $, and now he has a bucket of shares on which he will only pay 20% Capital Gains tax (no income tax). If he can pay the taxes at a lower price, he pockets 53-20=33% more of the appreciated value of the shares when he finally goes to sell them.

Of course he cares.

Paging @mongo

Cheers!
 
How do we distinguish between a deadcat bounce vs the greatest reversal of all time?
You wait for price action confirmation.

The next couple sessions will confirm whether we get rejected at resistance trend lines or whether we break through them and confirm a bull cycle.

If QQQs break and close above 370 I’ll be repositioning some smaller positions in speculative growth. It will also bode well for TSLA as we’ll likely be closing above 960 and 1000 by that point.
View attachment 762619

These could be considered part of COGS, as in beverage for the workers (the meaty, non-bot ones at least)
Excellent little brewery!
Which one of you is this? I demanded we do a TMC/BPS ETF and nobody wanted to!

(Bloomberg paywall)
They’re actually buying three month call spreads. Basically guaranteeing 80% of capital (more since they collect some premium on the sold leg of their spreads). Interesting idea.
Didn't someone do the math on this on the shares he just vested and sold?

As I remember the tax goes up with a higher SP but so does the price he gets for the shares he sells to pay the tax. What the SP is doesn't matter much for how many shares he has to sell.
The payroll tax that we saw hit Q4 (340M) is based on value at exercise date.
 
$10K hdw sounds fine, but that's a true COGS. Any software developement will come from R&D which is spread across mulitple product lines, including FSD. The accounting will be different, I think. Paging @st_lopes :D
Yep cost of developing FSD won’t hit COGS. It’ll hit R&D and other operating expenses (like depreciation). It’s basically why software is always touted as high margins. Mainly because the internal cost to “produce” the software is counted as a COGS. Only the input costs sourced externally to operate the software would be (eg if running FSD required paying for an external web service, that would form part of COGS).
 
The plan expires in August, so Elon gets it at the last possible moment if Q1 and Q2 (* see below) post 30%+ margins. Cybertruck timing was likely never a factor, even with original plan.


*Exact wording: "Gross margin of 30% or more for four consecutive quarters" so not TTM, and also assuming it's being applied to the automotive sector only including carbon credits.
Given this award is 1/3 the size of a 2018 tranche and Elon being Elon, I doubt it is a factor in the business decisions.
Classic thread: The 2012 CEO grant
I'm sure this has been pointed out (I think maybe by @The Accountant , but I just put 2 and 2 together (yes, I know I'm dense).

This means Tesla is very confident they are going to have 30% automotive GM in Q1 and Q2. One of my lingering short term concerns has been expected gross margins as both GF-A and GF-B come online. You know, the spreading of factory and equipment depreciation costs over a small number of vehicles. I guess this puts to rest my concerns.
 
I recently got my 2 daughters investing in Tesla. I gave christmas money to one, and birthday money to the other. Only enough to buy a handful of shares (literally). They have decent jobs but only earn enough to pay the bills, not save. I showed them how to open a broker account, transfer the money in and how to set a limit order. They liked being Tesla shareholders and its nice that they now had a personal interest in this company that their Dad keeps banging on about.

And then came last week.

I always buy Tesla on the dips. Always have, always will. And last week was one BIG dip. I was about to buy more when I suddenly thought, why not give them the money so they can buy more rather than me? To be honest I have quite enough already.

They were thrilled, because it was so unexpected. No christmas, no birthday, completely out of the blue. A selection of the messages from them:

"Dad this is so exciting, you're the best"
"What do you think I should set the limit at?"
"I got them - weeeeeeeeeeeee!"
"Hey Dad I'm the Wolf of Wall Street"

Best Dad in the world status secured I think. And without the dip none of it would have happened.

p.s. the price went down further so I couldn't resist buying a few more for myself :)
This made my day....my 11 year old who i have been funding his 529 account by buying $TSLA for the last 5 years told me last week..."Dad, I should use my Walmart commercial $$ to buy more $TSLA since it is below $900.." (He was in a family holiday Walmart commercial with sis and mom)....brought a tear to my eye. Can't wait for him to get home to show him we went up over 4 Gordons today!
 
I'm sure this has been pointed out (I think maybe by @The Accountant , but I just put 2 and 2 together (yes, I know I'm dense).

This means Tesla is very confident they are going to have 30% automotive GM in Q1 and Q2. One of my lingering short term concerns has been expected gross margins as both GF-A and GF-B come online. You know, the spreading of factory and equipment depreciation costs over a small number of vehicles. I guess this puts to rest my concerns.
???
I think you may be confusing the last two tranches of the 2018 plan which caused a GAAP hit due to becoming probable with the final tranche of the 2012 plan which I've not seen any news regarding.
 
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This made my day....my 11 year old who i have been funding his 529 account by buying $TSLA for the last 5 years told me last week..."Dad, I should use my Walmart commercial $$ to buy more $TSLA since it is below $900.." (He was in a family holiday Walmart commercial with sis and mom)....brought a tear to my eye. Can't wait for him to get home to show him we went up over 4 Gordons today!
You have a 529 plan that allows you to purchase TSLA? Ours only allows a certain number of funds, no individual stocks.

Do you mind sharing?
 
???
I think you may be confusing the last two tranches of the 2018 plan which caused a GAAP hit due to becoming probable with the final tranche of the 2012 plan which I've not seen any news regarding.
Very well could be; wouldn't be the first time I'm confused.

I thought I heard someplace (maybe here, maybe Tesla Daily) that the company accrued for the '4 consecutive quarters of 30% margin' tranche this past quarter. If so, doesn't that mean they are confident they are going to achieve 30% margins in Q1 and Q2 2022?
 
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Stupid people attract even dumber ones:

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Not all YouTubers are the same Dave and Rob (Tesla Daily) are quality and worth watching.

IMO Dave is just blown away by the implications of the ER and probably needs to revert back to his old style with fewer videos.
Yes. Love Dave and his thoughtful approach, but he's posting several Youtube vids a day now and seems a little off his normal rock solid foundation. Hopefully the over excitation will moderate in a few more days. Not to say he is wrong about the significance of what we learned on the call.
 
the robots in a field currently sit idle between seasons, a Tesla bot can walk out of the field and work in the house or at the factory in town or whatever when they aren't needed in the field.

Most farmers hate buying 6 figure+ pieces of equipment, if they can cheaply buy or rent a swarm of cheaper bots to do the same task they will avoid taking out that bigger loan for the single tasker that costs way more.

Smart observation. The bee keeper model, following the pollenating demand south to north.
 
Having thought about Optimus Prime for a few days I think there are two key things that need to happen for it to be a success:

1. a small number of applications with limited scope but which can be replicated to millions of units.

2. the ability for ordinary people who are not machine learning experts to train the bot.

For example a bot pet (robo-dog) for the elderly.

Having a pet (particularly dogs) is well know to have benefits for elderly people, taking them for walks gives them regular exercise, looking after them a sense of responsibility for something dependent on them and companionship for seniors who are often on their own for long periods of time. Seeing-eye and assistance dogs help those with sight problems and those with mobility issues.

But pets are not without problems, I know several elderly people who have given up keeping pets when looking after them became too difficult, or when a pet died to considerable emotional distress and was not replaced, or when the cost of looking after a pet became too much. Pets also have considerable adverse environmental consequences.

A solution could be robo-dog, it is a limited scope application, with potentially hundreds of millions of units world-wide. They needs to be able to navigate house, street and field environments, obey simple commands and react to their owner's emotional and behavior queues, they need a personality. Being able to be trained by their owners and given specific abilites (from OTA updates) for new skills and tricks allows them to become more useful over time.
I've made a thread about Optimus here:- Tesla Optimus Sub-Prime Robot

We should move the discussion to that thread.
 
No, it means that projects go faster and better when the most talented and most authoritative person is overseeing them. Anytime a large customer with urgent priorities or projects needed something from us, they'd ask if the key person would personally drive the effort. If it's a enough of priority, that would be the CEO, CTO, or VP Engineering. This is common in tech, but I assume for any other industry as well.

In Tesla's case, Elon is effectively all three. He doesn't *have* to drive the new product, but doing so will increase the likelihood of greatest success. In Elon's mind, anything less than 100% is not an option.



Edit: It sends a message that this is a kickass project that the top engineers will want to work on. The best devs want to develop, not to be managers. Elon driving your project is exciting because it means you're working on one of the most important projects in the company. All eyes are on your team, and you have a chance to show everyone what you can do. Demotivational is the opposite of what happens when Elon personally takes charge of a new project.
To add to this with some insight from Andrej Karpathy, one of Elon's top lieutenants and brilliant man in his own right. He notes how well Elon can make the right judgement calls with incomplete info (something Karpathy says he finds difficult to do himself - and this is coming from a person who's one of the best in the field at creating an algorithm that is supposed to predict the future based on incomplete information - FSD).

The other quality is to build and inject energy into the team to get the best performance out of them.

I can't think of two more important qualities when trying to develop products to do things that have never been done before.
He has incredibly well developed intuition....in many aspects where he makes the right judgement calls sometimes in what I perceive to be a lack of information because he's not fully in the detail of all the things and yet his judgement is extremely good. I still haven't fully understood how that happens, he has a way of taking a very complex system and simplifying it to really the fundamentals and the first principle components of what really matters about the system and then making statements about those. And so it's a very different way of thinking that I find fascinating. By default for example I get overwhelmed by the system, I feel like I need to know the system in it's full detail to make the correct decision but that's not how he operates, he somehow has a way to distil the system into a much simpler system in which he operates. And so I think I've learned a lot about how to approach problems.

It's a double edged sword in terms of working with him because he wants the future yesterday and he will push people and inject a lot of energy and he wants it to happen quickly and you have to be of a certain (I think) attitude to really tolerate that over long periods of time, but he surrounds himself with people who get energy out of that and they also want the future to happen quicker. Those people really thrive at Tesla and so I think I also happen to be like that and so I don't mind it, I actually kind of thrive on it and I love the energy of getting us to work faster and making a difference and having this impact.