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

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You want me to give you a disagree because TSLA will only double in the next 9 months? I like your style.
What it involves is accepting the probabilities of the 4T in the future. I accept the possibilities but can't wrap my mind on timeline or chance of success. The issue for me would be trade entry now. I'm fine sitting tight, but am not talking up things to people like I used to.

Back in the day, it was MUCH EASIER to come up with a future market cap based upon 10% of world car sales at the profit points they suggested. Car sales were a known factor. Jump to electric not that much of a difference. So, I could do some back of napkin analysis over a few minutes. Things like FSD, robotaxi, robot man, these are just so far forward thinking it is tough for me, retail investor at home, to evaluate.

Frank SG and a handful of others like ARKK, spend considerable energies thinking through such things and offer priceless insight and guidance. To me, participating in such analysis discussion is one of the potential best benefits (largely unrealized here) of investors coming together and hashing things out. Like, the person who brought forth Bayes theorem and conditional probabilities might have helped me mature my own market analysis from a mathematical perspective, especially after I read on them. I am willing to try to work hard to understand. I am willing to have my ideas and thoughts bashed, want my investment sword sharpened on the finest grit everyone can offer.
 
In case anyone needs a reminder not to discount the potential of Tesla Energy...

New promotional video from Tesla showing off their Townsite Solar and Storage facility: Townsite Solar and Storage Facility

528,084 panels feeding a 360 MWh Tesla Megapack!
Indeed. And if you are talking about the probability of some part of Tesla getting huge, Energy has to be a much higher probability than FSD, Optimus, Robotaxi, HVAC, Insurance, or anything else I can think of.

I'd put the probability at 50% that Tesla Energy really does become as profitable as the car business in a few years.
 
Perhaps I missed it but good old Dan seems to also want to muck things up.

Elon is not the only one using money to try and get what they want.

O'Dowd is a moron.

Californians love there Teslas, and they love Elon. This political stunt might work someone else, but not in California.

But, free advertising for Tesla, which will get Elon more Twitter followers, which will sell more cars.
 
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O'Dowd is a moron.

California's love there Teslas, and they love Elon. This political stunt might work someone else, but not in California.

But, free advertising for Tesla, which will get Elon more Twitter followers, which will sell more cars.
I agree but did you read the advantages he has in winning. Also MSNBC seems to love to run hit pieces on Elon, they had a long one last night full of misrepresentations. Dan is a moron but a tenacious one with a bone to pick and lots of money to burn, they article is worth a read. Dems are afraid of this campaign but what an irony, they also don't like Elon so it should be interesting, Dan is really bad at twitter but his spoof account is great.
 
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If that's literally what you got from that then I'm not sure how I can help you. But sure, I'll try a bit.

What Yishan Wong, CEO of Reddit from 2012-2014, is saying is that humans inherently behave badly when given a massive megaphone and no repercussions and what is being tightly regulated is humans behaving badly. That's why people on every "side" complains about "censorship" because it's not what their opinion is, it's how horrible and disgusting and nasty they are when expressing it. Which is completely true, social networks are cesspools because humans are cesspools. Furthermore, what he's saying is that "censorship" would cease to exist if humans gained the ability to be nice to each other on the Internet instead of the worst case scenarios of human behavior which is always what seems to happen on every social network that exists.

I personally don't want Elon wasting his valuable and pitifully short mortal lifespan on babysitting screeching greenhair woke blue checkmarks instead of doing important things like accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy and making humanity a multi-planetary species. Elon is busy tackling existential threats to humanity here, I don't understand where trying to solve fundamental human behavioral issues on social networks fits in there.
I don’t understand why you can’t or haven’t connected the dots.

Why do we need to transition to sustainability in the first place? Hint: because humans are cesspools and are happy to behave badly when they aren’t held accountable for their actions. That’s exactly what’s going on on social media.

Why did Tesla not just make EVs, but instead also went down the energy creation and energy storage path as well? Why did Elon not just start Tesla but also SpaceX to take humans off the planet? Why is Elon working on a method to make human consciousness permanent via an AI uploading platform? Why is he doing Optimus with a view to make everything in life bountiful for all humans (per his recent TED talk)? Hint: for the same reason he’s now looking at Twitter; it’s all the connected human condition.

You can’t fix one element, but not the rest. Won’t work. If people won’t willingly change, then you either force them by taking away all options, and/or you create a world and a life that naturally changes the human condition. What is there to be angry about if every human has everything in life they need without having to fight and claw and struggle?

Maybe that’s naive of Elon. Maybe the human condition will always be a cesspool. But he’s going to die trying and I’m okay with that.
 
Great points for me to ponder! Love it. I need to read more on Bayes and conditional probabilities. Thank you!

Bayes rule r/t TSLA and other examples, along with my investment training (books and experience). So many great examples from many sources in essence discuss betting on the successful jockey. Musk has many such examples in his background that helped me invest years ago.

I'm fine using 20% as a discount rate. I have no formal training, don't know how to properly have a discount rate. If I am off, it comes out in my favor. 20% is also the max premium I will pay for LEAPS.
The 20% discount rate may lead to you dramatically underinvesting in TSLA relative to your investment objectives.

The discount rate is used to account for the time-value of money from your perspective. To determine your own discount rate to use, the game is to figure out how much of a preference you actually have for receiving cash sooner rather than later.

Using a 20% rate means you think $100 today is equal in value to $100*(1-0.2)^t after t years. In other words, you’d be ambivalent about choosing between having $100 now, $80 a year from now, $64 after two years, $11 after ten years, $1 after twenty years, etc.

A baseline discount rate many people use is around 8-10% which aligns with the long-term historical performance of S&P500 index funds with some bonds mixed in and you might consider that a baseline benchmark to try to surpass.

Because the discount rate effect is an exponential decay over time and because the bulk of Tesla’s earnings will occur in 2030 and beyond, a choice of 20% is basically heavily biasing your TSLA valuation for what they do in the next 5 years and ignoring the future potential. Basically valuing long-term future profits as worth an order of magnitude less for every decade of waiting. For example, if you expect Tesla to earn $1T in 2032, you only value that year’s earnings today at $110B.

Not investment advice.
 

Would you be willing to buy the car and lease the battery? I doubt it if I would.
This has already been tried in the UK by Nissan with early Leafs, and Renault's Zoe. Its widely disliked and has the effect of rendering the cars almost worthless once they're older as the buying demographic for a more budget older car doesn't want a monthly rental payment just as high as when the car was new!
 
I don’t understand why you can’t or haven’t connected the dots.

Why do we need to transition to sustainability in the first place? Hint: because humans are cesspools and are happy to behave badly when they aren’t held accountable for their actions. That’s exactly what’s going on on social media.

Why did Tesla not just make EVs, but instead also went down the energy creation and energy storage path as well? Why did Elon not just start Tesla but also SpaceX to take humans off the planet? Why is Elon working on a method to make human consciousness permanent via an AI uploading platform? Why is he doing Optimus with a view to make everything in life bountiful for all humans (per his recent TED talk)? Hint: for the same reason he’s now looking at Twitter; it’s all the connected human condition.

You can’t fix one element, but not the rest. Won’t work. If people won’t willingly change, then you either force them by taking away all options, and/or you create a world and a life that naturally changes the human condition. What is there to be angry about if every human has everything in life they need without having to fight and claw and struggle?

Maybe that’s naive of Elon. Maybe the human condition will always be a cesspool. But he’s going to die trying and I’m okay with that.
Me too as long as my memory card is affordable but I assume by then it will be.
 
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Okay, bring on the dislikes! I've shared this kind of stuff before and nobody provided any constructive criticism. I think it makes the best argument for bears and analysts.


In the TED talk this week, Musk said the robot would be more valuable than the car business, thought first working prototype in 2023. I think modeling some future value for this (and the robotaxi network) is akin to investing in a pharmaceutical company with only a stage three drug trial or a lithium company that only has signed contracts giving them claim to lithium in the ground. No real product yet exists to sell, yet there is hope and chance of value creation.

What most impresses me is the 4680 battery now available in cars. I'll be further impressed as they scale production of that battery.

I do think TSLA might just accomplish all of their goals. But along with that might comes a chance of failure. One of the main things I think TSLA bulls fail to account for is the mathematics of probabilities. I think there is some fancy math rule, I might not describe it well but will try. Let's say one assigns a probability of FSD coming true by year 2025 as 50%. Robot of 25%, robotaxi 25%, Truck 50%. Well to come up with the chance of all of those things coming true by 2025, one has to multiply those probabilities (.25 x .5 x .5 x .25) to get a 1.56 % chance of all of that coming true. So modeling some future value based upon predictions gets to be very difficult and complicated. So if things model some future value of 4T based upon all of those things coming true, there is a very low probability of it happening. Even if you said that each of those had a 75% chance, the math says only 21% chance of all of it happening.

So lets say one can rationalize some future market cap of 4T in 2025. I then have to come up with a present value. I've seen others choose lower discount percent, but what I've always done is figure a 20% discount per year. So in 2024 they would be worth 3.2T. 2023 2.56 T, and this year just 2T. For a super high potential valuation, at some reasonable chance of failure, I am not sure this is worth investing into at this point.

This is why I have a tough time modeling for future products not yet available.
As long as the market is controlled by the bad guys, I don’t think modeling means mouse nuts other than to maybe understand what the bad guys are thinking/aiming for so that the good guys know how much of a bargain the current SP is so that accumulation and couch scrounging can continue in earnest.

TSLA accounts for 50% of the entire options market. Nobody controlling that segment gives a rat’s patootie about Optimus or any of it. They only care what might happen on the world stage and to a lesser degree the Tesla stage for specific short periods of time and manipulating the SP to get rich.

All you need to know is that world is changing and will look very different on your deathbed. Either get on for the ride or hanging half off or stay off entirely.
 
Exactly.
Elon's Asperger's helped him to become an excellent engineer. However, it inhabits him in the area of social interactions, human communication nuances.
His achievements with SpaceX and Tesla are all about engineering. Twitter is all about social interactions, human communication.
This endeavor is simply not a good fit for him personally.
That implies he’s incapable of learning human communication nuances or that he hasn’t learned over the years or that there’s not something the rest of us need to learn from him about human communication nuances.
 
As long as the market is controlled by the bad guys, I don’t think modeling means mouse nuts other than to maybe understand what the bad guys are thinking/aiming for so that the good guys know how much of a bargain the current SP is so that accumulation and couch scrounging can continue in earnest.

TSLA accounts for 50% of the entire options market. Nobody controlling that segment gives a rat’s patootie about Optimus or any of it. They only care what might happen on the world stage and to a lesser degree the Tesla stage for specific short periods of time and manipulating the SP to get rich.

All you need to know is that world is changing and will look very different on your deathbed. Either get on for the ride or hanging half off or stay off entirely.

No, modeling is what keeps me sitting pretty through the peaks and valleys. My models, my valuations, my assumptions, my probabilities. Not what you think or say, not what "bad guys" say or do.
 
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It's probably too early to be mathing, but independent odds do multiply, and dependant add. So, in that, @MABMAB is correct.
Odds of rolling 2 sixes is 1/6 * 1/6, each due to each roll being independent. Odds of both die being 5 or 6: (1/6 * 1/6) + (1/6 * 1/6) since it must not be 5 in order to be six.

Odds of a truck with FSD: .5*.5=25%
Odds of a truck and no FSD: .5*(1-.5)=25%
Odds of no truck, but we get FSD: (1-.5)*.5=25%
Odds of at least one of truck and FSD happening=25%+25%+25%=75%
More simply: 1-((1-.5)*(1-.5))=75% i.e. 100% minus odds of both failing.

If we ignore the FSD/taxi linkage, the odds of none of those things happening is (1-.25)*(1-.5)*(1-.5)*(1-.25)=0.14 meaning the odds of at least one highly profitable product being produced is is 1-.14 or 86%.
Pizza diagrams would be more helpful for visual learners, math challenged, ADHD afflicted, and everyone who hasn’t had enough coffee yet.
 
The 20% discount rate may lead to you dramatically underinvesting in TSLA relative to your investment objectives.

The discount rate is used to account for the time-value of money from your perspective. To determine your own discount rate to use, the game is to figure out how much of a preference you actually have for receiving cash sooner rather than later.

Using a 20% rate means you think $100 today is equal in value to $100*(1-0.2)^t after t years. In other words, you’d be ambivalent about choosing between having $100 now, $80 a year from now, $64 after two years, $11 after ten years, $1 after twenty years, etc.

A baseline discount rate many people use is around 8-10% which aligns with the long-term historical performance of S&P500 index funds with some bonds mixed in and you might consider that a baseline benchmark to try to surpass.

Because the discount rate effect is an exponential decay over time and because the bulk of Tesla’s earnings will occur in 2030 and beyond, a choice of 20% is basically heavily biasing your TSLA valuation for what they do in the next 5 years and ignoring the future potential. Basically valuing long-term future profits as worth an order of magnitude less for every decade of waiting. For example, if you expect Tesla to earn $1T in 2032, you only value that year’s earnings today at $110B.

Not investment advice.

Again, not sure of your math or figuring. What I do is come up with future value, then discount 20% per annum for current value I'd be comfortable with.
 
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I agree but did you read the advantages he has in winning. Also MSNBC seems to love to run hit pieces on Elon, they had a long one last night full of misrepresentations. Dan is a moron but a tenacious one with a bone to pick and lots of money to burn, they article is worth a read. Dems are afraid of this campaign but what an irony, they also don't like Elon so it should be interesting, Dan is really bad at twitter but his spoof account is great.

Yeah, but it's not anything new against Elon/Tesla. And the Politico article already seems to be front-running it. It's not defending Elon, but it sure is making people aware of the political motivations of O'Dowd.
 
Any long-term predictions about virtually any company have about the same viability of trying to accurately predict the weather on any given day, 5 years from now. There are simply too many variables to account for. One thing decades of engineering has taught me is that your "output" or analysis is only as good as the assumptions made for your inputs. And even in relatively simple thermo-mechanical systems, minor details or variations can have a huge impact on your output. In the case of Tesla, we can't predict what the competition is doing, what governments will do to manipulate the playing field, what new technologies will be developed, what worldwide pandemics or wars will impact markets and strategic materials. Combine that with the new technologies, products and fields of endeavor that Tesla is just entering, or many enter in the future. Trying to predict the stock value 5 years from now is a fun exercise, and I enjoy the heck out of the discussion. And I'm extremely bullish on the future of Tesla and Elon's other endeavors. But hard predictions of the long-term future PT? Too many variables to have any confidence in the output.

One thing I've learned over the last decade or so-never bet against Elon. I remember watching programs about Tesla in the era of the original roadster and some of the future goals. My though was-yeah, right. This computer geek thinks he's going to start and run an auto company and compete with GM, Ford or Toyota. I expected a spectacular failure-and am very happy to have been proven spectacularly wrong. When I heard he was starting a "space company", something that has required the resources of a nation state-and that he's going to land re-usable rockets by setting them down tail first like a bad 1950's sci-fy movie-my first thought were similar-but far less confident after being proved wrong once. Now when I see how far Tesla has come with FSD (yes, we're not there yet-but so close), when he talks about herds of humanoid robots like iRobot-I listen. Same when looking at his plans for power generation and grid-level storage. Unlike most promoting these things that I look at as engineering-illiterate dreamers or scammers-when Elon says it-I listen.

To me, the interesting take-away from Elon's success isn't the technology or the businesses themselves. Elon is a great engineer-but again, he's only one guy, and he didn't do all these things himself. The interesting aspect is how does he identify the individuals, the skill sets, brings them all together and develops the business culture that inspires and drives his teams to do things no one thought possible. If we can learn from that and train a generation of Elon's, we have changed the world (and by "we", I don't mean us sitting here banging on our keyboards). And I think that aspect is something sadly missing. I see all kinds of youtube videos, articles and discussions of the technology, of the business, of Elon's "mean tweets". But as far as his leadership methods? Mostly crickets (at least from what I've found).
I want to point out that your post shows a clear change in the human condition.