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

[hobbes]

Tesla Model Y wins U.S. News 'Best Luxury Electric SUV' award

The Tesla Model Y has won U.S. News award for “Best Luxury Electric SUV,” beating out a heavy lineup of worthy battery-powered sport utility vehicles. The Model Y first was delivered to owners in early 2020 and was the automaker’s answer to the widely-popular crossover SUV sector. A sibling of...

www.teslarati.com

Surreal how the good news keeps coming while share price keeps dropping..

 

[aGreenGuy]

Does this mean I can have another go @800.85?

 

[thesmokingman]

Does that mean Ark has squandered away all its TSLA gains? lol

That's is nuts, hard to wrap my small brain around those losses!

 

[JustMe]

Good for Cathie.
Would be in a worse position like me had she just stayed put this past week.

I’m tired of the nonstop Ark-bashing in this thread, despite repeated purgings and mod admonishments. I guess they gave up trying to tamp this noise down.

Many howled when Ark sold a chunk of TSLA before Q1 earnings. Someone here said this was stupid because TSLA was GAURANTEED to be 15% higher after they reported earnings. Guess what - TSLA dropped hard. Timing the market is hard

I think this dead horse is well beaten and should be put out to pasture.

Here’s to a better tomorrow

 

[TheTalkingMule]

I like your opinion but the wild card is even though Shanghai is functioning now, we do not know to what extent the supposedly supply chain issues are gonna affect production.

Elon seemed unworried about Shanghai literally yesterday. So I'm feeling pretty ok about it.

I believe Elon was asked about Chinese lockdowns and said he talked to govt officials and feels it'll be resolved within 2-3 weeks. Meanwhile, the Shanghai team is at work and sleeping in the factory.

Elon's tone about Chinese workers atthe end of that interview had me thinking they'll crush it this quarter. Ease the restrictions and supply issues by late May.....they'll go bananas in June.

 

[UnknownSoldier]

Elon seemed unworried about Shanghai literally yesterday. So I'm feeling pretty ok about it.

I believe Elon was asked about Chinese lockdowns and said he talked to govt officials and feels it'll be resolved within 2-3 weeks. Meanwhile, the Shanghai team is at work and sleeping in the factory.

Elon's tone about Chinese workers atthe end of that interview had me thinking they'll crush it this quarter. Ease the restrictions and dupply issues by late May.....they'll go bananas in June.

There is zero evidence that China is planning on relaxing restrictions in Shanghai. The people have survived 7 weeks now, it's likely we are now at a stable state and they could live indefinitely under lockdown. So China can easily wait until Covid Zero at this point no matter how long it takes.

What I'm saying is we need to start thinking about how the lockdown of Shanghai will affect Q3.

 

[hobbes]

Interesting - if this comes to pass this could make things much easier for FSD in Europe as European agencies follow the UNECE rules (unlike US). Unfortunately no source though so take with grain of salt:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1524339121434595330

EDIT: source claimed to be UK department of transport in private communication:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1524343379638816769

 

[TheTalkingMule]

There is zero evidence that China is planning on relaxing restrictions in Shanghai. The people have survived 7 weeks now, it's likely we are now at a stable state and they could live indefinitely under lockdown. So China can easily wait until Covid Zero at this point no matter how long it takes.

What I'm saying is we need to start thinking about how the lockdown of Shanghai will affect Q3.

No offense, but I'll take Elon's comments 24hrs ago after speaking with govt officials over your guess.

 

[Gigapress]

Elon was asked yesterday in the Financial Times interview “What do you make of the Chinese government’s actions [with respect to their COVID-Zero policy]?”

He responded “Well I’ve had some conversations with the Chinese government in recent days and it’s clear that the lockdowns are being lifted rapidly, so I would not expect this to be a significant issue in the coming weeks.”

That sounds like the most direct evidence possible that Shanghai lockdowns are ending soon, because I would put more confidence in Elon saying they told him this than I would put in public communications from the CCP.

 

[EnergyMax]

China is on the steep part of the Covid downtrend.

From China: Coronavirus Pandemic Country Profile . So hopefully case count should be quite low by start of Q3.

 

[MountainRatMat]

He could probably pay the fine, re submit a bid a $35/share or less (and win) and put a chunk back into TSLA if he wanted to at this point.

If Elon pays the fine it goes to Twitter right?

Step 1) Cancel current bid and pay Twitter $1B
Step 2) Offer $35/share bid (or anywhere lower, just using your example)
Step 3) Own Twitter and get your $1B back

Is this a possibility or am I simplifying this too much?

 

[elasalle]

Btw EM has a good excuse for walking away from the twitter deal …

 

[Gigapress]

Regarding Shanghai let’s also remember the earning call questions about this.

Say.com Question:
“How much of an impact will the production shutdown in Shanghai have in Q2?”

Elon Musk: (12:57)
“Well, we did lose a lot of important days of production. And there are sort of upstream supplier challenges where a lot of suppliers also lost many days of production. But Tesla Shanghai, Giga Shanghai, is coming back with a vengeance. So I think notwithstanding, with new issues that arise, I think we will see a record output per week from Giga Shanghai this quarter, albeit we are missing a couple weeks. So that means that most likely vehicle production in Q2 will be similar to Q1, maybe slightly lower. But it’s also possible we may pull a rabbit out of the hat and be slightly higher.”

…

Alex Potter: (51:32)
“Okay, great. First question I had was the extent to which other plants, outside of China, are insulated from any further upstream supply bottlenecks that we may have in China. Obviously, if this COVID lockdown things gets out of hand, clearly that’s going to continue impacting Shanghai, but is there a point at which it could actually also impact other facilities?”

Elon Musk: (51:59)
“Yeah, if it were to continue. There are some parts that are sourced in China that apply worldwide, and that would impact production elsewhere. But all indications are that we’re out … Because Shanghai is back in production at fairly high levels already, and so our suppliers … So we don’t think this is going to be a big deal.”

This was said on 4/20 and the tone didn’t sound any different yesterday three weeks later.

 

[M|S|M MYP]

Tell me you are going bankrupt without telling me you are going bankrupt:

So....now they do not have a factory but Foxconn will own the factory and continue to build the Endurance?? This makes me appreciate $TSLA so much more for its execution, innovation, loads of cash, giga factories....yada, yada.

 

[Cherry Wine]

Rivian:

Q3 2021: 386 vehicles delivered, 652 produced
Q4 2021: 909 vehicles delivered, 1,015 produced
Q1 2022: 1,227 vehicles delivered, 2,553 produced

I'm not super well-versed on Rivian, though I like their products. Their shareholder letter said that they've produced, as of May 9th, ~5k vehicles since the start of production. Does that mean that they have only produced 800 vehicles so far in Q2? (~5k-~4200)

 

[growler23]

Yes, Rainbow's End.

Vernor Vinge is an academic software engineer, we could engineer a Robotaxi network similar to what he imagined.

There is 100 years of research into this. Telephone exchanges, needed to be sized correctly to handle the expected traffic, even in the days of manually operated switchboards. Since then its been applied to all types of telecoms networks, including the internet, traffic, logistics, manufacturing, and many other fields. You can optimise for resources, wait times, peak and average load, etc. There is a whole body of mathematical theory to back it up, and optimisation techniques which scale to the whole world's population.

Conventional software would be capable of doing a Robotaxi network (I think this is what Vernor Vinge imagined), as would Nueral Network AI, perhaps a combination of the two would be better still.

To tie this in to the beating-a-dead-horse conversation about graduation night in a small town in the Robotaxi world, since the AI running the networked system has long since learned how to find major gatherings of people (like graduations or concerts) and knows when they are to happen (pretty easy to predict things that are widely advertised online well beforehand) and would let an appropriate number of taxis drift to that general area, and be ready for summons from close range.
Even though it might not know exactly which families would use them, in the aggregate the general number needed and their general locale can be predicted relatively well.
"But what about everyone in the nation wanting to leave at once?" Yes, there will still be cases where the limited resource cannot cover all requests. The expectation is the AI does a far better job than a tiny slow-processing human brain at this. As the OP indicated, this has been well studied and is implemented in many commercial applications today. It just requires a ton of data, which is now largegly available.
TL;DR Robotaxi plus AI is gonna rock and does not necessarily leave out all rural areas, once high volume and low cost are achieved.

 

[30seconds]

There might be some funky short pressure going on with Tesla trigger now given Elon’s collateral pledge for Twitter. Since the overall market is declining large funds are probably adding to their market short positions.

This might include some additional bets on Tesla given the higher volatility and an idea that Elon might have to sell more shares to fund the Twitter purchase since the value of the Tesla collateral has sunk. Plus the banks will value the collateral lower even if the stock rebounds due to the increased volatility.

Given the set up for Q2 miss or lower forecast it might get ugly. At least Q2 numbers aren’t till July.

 

[JustMe]

There might be some funky short pressure going on with Tesla trigger now given Elon’s collateral pledge for Twitter. Since the overall market is declining large funds are probably adding to their market short positions.

This might include some additional bets on Tesla given the higher volatility and an idea that Elon might have to sell more shares to fund the Twitter purchase since the value of the Tesla collateral has sunk. Plus the banks will value the collateral lower even if the stock rebounds due to the increased volatility.

Given the set up for Q2 miss or lower forecast it might get ugly. At least Q2 numbers aren’t till July.

If this is true, this dump could unwind as fast as it fell, once the market decides there’s a decent excuse to buy.

 

[heltok]

No offense, but I'll take Elon's comments 24hrs ago after speaking with govt officials over your guess.

I would take the reality of the virus over govt officials. The virus grows exponentially so you need to look at log graphs:

What China have done is really impressive. Omicron is crazy transmissible, R0(which I think is a silly measurement but anyway) is closer to 12. But even with these extensive restrictions they have “only” decreased the number of cases by a factor of 3. To get down to 100 cases/day would require 6 more periods of the same extensive restrictions. And at some point restrictions stop being effective when people start to riot. Chinese might have a much higher tolerance for restrictions than Melbournians, but even they have their breaking point.

Maybe the Chinese strategy of local lockdowns are working and they will be able to open up more and more areas. But I have a feeling that soon there will be cases popping up in factories here and there and it will not be smooth sailing until Xi is reelected.

I see a few different outcomes:
1. China gives up -> short term high pain
2. China fights the entire year and win -> lots of small pain
3. China fights and then gives up -> lots of small pain and short term high pain

Right now it seems that 2 is most likely. Which imo doesn’t mean that Shanghai will run full steam ahead from Q3-Q4. No it means supply chain issues, risk of cases in the factory and full shutdowns randomly.

And the question is how long they will run zero covid, what’s their exit strategy? Imo they could try to develop a better vaccine, get it out, then open up. At least that‘s a strategy that you can motivate. Zero covid forever would make them a hermit kingdom forever. And with these outbreaks happening it would likely mean masks, social restrictions and testing forever. I can see Xi running zero covid the rest of the year, then once he is reelected he can finish up his weeding out of opponents due to their “failures” and then when he feels secure he can finally give up zero covid. But the rest of the year is gonna be messy in China one way or another…

 

[betstarship]

I'm not super well-versed on Rivian, though I like their products. Their shareholder letter said that they've produced, as of May 9th, ~5k vehicles since the start of production. Does that mean that they have only produced 800 vehicles so far in Q2? (~5k-~4200)

They said on the earnings call they're not reporting out current quarter production numbers anymore until eoq - ...so i dont know?