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Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable
- Thread starter AudubonB
- Start date
Weekend thoughts after seeing all those nuclear war FUD, if that ever happens, guess which company is already working on an air-tight off-road truck that doesn’t need gas to run?
*This* is the most important thing I would ask of this forum: “Replace “margin” with any other topic, and truly consider this as you are posting, consider the extremes, and post about where on the spectrum of possibilities you believe in. Rarely are the extremes the right answer (and even when the answer is an extreme all-or-nothing, that is even more rarely a well thought out and interesting answer). For example, for all the stock buyback discussions recently: Hopefully even the most ardent supporter would agree using *all* available funds + future FCF + borrowing to max out a stock buyback would be a poor choice, and hopefully even the most staunch opposer would agree spending a tiny amount to recover employee stock purchases / employee stock grants (other than the large exec ones) over the next year would not consequentially hurt the company (although also provide no consequential benefit to the TSLA share price), so everyone should be describing where between those extremes they feel would be the best balancing point, and why. (Arguably the lower extreme could even be another secondary offering to raise cash, the opposite of a stock buyback, if someone wanted to go there.) For the products (hopefully most of us here are Tesla vehicle / energy / merchandise owners, not just “TSLA investors”): Hopefully even the most fanboi among us can acknowledge areas of improvement to be made, and even the most disgruntled buyer (if they exist here) can acknowledge how far ahead of any other available alternative the products are. With Musk himself: Hopefully even his greatest supporters can see individual points where they disagree with him, and even his worst detractors will acknowledge the HUGE good he has done not just for Tesla / SpaceX / et al, but for humanity as a whole. (And, YES, every person on this forum should be able to see the same “some good and some bad” in other forum members as well as THEMSELVES!) Same with longer range options, Texas and Germany production ramp, 4680 production ramp, advertising, and every other topic…few things are “All or nothing” - one should understand the extremes and then discuss where between them they believe the best balancing point is.
Needs a faraday cage to be safe from EMP though.
JSML
Member
MarketBeat shows short interest at 2.39 percent of the shares floated. In the past it has been as high as 8 to 9 percent.Data only goes back to 8/2018, but it's still at ATH.
Very important, yes. Back in my more technical days, my code did emphasize white space for readability. Then again, I wasn’t writing code on my phone…
JSML
Member
In 2016 shares shorted was 25 percent.
I think it was a couple of bats still pissed about having to move.
So nobody reported this yet? Rob Maurer gave a sneak preview of his Q3 earnings estimate. It's $1.10 on a GAAP basis. He will go through all the numbers on Monday.
I was a bit surprised his estimate was that low.
Video is cued up at the point where he talks about it.
I was a bit surprised his estimate was that low.
Video is cued up at the point where he talks about it.
I think sentiment is very high Tesla will post a record all time high earnings, but I'd agree the sentiment for many of us is low the stock will rise favorably as a result. Great long term but very questionable in the short term.
I watched a video about them:Why a Tesla Partnership with Boxabl Could Help Dramatically Accelerate the Advent of Sustainable Energy and Sustainable Housing
Clean-Sheet First-Principles Design and Proper 21st-Century Industrial Mass Manufacturing for a 10x Improvement
Also Maybe Mars?
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Tesla Solar Roof, Powerwall, HVAC and home vehicle chargers all have a serious fundamental problem.
They cost far too much to design, ship, install and permit because they're done one at a time with human labor out in the field, often in custom retrofitted installations. To make matters worse, traditional roofing work and electrical can be dangerous, exposing people to potential hazards from falls, ultraviolet radiation, extreme temperatures, storms, nail guns, poor ergonomics, repetitive motion stress, and energized electrical wires.
Why is residential solar photovoltaic energy in general currently more expensive than utility-scale? Let's look at this data from the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) government agency for a breakdown. Those little yellow bars for the solar modules themselves are approximately identical regardless of the type of solar system installed, so that's not the problem. The big difference is in soft costs and there's some minor differences for inverters and the rest of the structural and electrical hardware. There are similar problems for residential battery installations compared to utility-scale batteries.
View attachment 864210
Utility-scale solar/battery power plants are typically far away from the load, often on the order of maybe 5 to 500 kilometers of distance. This necessitates large-scale electrical grid transmission infrastructure that is:
$30/MWh is a lot for transmission costs, considering that in many areas of the world utility-scale solar is already being sold for less than $30/MWh, which would make transmission costs the majority of the cost structure, and that fraction is increasing over time as transmission costs are rising while solar costs continue falling. At $10/MWh solar, transmission would be 75% of the cost structure.
- Expensive ($30/MWh amortized all-in cost on average)
- Aging, with big, looming maintenance and equipment replacement investments on the horizon
- Run by centralized monopolies that often don't behave in a prosocial manner and typically just seek maximum rents on their assets
- Increasingly vulnerable to threats from climate change-related natural disasters, terrorism and cyberattacks
We need to get the proximity benefits of collecting energy from photons striking the top of the building in which the energy is being used, while also deleting the traditional cost penalty of residential solar.
But how?
A lot of those residential solar soft costs are for stuff like sales, overhead, installation labor, design, inspections, and permitting. Imagine if every Tesla car needed a unique bespoke design with a Tesla employee first driving out to meet with the customer and discuss their particular automotive needs, hand-built construction in the customer's garage or driveway, and then individual government inspection and approval which needs to be fully completed before the customer can legally start driving their new Model Y. That would be totally absurd, right? But that's currently the model for Tesla Energy's residential solar, battery and charging products and would be the model if they were making HVAC systems already! Why are we doing it this way?
From a first-principles lean manufacturing standpoint, this is extremely inefficient and not ideal from an ethical standpoint because people are at risk of getting hurt or dying while at work. I roughly estimate that approximately 90% of the total activity involved is non-value-added waste that isn’t fundamentally required to arrange the atoms into the final configuration in the customer's desired point in spacetime for delivery. Therefore, this is a 10x disruption opportunity.
Key examples of non-value-added waste activity in current Tesla process from factory to final installation:
When it's listed like that, this process actually sounds comically ridiculous, doesn't it? A huge amount of the activity is actually just useless due to bad design. This is embarrassingly inefficient compared to Tesla's car manufacturing and it needs a radical rethink. Tesla’s home/commercial energy and thermal product family should be installed on a proper industrial moving assembly line and robots should do most of the work, or ideally all of it. Scaled up across the world, the better industrial model could save a staggering amount of wasted labor as well as copper, aluminum, steel, concrete, transformers, circuit breakers, and so on. The best inspection is no inspection. The best substation is no substation. The best high-voltage transmission line is no high-voltage transmission line. Delete and simplify and just make off-grid housing or local microgrids like Tesla did in Puerto Rico and American Samoa. The factory model with standardized, indoor, robotic mass production can almost totally annihilate these costs, leaving a total system cost that might actually end up being lower than utility-scale, especially after accounting for the opportunity for Tesla Solar Roof to save money on the customer not needing a separate roof for the building.
- Scoping out site beforehand and meeting with owners and other customer acquisition tasks
- Shipping hardware from factories to various sites
- Crew driving to and from site
- Moving hardware and tools from truck to building
- Setting up ladders
- Attaching fall hazard personal protective equipment
- Climbing up and down ladders
- Setting up work area and cleaning up when done
- Walking around on the roof and in the house
- Avoiding banging into doorsills when bringing stuff into house
- Manually lifting solar roof tiles onto roof
- Bending over to pick up roof tiles and turning to nail them into place
- Manually installing nails, screws and other hardware
- Measuring distances and marking lines with pencil
- Carefully aligning tiles by hand
- Plugging in wire connectors by hand
- Getting separate permitting for each installation
- Waiting around for approvals
- Learning electrical setup of house
- Fixing any quality errors due to manual assembly and roof imperfections
- Working around weather disruptions
But how?
That's where a Tesla-Boxabl partnership could come in. First, what is Boxabl?
Boxabl has, I think, the world's first and only commercially viable solution for mass manufacturing of housing. It's like the Cybertruck of housing: first-principles material selection, design for manufacturing, ultra durable, can go anywhere, apocalypse-resistant, and so bold and radical of an idea that nobody is even attempting to copy it probably because they either don't comprehend the significance of what they're seeing or because they don't have the self-confidence to differ that much from conventional wisdom. And guess who bought the first prototype Boxabl unit a couple years ago and has it in his backyard in Starbase, Texas?
Normally I don’t care about celebrity product endorsements, but this one is unpaid and I think Elon Musk is a special case with respect to endorsements of new technologies and I highly respect his opinion on this kind of stuff. This was a rumor Boxabl had been heavily hinting at since delivery because they were under an NDA, but the Tesla Technoking finally admitted to it two months ago on the Full Send podcast. Brief discussion of Boxabl at 41:45:
I have spent hundreds of hours researching Boxabl and the prefab/manufacturing housing industry and if TSLA weren't so low right now I'd probably be contributing to Boxabl's Series A fundraising round, which is currently still open to Accredited Investors (link). This is a Tesla thread so I won't get into detail about why I think Boxabl is so Excellent, but you can find all my notes and calculations in this spreadsheet:
Boxabl
Product Casita Price,$60,000 Interior area,361,sqft Price per sqft,$166 Features,9'6" ceilings 8' windows Tight tolerances compared to traditional builds Energy Efficient: LED lighting, Thermal insulation of laminate walls has R of 23, no lumber studs with thermal bridging,<< 5/13/2023: Go look...docs.google.com
Here's a really good introduction to Boxabl from Ellie in Space that was published in September:
More technical detail in this production line tour with Boxabl Cofounder and Director of Engineering Kyle Denman:
Boxabl can provide the substrate upon which Tesla’s energy ecosystem can be built. With enough integration, it’s possible in theory to directly connect a Boxabl assembly line to the assembly lines for the solar roof tiles, Powerwalls, HVAC systems and wall chargers. The Tesla production lines can be situated as feeder lines outputting directly into Boxabl units where they would be immediately installed. Even if not, at a minimum there is a big efficiency advantage of being able to ship tiles, Powerwalls, HVAC and chargers in full semi truckloads and unload them at lineside loading dock bays, like Boxabl is doing with the refrigerators and other appliances and materials.
Key advantages:
Right now, Boxabl is leaving any special roofing up to 3rd-party contractors, but in the long run they plan to install solar at the factory as well. The only reason they're not already doing this is that they don't want to bite off more than they can chew, since they're facing a backlog of 120k orders for their minimum viable product, the Casita, which is accumulating new orders far more quickly than Boxabl is currently able to produce units.
- Moving assembly line
- Standardized mass production
- Numerous opportunities for end-to-end software automation including potentially an online configuration web app where customers can design things like door and window locations, bathroom and kitchen layout and thereby create a digital twin of their house, which feeds into the CNC machines cutting out the holes in the wall panels and so on
- Probably suitable for rapid snap-fit robotic installation for roof tiles
- Minimum inventory; just-in-time logistics
- Minimum transportation from end of Tesla assembly line to house unit (could be on the order of 1 to 10 meters if done right)
- Extreme quality (i.e. consistency)
- No weather disruptions
- 24/7 operation possible with three shifts
- Product is turnkey and totally ready for customer upon delivery to site after less than an hour of easy installation
If anyone at Tesla with influence reads my posts, I want say that I hope that Tesla will make a partnership like this. I think Boxabl has an excellent solution for sustainable housing, but they really need capital badly in order to make a bigger factory with robots and really invest in R&D to take the design closer to perfection. Boxabl could also benefit greatly from Tesla’s manufacturing expertise. They already got extensive help from Porsche Consulting, but as we all know, Tesla is on a whole other level with respect to manufacturing prowess. Alternatively, maybe someday Tesla could acquire Boxabl and help it scale. This would be quite similar to the 2016 acquisition of Solar City that got Tesla into the energy business in the first place in order to broaden the sustainability mission and capitalize on synergies between battery business, solar business and cross marketing opportunities. Tesla has already been partnering with developers like Brookfield to make subdivisions and wants to run a portfolio of distributed energy assets managed by Autobidder, but Brookfield is still building expensive stick-frame houses the old-fashioned way, not in a proper factory.
Moreover, for a strong initial market segment to pursue while scaling this idea, this Tesla-powered Boxabl design would have similar appeal as Cybertruck for the “prepper” crowd wanting independent off-grid home setup, and thus these products could easily be co-marketed.
The Boxabl architecture seems to be the most eco-friendly construction design I have ever seen, and it's not even close unless we want to count primitive housing made by hand with organic materials, like traditional adobe or log construction. This meshes perfectly with Tesla's mission of driving human civilization towards sustainability, for which goal solving energy consumption and generation is one necessary but insufficient piece.
The Boxabl founders openly admire and support Elon Musk, drive Tesla Model Xs, and are clearly copying the Musk company way with first principles design engineering and focus on manufacturing and logistics and fun. Engineering runs the show and they appear to be rapidly iterating. One of the cofounders, Galiano, allegedly spends 16 hours per day working right now and spends a lot of nights sleeping in the prototype Boxabl unit next to the factory so he can get back to work sooner and spend less time commuting. I called Yanni, the investor relations focal at Boxabl and asked point-blank if Galiano is actually doing this and if it's really a sustainable workload, and the answer was that in fact Galiano is because it's his passion and we'll see how sustainable it is. Galiano's main job is recruiting capital and marketing, so that doesn't get too much harder with production scale.
Any Boxabl copycats that eventually enter the market could partner with Tesla too. The main point is that the best way to solve for minimum cost and highest quality and highest production volume to maximize rate of transition to sustainable energy and sustainable housing in general is to industrialize the operation and mass manufacture in a proper factory. First principles clearly point this direction and Tesla is a logical engineering company that always eventually does what physics first principles dictate as being optimal.
Addtionally, with Giga Shanghai and especially what was seen at Giga Texas, Tesla is finally moving closer to the vision of the ultimate factory that operates using the vertical dimension, being designed like a modern integrated circuit. Roof tiles could be fabricated on 2nd story maybe and then lowered down into place like how mating of Tesla body-in-white and skateboard is being done with the structural pack. If not, at least a factory will have cranes or other apparatus that can lift up solar roof tiles to the roof height where a robot could click them into place if Tesla can develop a 100% snap-fit design. No more ladders and manual pulley lifts.
Inspection should be a breeze due to standardization and mechanization, same as with cars. Designs can be repeatably installed. Customers eventually can design their own building with a CAD web app and Boxabl factory uses that as the blueprint.
Tesla also wants the HVAC to condense water and that could go directly to plumbing easily with Boxabl design.
This is how to make a production line to crank out a thousand solar roofs/powerwall/HVAC/charger installations per day.
But wait, there's more...
Back on April 30th in post #337,556 I wrote:
SpaceX is trying to create a self-sustaining civilization on Mars with a target population of one million people as soon as possible. They will need a lot of rapid habitat construction to do that.
But how?
Here are the special requirements I can think of:
As far as I can tell after having researched the industry and a wide variety of different house construction designs, Boxabl is the *only* company making anything with an architecture that could meet these requirements with some design changes for a Martian version. To make thing more interesting, in one short video on their website Boxabl vaguely hinted at potentially putting their units on Mars for Elon Musk, suggesting that they are thinking of doing this in the long run. I'm not sure of this, though, because there's probably stuff I don't know about since I have no expertise in designing Mars habitats. This is just what I could think of.
- Extreme affordability
- Extreme manufacturing scalability
- Fit in the cargo bay of a starship with good volumetric efficiency (Starship has 30-foot or about 10-meter diameter)
- Survive launch stresses such as acceleration, vibration, and temperature
- Easy deployment on Mars
- Minimal labor, particularly specialized labor like plumbing and electrical
- Minimal installation time
- Minimal tools, particularly specialized tools
- Concrete foundation not necessarily needed
- Can be towed from launch pad to installation site by a Mars-edition Cybertruck or similar general-purpose utility vehicle
- Extremely high thermal insulation
- Radiation shielding
- Tightly sealed air envelope
- Solar panels, batteries, vehicle charging and HVAC preinstalled on Earth
- Pleasant to live, work and play in for people who will have to spend almost all their time indoors
- Modular Lego-like design that's easy to connect to additional units or remove and relocate from original site
- Extreme durability over decades or preferably centuries in harsh conditions on Mars
I cannot help but think which workers could be replaced by an Optimus. How far are we from the day when Optimus can manufacture the homes and unpack them? Imo Tesla should seriously consider making the world awesome by fixing housing. Tesla have products for Solar roofs, powerwalls, tesla chargers, HVAC, starlink etc and will soon have Semis to transport the homes and Optimus to install them. Add their skill in manufacturing, capital to fund the scaling and brand name. I would buy a Tesla home...
Heck it may have one by next Summer.Needs a faraday cage to be safe from EMP though.
Captkerosene
Member
Until the 4680, FSD, new factory ramps, Cybertruck, Semi, Boring, Brain, Bot, AGI, Dojo, TWTR, Ukraine and Starship are all up and running, ... I'd rather see Elon stay laser focused on what he currently has on his plate.
that's my biggest problem with Elon - he's a total slacker and doesn't have enough on his plate
All you need now is Starlink and you will be fly. Or is it flies? Not sure, one or the other. Address: 3rd Rock from My Son.Wow! Me too! So, my new place s down by the river! And it came pre-furnaced* with all this cool old furniture! And its got a new ceiling put in too! /s
View attachment 864152
Hahaha, we gonna be okay...
Chairs for the Longs!
*photo taken before installation of a furnace.
You do realize he doesn't do everything at all the various companies where he is the majority stockholder right? There's a lot of people at Tesla that will handle the acquisition if it makes sense and Elon says Make It So.
Gigapress
Trying to be less wrong
Or maybe Gigapress needs to publish on a blog…
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