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

[Ogre]

They are doing to get people into dealerships. A good salesman will sell two cars when someone walks in. ”Let me put your name on this 2 year long waiting list, and then buy this ICE in the interim…”.

They should start offering a hybrid lease/ reservation list deal. Where the lease duration is the time until their EV is ready.

 

[UkNorthampton]

And what happens to taxes when most people no longer need to work but still need retirement, health care and living. Those are costs that do not truly disappear.

What happens to tax spending when robots can do much of the work for near free?

Bigger problem is demographics, lack of younger people to support long-lived older people with few if any children with the time, money, ability or inclination to help. That probably improves with robots.

 

[UkNorthampton]

They should start offering a hybrid lease/ reservation list deal. Where the lease duration is the time until their EV is ready.

How long does a GM/Ford last? Average age of 18 years is it?

 

[dhrivnak]

What happens to tax spending when robots can do much of the work for near free?

Bigger problem is demographics, lack of younger people to support long-lived older people with few if any children with the time, money, ability or inclination to help. That probably improves with robots.

Not sure I agree when the workforce participation rate hovers around 60%

 

[UncaNed]

I wrote up something from looking at a FB/META grumbling on twitter. This was meant to some of my friends who are not stock savvy. So, figured to get your views before sending to them.
Am I on the right track?

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Are all these comparisons from buying on their respective IPO days, or are they all from buying in 2012?

 

[insaneoctane]

Perhaps with the 2170s they are going to be stuffing into it this year that's what the economics look like. But once they transition to Texas and are selling them with 4680s, the whole equation changes.

You need to add a row to that table for $70/ kWh cells. Likely even lower than that after manufacturing incentives from IRA. It's also likely the price will be much higher than $180k after the first few thousand shipments if the IRA incentives remain in place. IRA incentives may well contribute $45,000 per truck to Tesla's bottom line. Plus another $40k in incentives to the purchaser.

Impression I get is Tesla either has contractual agreements they need to meet or they are just super motivated to make their first customers happy. Pepsi has spent $500k just installing facilities to support this operation and don't have a single truck yet. Margin will be low or maybe negative on these first trucks. Expect profits only after they move production to Texas and scale up.

All excellent points. But, if Tesla can get battery pricing down to $70/kWh, that cost ought to be available to all vehicles, if desired. Ignoring US IRA for a moment, IMO, relative to SP, the semi only makes sense once the higher GM MS/MX/MY/M3/CT are fully saturated. Then it's a way to sell even more product/batteries. GM of semi is probably always below the cars above, but better than the future model "2". All these vehicles and Tesla energy all need cells, and I'm okay ramping everything simultaneously, but want high % of cells feeding the highest GM products....honestly, maybe exactly what Tesla is currently doing

With all that said, @Ogre makes excellent points about US IRA potentially changing all this calculus for the semi...and mission doesn't necessarily produce best SP.

 

[AudubonB]

They are doing to get people into dealerships. A good salesman will sell two cars when someone walks in. ”Let me put your name on this 2 year long waiting list, and then buy this ICE in the interim…”.

I strongly believe there may be a very large element of truth there.

 

[Ogre]

All excellent points. But, if Tesla can get battery pricing down to $70/kWh, that cost ought to be available to all vehicles, if desired. Ignoring US IRA for a moment, IMO, relative to SP, the semi only makes sense once the higher GM MS/MX/MY/M3/CT are fully saturated. Then it's a way to sell even more product/batteries. GM of semi is probably always below the cars above, but better than the future model "2". All these vehicles and Tesla energy all need cells, and I'm okay ramping everything simultaneously, but want high % of cells feeding the highest GM products....honestly, maybe exactly what Tesla is currently doing

With all that said, @Ogre makes excellent points about US IRA potentially changing all this calculus for the semi...and mission doesn't necessarily produce best SP.

Tesla believes in their mission.

They will ship semis because it's consistent with their mission regardless of whether or not it is profit maximizing.

Then they will apply whatever resources they need to maximize the profits on doing it.

 

[insaneoctane]

Wonder how quickly our government(s) will devise a unique tax for Optimus? Think how much taxation (income, payroll, social security, Medicare, etc) the government misses out on when a worker is replaced by an Optimus....

 

[Cosmacelf]

First Argo AI going kaput, now George Hotz announcing he is leaving comma.ai.

The Hero’s Journey

I’m taking some time away from comma. In some ways, I feel like it’s all planned out, it only remains to see if it works or not. I rewatched my first Lex Fridman and realized I hadn’t said much new on the self driving front for the past couple years. My two part blog post from 2019 remains a...

geohot.github.io

OMG. Poor George has an inkling that he doesn’t have what it takes to do, well, anything he thinks is important. Just an inkling though since he is now embarking on a Hero’s Journey and he thinks it’ll be glorious. George Hotz‘s problem was always that his self regard was way higher than his abilities. He isn’t a zero, but unless he realizes he isn’t a genius, he isn’t going to get anywhere since he will always be tackling problems that are too big for him.

I recognize this affliction since I had it when I was 20. By 24 I realized I couldn’t do everything (a hard university degree will do that to you), and set my sights lower. But “lower” still meant I could run a modest startup that went public and set me up for life. Hotz needs to match his expectations with reality.

 

[Paracelsus]

Wonder how quickly our government(s) will devise a unique tax for Optimus? Think how much taxation (income, payroll, social security, Medicare, etc) the government misses out on when a worker is replaced by an Optimus....

Shhhhh…………please don’t feed the trolls on this yet.

 

[Cosmacelf]

Two possibilities I can imagine based on what we're seeing the last few days WRT autonomous driving companies:

1. Due to economic conditions, self-driving hopefuls who aren't as far ahead as others thought aren't seeing the money come in to support continued R&D on such a hard problem and are therefore abandoning it, or

2. Competitors are seeing how far ahead Tesla is on FSD and throwing in the towel.

Tesla has been remarkably open about what it takes to do autonomous driving. Assuming Tesla doesn’t have the completely wrong approach, there is a *sugar* ton of infrastructure, engineering, and fleet data you need, which NO ONE else has. So I’m not at all surprised. These other companies haven’t made enough progress and we are in an investment winter.

Of course, the Cruise and Google ivory tower folks say that Tesla doesn’t know what they are doing. If I had to choose who to believe, Tesla with a million cars on the road, and the others with hundreds of geo fenced cars, well, it isn’t a very hard choice!

 

[AudubonB]

Wonder how quickly our government(s) will devise a unique tax for Optimus? Think how much taxation (income, payroll, social security, Medicare, etc) the government misses out on when a worker is replaced by an Optimus....

Government by Ludd really is not an option. Moreover, the functional distinction between a robotic instrument like the ones Tesla uses from Fanuc et al. to perform, e.g., automated welds, and one that appears more humanoid and can select a part from a bin, perform a complex task like installing a wiring harness, is minimal. I will agree that the apparent (sensu stricto: its appearance) difference exists, but I’ve zero qualms about legislation targeting that.

More: by definition, productivity is measured by output divided by HUMAN input. The more robots serving one labor quantum (ie, one human), the better an operation…a factory…a company performs. AND THE MORE FACTORIES that company can build. Thus more workers employed…and the closer the world moves toward sustainable transport and other planet-saving goals.

 

[Andy O]

Get the mark ready to buy and ... (all the rest)

Oh, you're dangerous!

 

[MABMAB]

I wonder if a man that does not like to be wrong would pushback at the SEC buying a company whose services he was supposed to have pre approval to use? I foresee some interesting developments. (utubers feel free to run with this for a 10 min blab session, credit desired)

 

[elasalle]

First Argo AI going kaput, now George Hotz announcing he is leaving comma.ai.

The Hero’s Journey

I’m taking some time away from comma. In some ways, I feel like it’s all planned out, it only remains to see if it works or not. I rewatched my first Lex Fridman and realized I hadn’t said much new on the self driving front for the past couple years. My two part blog post from 2019 remains a...

geohot.github.io

I rewatched my first Lex Fridman and realized .....
should be - I watched karpathy's first Lex Fridman ...

 

[mongo]

I believe that I'm still in the minority here that think that the semi's GMs are going to be terrible. Even at volume, I think they will be low. It's not obvious to me that delivering semis should be a catalyst if the expected margins are poor? At LRIP the margins will be negative (typical), but when you're selling a vehicle that is 30% more expensive than a MS Plaid, but with 10x more kWh, it will always be much lower margin IMO.

	Kwh	$/kWh	Pack cost	Price	Pack$/price
Plaid	100	125	$12,500	$136,000	9.2%
Semi	1000	125	$125,000	$180,000	69.4%

I think the semi is more about the mission...

All excellent points. But, if Tesla can get battery pricing down to $70/kWh, that cost ought to be available to all vehicles, if desired. Ignoring US IRA for a moment, IMO, relative to SP, the semi only makes sense once the higher GM MS/MX/MY/M3/CT are fully saturated. Then it's a way to sell even more product/batteries. GM of semi is probably always below the cars above, but better than the future model "2". All these vehicles and Tesla energy all need cells, and I'm okay ramping everything simultaneously, but want high % of cells feeding the highest GM products....honestly, maybe exactly what Tesla is currently doing

With all that said, @Ogre makes excellent points about US IRA potentially changing all this calculus for the semi...and mission doesn't necessarily produce best SP.

Sure, it's no Plaid, but nay be better than you are estimating.

JB in the 2018 annual meeting (via YouTube auto captioning):
"
So, generally, we're still pretty confident about that same direction. - Yeah, we think, at the cell level, probably, we can do better than $100 per kilowatt hour, maybe later this year, depending upon commodity prices. If commodity prices are roughly where they are today, then we'll probably do better than $100 per kilowatt hour at the cell level.

With further improvements to - That's huge. - The cell chemistry, production process, and more vertical integration on the cell side, for example, integrating the production of materials at the Gigafactory, and improved design of the module and pack, we think longterm, we can get below $100 kilowatt hour at the pack level, which is really the key figure of merit for a car.
But long term, meaning definitely less that two years. That's as a longterm.
"
If $100/kWh at cell level, your estimate has $25k for the rest of the pack. Pack overhead/kWh should be better for Semi.

 

[SarahsDad]

Thanks for the heads up that Tony's new video was out @Artful Dodger - I have been impatiently waiting for the next one for too long. And as expected, it is filled with insight and guidance.........but not for "the incumbants" as Tony points out, because they won't see the opportunity in disruption, but for "the entrepreneurs because they will."

But for me, Tony's mic-drop moment of 'you should have listened to my first predictions' was one that is very well understood on TMC................."Cost curves are like gravity. I don't care what your opinion is. Cost curves are like gravity." (pointing out the evolving cost of battery production, and how he literally nailed the cost curve for that cost in his earliest predictions)

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Make no mistake about the importance of this curve, and of this metric. Many of us that worked in-and-around the energy sector became TSLA investors early-on not only because of the vehicle, but primarily because of the obvious need and benefits of battery storage to the grid (and of course a very strong desire to see the entire paradigm of grid management shift for the betterment of the Planet). It's been a long decade of waiting for gravity to drive that cost curve to the point of disruption and the subsequent implosion of the incumbents, but we have finally arrived!

IMO it is only borderline-unethical protectionism by DC and the EU of the current grid monopolies that is now holding back this inevitable tsunami of hurt, such as the rewriting of all things good in the Green New Deal to benefit the current grid operators and the financers of this renewable transition (you know - the incumbents - the ones that Tony points out failed to see this coming and failed to act accordingly), while the entrepreneurs of this transition (the one's whose companies cannot be named by the tools of the establishment in DC) are forced to play 3D chess to survive. Fortunately for all of us and for the planet, there are people like Tony Seba that have helped investors see the next moves on the chess board long ago so that retail investors could actually help participate and help influence this change. And there are people like Elon, who can play a game of chess against everyone in DC and the EU and in China while managing other massive disruption companies, and while being an influencer on many platforms, and while still having time to be on SNL laughing about it.

When you look through a long-enough lens that looks past all the fear-mongering that hopes to control us all and keep us in check, these are really exciting times. And the utter disarray that is DC at the moment - that steaming pile of 'hey, look over there' Machiavellian politics that begs us to focus more on pronouns than on the World's energy grid and transportation and the financing of that transition and who will own it all and profit the most from it............perhaps we should look a bit more positively on that hot mess, because what perhaps what it truly represents is that we are all winning....we the people that is.......and the Planet IS winning, despite their best efforts. And this is all happening because Elon & TSLA, and the retail investors that have helped support their mission, and tremendously insightful people like Tony Seba, have all moved faster and are more aware than "the incumbents" had ever hoped................

Looks like part 2 (of 3) is out now. Lots of good info. Tony rocks.

 

[betstarship]

Anyone happen to know the take rate for premium connectivity in the Tesla fleet? Can't find it anywhere online.

 

[Prunesquallor]

Gotta be high. Music and nav is lame without it.