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

[ZachF]

Are we going to see fully loaded semis on the drag strip ?

If Tesla doesn’t release comparison videos I’ll be both surprised and disappointed.

 

[MartinAustin]

Love this article by Zach Shanan this morning! He really shows how decieving headlines are these days:

Does The Chevy Bolt Have "Huge Sales" Now? - CleanTechnica

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News! CNN Business recently published an article titled “The Chevy Bolt’s huge sales prove America is craving a cheap electric car.” It caught my attention since I track auto sales, and especially electric vehicle...

cleantechnica.com

Interesting sentence in that article: "The Tesla Model Y was the top selling automobile in the world in September."

 

[MartinAustin]

If Tesla doesn’t release comparison videos I’ll be both surprised and disappointed.

The Semi will beat a 1985 Ferrari Testarossa, the kind regularly featured in Miami Vice, to 60mph. Not sure about what happens after that

 

[Christine69420]

I don't know where to put this, so putting it here (please move if not appropriate here).

Anyone have experience getting a custom prefab home constructed for themselves? If so, mind if I ask a few questions?

This would be better if you made a new thread for what is IMHO a not relevant subject for TSLA investors.

 

[mongo]

If Tesla doesn’t release comparison videos I’ll be both surprised and disappointed.

They did (virtual)

 

[betstarship]

This would be better if you made a new thread for what is IMHO a not relevant subject for TSLA investors.

Done Building prefab / modular homes

 

[Ogre]

While many people are complaining about Elon (Twitter, selling TSLA, political, etc.), I keep seeing more things he does that I'm grateful for....

Like after watching the Lex/Karpathy marathon interview. Andrew was giving Elon credit for something that many take for granted around here - his ability to run an extremely efficient organization (aka "tight ship"). But somehow he does this at scale. If you've ever worked at a large company, you know how much bloat and soul robbing processes/red tape exists. Elon has found a recipe to massively scale the "skunk works" spirit. I don't know of any ~Trillion dollar companies that have scaled as well as Tesla has. They still trim fat on occasion, but that's exactly the point. If it can be bottled, this recipe is priceless IMO.

Karpathy also told us the reason this management style is not prevalent. Essentially he said you need a very smart person with a big hammer who is willing to make decisions.

What Karpathy means is you need a genius level engineer in power. This is pretty much unheard of previously. It is nearly impossible for engineers to rise up to the C suite in normally managed companies. A smart engineer isn't going to wade through 3 or more layers of middle management positions which lack decision making power and don't do any engineering. Karpathy even left Tesla largely because he got tired of being a manager.

So it's nearly impossible to find a new "Musk style" executive in an existing company... likely difficult even in Tesla.

 

[BrownOuttaSpec]

I still fail to see how you get to only 93 miles of range on a 75% charge. That's truly awful and I have a hard time believing that it's what a Cruise vehicle normally gets. But if their self-driving computer really uses that much power, Cruise is in trouble.

That's the point! How power efficient does this look to you?

....... vs something a little more S3XY

(Ok, this is a little biased, but you get the idea)

 

[wipster]

Interesting sentence in that article: "The Tesla Model Y was the top selling automobile in the world in September."

Yeah, that stood out to me as well. I'd heard about Europe but the world? Hope Zach is right!

 

[wipster]

If I were a betting man, I would bet that the owner of the building thought that they could jack up Tesla's lease rate. Tesla probably did some analysis and determined it wasn't worth it.

Sadly, I'm sure Rotoreuters won't cover when Tesla opens a new sales location within 5 blocks . . .

According to the article, they want to open more Service Centers. That location was both expensive and crowded, seemed like it just made sense to terminate the lease.

 

[Todd Burch]

That's the point! How power efficient does this look to you?

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....... vs something a little more S3XY

View attachment 870237

(Ok, this is a little biased, but you get the idea)

In 5 years they might start using the highway too. Then imagine the drag on top of that...

 

[Nocturnal]

Now we are talking.

 

[Ogre]

FWIW a major reason big old companies hoard mountains of patents (IBM famously had the most new patents every year for decades because they offered $ to employees who got patents- on anything, even things with no immediate/obvious commercial value to anything IBM was currently doing) is because of its value in future litigation (or prevention thereof).

It's fairly common for someone to say "Hey you're infringing our patent, give us $" to such a company, who then goes to their catalog of eleventy-pepsi random patents, and finds 3 the first guy might be infringing on- so they point this out and say how bout we pay you nothing and you sign this saying it's fine for us to use the thing we are using and we won't sue YOU over the 3 things we only bothered to find because you annoyed us?"

None of this is about making their own existing products better necessarily- but it absolutely makes business sense in areas where there's insane #s of patents floating around and it's reasonably easy to infringe unintentionally (or at least come near enough a lawyer might make a case you did and insurance is nice to have).

Mostly correct, particularly with technology companies. This is why patent trolls are so bad for the industry. They have an arsenal of patents often bought from some now defunct company, but have no actual products they need to protect.

But the particular examples I gave are in fact patented, protected things and the sort of thing these companies feel are worth protecting. Ford's weird tailgate step is in fact patented and GM had to come up with their own slightly different weird tailgate step to combat it. Ford also has patents for the frunk on their F-150 as well. Musk describes this as landmines to prevent people from following and he's 100% correct.

As I said above, none of this really protects them and giving Tesla access to their tailgate step or their keypad entry system won't harm their underlying business. But you'd never convince Ford's C-Suite that it's worth trading access for those to get the Tesla charger.

 

[mongo]

Karpathy also told us the reason this management style is not prevalent. Essentially he said you need a very smart person with a big hammer who is willing to make decisions.

What Karpathy means is you need a genius level engineer in power. This is pretty much unheard of previously. It is nearly impossible for engineers to rise up to the C suite in normally managed companies. A smart engineer isn't going to wade through 3 or more layers of middle management positions which lack decision making power and don't do any engineering. Karpathy even left Tesla largely because he got tired of being a manager.

So it's nearly impossible to find a new "Musk style" executive in an existing company... likely difficult even in Tesla.

It's also difficult from a handing-failure point of view.
If the purse holder can override/ fire the decision maker, then the personal cost of an unsuccessful decision is higher than if the position is secure.
Tesla is public, but Elon owns a lot of it and is recognized as the person leading, not merely the person currently holding the title of CEO.

"He who has the gold, makes the rules"

 

[Ogre]

OK, now compare the effect of the 2020 split with the effect of the 2022 split.
That's hardcore data right there. Now, prove that it was not Elon's Twitter obsession and share dumping that made the huge difference.

First mods any many here have made it clear this Twitter stuff belongs on the other thread.

Second, if you want to make a assertion as you have, it's YOUR responsibility to back it up with some research. None of the twitter whinging crowd have bothered and it's super annoying hearing this same stupid assertion over and over again with no numbers. YOU PROVE YOUR POINT. It's not anyone else's burden to prove you are wrong. Gigapress has already walked you most of the way down this path. Quit being lazy and prove it or move on. Either way Move it to where it belongs, the Twitter thread.

EDIT: Dear mods. No need to apologize if you move this message to the Twitter thread along with the above post. I appreciate the work.

 

[Discoducky]

Interesting sentence in that article: "The Tesla Model Y was the top selling automobile in the world in September."

Good catch. Typo or is this true and is there verifiable data? If so, huge milestone!

 

[Todd Burch]

Now we are talking.
View attachment 870244

I didn't really like potato chips. Until now.

 

[bkp_duke]

Now we are talking.
View attachment 870244

All the reddit posters commenting about how megachargers are going to be powered need to be shared this tweet.

Oh, and I absolutely LOVE that Tesla is double-dipping on this and is going to get the revenue from the solar installation (and possibly megapacks?).

 

[Todd Burch]

Good catch. Typo or is this true and is there verifiable data? If so, huge milestone!

Meh, I'd caution against cheering cherry-picked data like that. Not that I think Zach's really trying to mislead anyone--and certainly Model Y is on its way there--but this is likely based on registration data or something similar. And obviously such numbers are backloaded at the end of a quarter and just a result of logistics.

Best selling car in a given quarter though? Now we're talking.

 

[Nocturnal]

All the reddit posters commenting about how megachargers are going to be powered need to be shared this tweet.

Oh, and I absolutely LOVE that Tesla is double-dipping on this and is going to get the revenue from the solar installation (and possibly megapacks?).

Without megapacks the demand charges to recharge 1 or more Semis concurrently with the existing load could get excessive. Seems like a no brainer.