I think you should think about finding some other people to talk to. Although, you do seem to fit right in there with them. Must be a birds-of-a feather thing.
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Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable
- Thread starter AudubonB
- Start date
And Fox/Tucker will edit the segment to piss off people and any push back Elon makes against what Tucker says during the segment will be minimized by Tucker editorial staff.
Elon was in a following spree today, started following half a dozen of Tesla-related Twitter influencers.
So not only Rob.
So not only Rob.
It’s Friday, which implies an expiration of TSLA options. My survey of today’s options activity suggests that $185 would be the most profitable target for large option writers (hedge funds & market makers) with the ability to temporarily manipulate the TSLA share price.
Elon Musk is reportedly planning an AI startup to compete with OpenAI, which he cofounded
Musk's entry would be the latest into an increasingly crowded artificial intelligence space, even as the CEO questions whether AI development is moving safely.
Don't know if this has been discussed....
Maybe Elon will put an unedited version out on Twitter?
Tesla is a global company now. The US centric nature of this forum clearly shows up when commenting on that Colbert guy. Nobody outside of US gives a button about Elon showing on some talk show. Apparently, US folks have a strong feelings about it which even involved some party affiliations.
Get your head out of your sugar before is too late. US of A is not the belly button of the world. Elon ain't from here so aren't many others who actually matter in grand scheme of things. There are plenty of people and countries that love Tesla and Elon which can be seen everyday. Even Elon's mom was treated like a royalty in Shanghai which really should tell a story. Tesla's management team members are from many countries as well. So are engineers and workers.
The whole world which Tesla actually operates in is not defined by US Unions, 2 political US parties, pronouns and talk show hosts. It will change even further with time.
Get your head out of your sugar before is too late. US of A is not the belly button of the world. Elon ain't from here so aren't many others who actually matter in grand scheme of things. There are plenty of people and countries that love Tesla and Elon which can be seen everyday. Even Elon's mom was treated like a royalty in Shanghai which really should tell a story. Tesla's management team members are from many countries as well. So are engineers and workers.
The whole world which Tesla actually operates in is not defined by US Unions, 2 political US parties, pronouns and talk show hosts. It will change even further with time.
Gigapress
Trying to be less wrong
I will echo James Douma's comments on the price cuts and advertising question.
Linked to relevant timestamp. Whole interview is top-notch, as usual.
Let's unpack what Mr. Douma meant. Tesla has detailed, comprehensive data on everything that could possibly be relevant and measurable for making this decision. For example:
----------------------
Furthermore, Elon has said multiple times in the last few months that automotive demand has been weakening globally, for Tesla and the whole industry, and has said that higher rising interest rates are the main problem. We also can see signs of this in the growing inventory levels at dealerships of other OEMs. The credit market is almost certainly a major factor driving the recent price cuts.
Indeed, car sales for the whole industry remain significantly lower than the in years past. For instance, in the US, sales are depressed around 10-20% relative to 2020 and early 2021, which was already much lower than the peak years of 2017-2019. Tesla is selling into tough macros for automotive. Maybe this is due to lingering supply chain shortages, but maybe it's demand too.
Still, there's yet more nuance to these pricing and marketing decisions.
1) Tesla has also been saying they're finding that the sensitivity to price has been very high, which aligns with the expectations of fundamental microeconomic theory for expensive purchases that constitute a large portion of the average customer's overall household budget. Price cuts are the simplest and most effective way for Tesla to drive order flow in the short term. At Investor Day and the Q4 earnings call, they emphasized the dominant importance of price and affordability, and said that the primary limiting factor is affordability.
2) In line with the affordability consideration, gas price fluctuations appear to strongly influence short-term interest in buying Tesla cars as well as other EVs, hybrids and other eco vehicle options. Gas prices have fallen majorly since the peak in summer of 2022, which was when Tesla vehicle demand skyrocketed and the company hiked prices to record highs to stave of the stampede of orders pushing the backlogs to untenable lengths. Below is a chart I made with data from the US Energy Information Administration. Gas prices have returned to 2021 levels and so have Tesla's average vehicle prices, roughly speaking. Granted, correlation alone does not imply causation, and even if there is causation here it's probably not the only significant factor, but I'm confident the decline in fuel prices has played a meaningful role. I don't understand why this isn't getting more attention in the conversation these days.
3) Tesla's demand curve is not static because it's increasing over time. The positive feedback loop of Tesla's word of mouth sales force continually drives more interest in the products even if Tesla does absolutely nothing to advertise. The more Teslas Tesla sells, the more Teslas Tesla sells. This means that simple analysis like "Tesla needs to drop prices to sell more cars as production volume increases" is not necessarily true, at least until Tesla is saturating each market segment they currently serve. The customers are educating other future customers and providing social proof that the cars are good.
4) There's big-picture branding, marketing and competitive positioning considerations. Tesla's brand is partially built around *not* doing traditional advertising. Almost everyone bought one either because of independent research or someone telling them about it. I have seen multiple people's eyes light up with surprise and intrigue when I've told them that last year Tesla was the top-selling and most-profitable luxury car brand in America despite not paying for a single ad. That's the kind of fact that makes people think "hmm, there must be something special going on here and I want to know more". Everyone knows that ads are often misleading and deceptive, but winning on sales without them is a strong signal that can't be faked. This narrative is spoiled if Tesla starts paying for ads, and it would open up new possibilities for negative attacks on demand fears whenever Tesla increases the amount of advertising.
This lack of paid advertising also makes Tesla ownership kind of feel like being in a club of special people "in the know" who either are up-to-date on the latest technology and smart enough to recognize something good when they find it, or they have cool friends who explained it to them and gave test rides. Marketing primarily via cult proselytization actually is a viable strategy for a business like Tesla.
I think Tesla isn't too concerned about short-term cash flow. The mission is the focus and that mainly depends on mass production in the 2030s and beyond. Now that the company has no financial stress and a very well capitalized balance sheet, the priority needs to be targeting the brand positioning for the future. The mission demands optimization for the long game. A few billion dollars around the margins in the next few years is just a rounding error in comparison to the impact of improving performance in the 2030s and 40s.
5) Price cuts themselves generate attention for Tesla that's tantamount to advertising.
6) Expectations of imminent refreshes of Model 3 may be influencing short-term demand
7) I've saved the best for last: Tesla already has a massive social media presence, especially on Twitter, with Tesla's account having 20M followers and Elon's having 135M followers, and this lets them advertise for free. Tesla's social media presence is *elite* among major consumer brands and it's more than an order of magnitude ahead of other automotive OEMs.
Of the top 50 accounts on Twitter, almost all of them are famous individuals, not organizations. Elon's account is now #1, having recently passed Barack Obama's account. For the few organizations in the top 50, it's mainly sports teams/leagues, social networks, and top news media. Beyond these particular industries, Tesla is one of the most followed organizations of any kind on Twitter and is getting closer to this elite level with every passing year. In fact, I was unable to find any companies selling physical goods to consumers that have more Twitter presence than Tesla. This is especially remarkable considering how few customers Tesla actually has so far compared to companies like Walmart, Nike, Starbucks or McDonald's. Watch what happens as time goes on and Tesla really goes mainstream and is putting up Toyota-like sales numbers.
Tesla also probably benefits indirectly from SpaceX driving traffic and attention to Tesla's tweets. SpaceX has 29M followers.
Some of this, of course, depends on which social media platform each company prioritizes. For example, Apple has an order of magnitude more subscribers and views on Youtube than Tesla has. Many companies are more active on Facebook than Tesla is. Nevertheless, Twitter is the biggest platform for businesses to update the public on their products and services, and you only need traction on one platform anyway, because people will share compelling content on other platforms and in real life. Facebook, Google and Youtube get more advertising revenue but for direct engagement I'm pretty sure Twitter is #1. Tesla's account garners about 1-2M views on normal tweets and every few days exceeds 10M on more notable tweets like the Cybertruck crash test demo video from April Fool's Day. This is approximately the same view count as President Biden's tweets. In contrast, Mercedes-Benz rarely gets more than 100k views on a tweet at best.
So, Tesla already is advertising and educating consumers on the products. The question is actually whether Tesla should spend money on bribing other companies to promote the ads beyond what comes from subscribed followers and the organic interest generated by the Twitter & Youtube suggestion algorithms. I think competitors pay for ads fundamentally because they and their products are not intrinsically interesting enough per se, but Tesla does not have this limitation.
Linked to relevant timestamp. Whole interview is top-notch, as usual.
Let's unpack what Mr. Douma meant. Tesla has detailed, comprehensive data on everything that could possibly be relevant and measurable for making this decision. For example:
- Usage stats for the Tesla app and Tesla.com, such as page access requests, average time spent browsing, how often people play with the vehicle configurators and what different options they select, etc.
- What new refreshes or models are in the pipeline and when they intend to reveal them and begin production
- Foot traffic statistics at the showrooms
- Detailed geographic location data on all of these measures (except for the internet stuff for the minority of people using VPNs)
- How Supercharger and Service Center construction in an area subsequently affects demand
- Amount of inventory in every delivery center on the planet
- Test drive impressions and customer comments
- Surveys of employees at showrooms regarding customer questions and interests
- Initial quality complaints upon delivery
- Frequency of buying upsells like paint or FSD
- Mix of SR/LR/P variants
- Referral code usage
- Repeat purchase data for each customer or household
- Changes following posts on Twitter, major product reveal events on Youtube, etc.
----------------------
Furthermore, Elon has said multiple times in the last few months that automotive demand has been weakening globally, for Tesla and the whole industry, and has said that higher rising interest rates are the main problem. We also can see signs of this in the growing inventory levels at dealerships of other OEMs. The credit market is almost certainly a major factor driving the recent price cuts.
Indeed, car sales for the whole industry remain significantly lower than the in years past. For instance, in the US, sales are depressed around 10-20% relative to 2020 and early 2021, which was already much lower than the peak years of 2017-2019. Tesla is selling into tough macros for automotive. Maybe this is due to lingering supply chain shortages, but maybe it's demand too.
Still, there's yet more nuance to these pricing and marketing decisions.
1) Tesla has also been saying they're finding that the sensitivity to price has been very high, which aligns with the expectations of fundamental microeconomic theory for expensive purchases that constitute a large portion of the average customer's overall household budget. Price cuts are the simplest and most effective way for Tesla to drive order flow in the short term. At Investor Day and the Q4 earnings call, they emphasized the dominant importance of price and affordability, and said that the primary limiting factor is affordability.
2) In line with the affordability consideration, gas price fluctuations appear to strongly influence short-term interest in buying Tesla cars as well as other EVs, hybrids and other eco vehicle options. Gas prices have fallen majorly since the peak in summer of 2022, which was when Tesla vehicle demand skyrocketed and the company hiked prices to record highs to stave of the stampede of orders pushing the backlogs to untenable lengths. Below is a chart I made with data from the US Energy Information Administration. Gas prices have returned to 2021 levels and so have Tesla's average vehicle prices, roughly speaking. Granted, correlation alone does not imply causation, and even if there is causation here it's probably not the only significant factor, but I'm confident the decline in fuel prices has played a meaningful role. I don't understand why this isn't getting more attention in the conversation these days.
3) Tesla's demand curve is not static because it's increasing over time. The positive feedback loop of Tesla's word of mouth sales force continually drives more interest in the products even if Tesla does absolutely nothing to advertise. The more Teslas Tesla sells, the more Teslas Tesla sells. This means that simple analysis like "Tesla needs to drop prices to sell more cars as production volume increases" is not necessarily true, at least until Tesla is saturating each market segment they currently serve. The customers are educating other future customers and providing social proof that the cars are good.
4) There's big-picture branding, marketing and competitive positioning considerations. Tesla's brand is partially built around *not* doing traditional advertising. Almost everyone bought one either because of independent research or someone telling them about it. I have seen multiple people's eyes light up with surprise and intrigue when I've told them that last year Tesla was the top-selling and most-profitable luxury car brand in America despite not paying for a single ad. That's the kind of fact that makes people think "hmm, there must be something special going on here and I want to know more". Everyone knows that ads are often misleading and deceptive, but winning on sales without them is a strong signal that can't be faked. This narrative is spoiled if Tesla starts paying for ads, and it would open up new possibilities for negative attacks on demand fears whenever Tesla increases the amount of advertising.
This lack of paid advertising also makes Tesla ownership kind of feel like being in a club of special people "in the know" who either are up-to-date on the latest technology and smart enough to recognize something good when they find it, or they have cool friends who explained it to them and gave test rides. Marketing primarily via cult proselytization actually is a viable strategy for a business like Tesla.
I think Tesla isn't too concerned about short-term cash flow. The mission is the focus and that mainly depends on mass production in the 2030s and beyond. Now that the company has no financial stress and a very well capitalized balance sheet, the priority needs to be targeting the brand positioning for the future. The mission demands optimization for the long game. A few billion dollars around the margins in the next few years is just a rounding error in comparison to the impact of improving performance in the 2030s and 40s.
5) Price cuts themselves generate attention for Tesla that's tantamount to advertising.
6) Expectations of imminent refreshes of Model 3 may be influencing short-term demand
7) I've saved the best for last: Tesla already has a massive social media presence, especially on Twitter, with Tesla's account having 20M followers and Elon's having 135M followers, and this lets them advertise for free. Tesla's social media presence is *elite* among major consumer brands and it's more than an order of magnitude ahead of other automotive OEMs.
Of the top 50 accounts on Twitter, almost all of them are famous individuals, not organizations. Elon's account is now #1, having recently passed Barack Obama's account. For the few organizations in the top 50, it's mainly sports teams/leagues, social networks, and top news media. Beyond these particular industries, Tesla is one of the most followed organizations of any kind on Twitter and is getting closer to this elite level with every passing year. In fact, I was unable to find any companies selling physical goods to consumers that have more Twitter presence than Tesla. This is especially remarkable considering how few customers Tesla actually has so far compared to companies like Walmart, Nike, Starbucks or McDonald's. Watch what happens as time goes on and Tesla really goes mainstream and is putting up Toyota-like sales numbers.
Tesla also probably benefits indirectly from SpaceX driving traffic and attention to Tesla's tweets. SpaceX has 29M followers.
Some of this, of course, depends on which social media platform each company prioritizes. For example, Apple has an order of magnitude more subscribers and views on Youtube than Tesla has. Many companies are more active on Facebook than Tesla is. Nevertheless, Twitter is the biggest platform for businesses to update the public on their products and services, and you only need traction on one platform anyway, because people will share compelling content on other platforms and in real life. Facebook, Google and Youtube get more advertising revenue but for direct engagement I'm pretty sure Twitter is #1. Tesla's account garners about 1-2M views on normal tweets and every few days exceeds 10M on more notable tweets like the Cybertruck crash test demo video from April Fool's Day. This is approximately the same view count as President Biden's tweets. In contrast, Mercedes-Benz rarely gets more than 100k views on a tweet at best.
So, Tesla already is advertising and educating consumers on the products. The question is actually whether Tesla should spend money on bribing other companies to promote the ads beyond what comes from subscribed followers and the organic interest generated by the Twitter & Youtube suggestion algorithms. I think competitors pay for ads fundamentally because they and their products are not intrinsically interesting enough per se, but Tesla does not have this limitation.
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GhostSkater
Member
And as we see, the US is getting less and less relevant as time goes on, and we are on the period the drama is through the roof to try to stay relevant
With the manufacturing shift to China on the last decades, it opened the door to irrelevance. If you don’t have manufacturing what do you have? Software is nice and necessary, but not without the rest
We just need the whole world to ignore more and more US drama
And Tesla will be fine, and even better with all the drama to the background and nobody paying attention anymore
Bet TSLA
Active Member
I'm curious as to why you ascribe any truth to Elon's claims about Twitter. To my knowledge, now that the company is private there is no obligation to be truthful about anything related to the business. At least not in public.
I find it impossible to believe that somehow most of the bots have disappeared and yet Elon's follower count has never fallen precipitously. And when Elon constantly amplifies blatant falsehoods related to other topics, why would anybody imagine he's being truthful when it comes to claims about how the business is doing? And many of the changes made to Twitter code and policies seem designed to make things more opaque, so third party validation is pretty much impossible.
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My question: If a Tesla price falls in the forest and there's no advertising/publication, does anyone hear it?
I hate advertising, but a simple photo of a 3 or Y, or just a silent, gray screen announcing enormous % price cuts for 15 seconds would be very useful.
Perhaps you didn't read this article from this week in the British magazine The Economist. 2nd paragraph:
"Yet the anxiety obscures a stunning success story—one of enduring but underappreciated outperformance. America remains the world’s richest, most productive and most innovative big economy. By an impressive number of measures, it is leaving its peers ever further in the dust."
The lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
The world’s biggest economy is leaving its peers ever further in the dust
US and international politics will be crucially relevant to Tesla in a few years when Taiwan has been reduced to rubble, and the US bans imports from China and requires US companies to divest Chinese assets. These things might not happen, but there's a good chance they will.
UkNorthampton
TSLA - 12+ startups in 1
Just to pull this info out. M3LR Dual motor seems to be around 52990 Euros - so 5k cheaper for Fleet Single Motor?
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Very smart wealthy guys, yes, but when the SVB failure broke, they abandoned their "principled" anti big government stand in a nanosecond and were all wailing and pleading for a bail-out. I watched it and was disgusted. I'll not be spending my time with them anytime soon. Entitled. Spineless. Pathetic.
He has generally earned at least my trust as not beeing a liar, for what that may be worth. That may change in the future of course - but by no means based on what you bring to the table here…
Tesla is an American company and the US is Tesla’s biggest market. It is listed on US capital markets. It sells more cars in the US than in all of Europe combined. Musk is an American citizen. The perception of Tesla in the US is more important than in any other country or region in the world. Tesla’s success or failure starts at home.
Gigapress
Trying to be less wrong
If you are alleging that we can't trust follower counts on Twitter now, ummm really? Also the follower counts and associated rank distribution of top accounts is still almost exactly the same as in 2021, so that would imply that previous Twitter management also was lying about this. I really doubt it.
I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure this is not true. And bear in mind, they still have customers relying on the accuracy of that information when selling them ads.
GhostSkater
Member
That is quite a discount
With the new drivetrain costing ~$1k, I doubt the current one is that much
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