Quite OT, yes. And while I am quite in favor of moderation for online forums, I do think some degree of OT discussion is reasonable in a 'Roundtable' forum.
However, I am quite confused why posts about FSD, a product the company has been selling historically and become well-known for / sells now / talks about as a key driver for the future of the company, are consistently moved out of here, while posts about water desalinization, which is neither a historical / present / publicly-discussed future product of the company still remain here. Water desalination is an incredibly important topic for humanity, IMHO, and likely warrants as much of our attention as a species as FSD does. Why would posts about a product this company sells get moved, but posts about other major planet-wide problems which are not addressed by this company remain here in the investor roundtable? Perhaps these should go into one of the "other investment ideas" threads, since it's not a Tesla investment thing?
I always strive to keep on topic here to improve the signal to noise ratio, albeit with some occasional jokes. Here’s why desalination and Elon’s recent comments that he expects it to solve the water crisis is 100% relevant.
Tesla is aiming to be the world’s largest and leading energy company within the next decade. The mission is to transition the entire world economy to sustainable energy. This necessarily includes
all future major use cases for energy, not just the obvious ones that comprise the current major uses.
Therefore, reasoned discussion of the TAM for Tesla Energy as well as the overall scope and scale of the business must include predictions about probable changes in macroeconomics for the energy market. When the Technoking of Tesla starts talking in public about one such new use case massively scaling in the future, I believe it’s wise for Tesla investors to take notice and consider the implications. For desalination, physics first principles of thermodynamics prove that if this actually grows really big then it’s necessarily going to become one of the top future categories of energy consumption, quite possibly larger than even the entire combined transportation sector (cars/truck/aircraft/trains/ships/etc) today. It could even consume more than transportation and HVAC combined. That means more kWh of clean electricity for Tesla to produce, manage, and sell than what Tesla has explicitly guided for investors to expect.
In the spirit of science, we ought to be skeptically scrutinizing what Tesla has published in their Investor Day and Master Plan projections to try to verify or falsify the model. In my estimation, Tesla has omitted several major upcoming new categories of energy usage, of which desalination is but one, and also has neglected to fully account for the upcoming growth of some existing major categories, like air conditioning and data centers. I think they also failed to present a realistic estimate of how cheap Gen 3 EVs (with their super-low long term total cost per mile) and potentially FSD could dramatically increase the total energy consumed for ground transportation even despite the 3-4x efficiency improvement per mile relative to ICEVs. When stuff becomes cheaper and better, markets consume more of it. I don’t see a good reason to expect the energy market to behave any differently, but the Master Plan implies that we won’t exploit cheap energy to improve our quality of life. I believe that’s an absurd prediction that contradicts everything we know about economics and technology disruptions, and investors should realize this instead of taking what Tesla published at face value.
I also suspect that if Boring Co can successfully reduce the cost of tunneling, then the case for large-scale desalination increases because underground aqueduct infrastructure will become more feasible and affordable. Boring Co is of course in the broader family of interconnected companies Tesla belongs to. More aggregate tunnel demand means more innovation, more economies of scale, and ultimately faster and cheaper construction of robotaxi racetrack in more cities worldwide, which directly benefits Tesla’s future business prospects.
The problem with the FSD posts is that they always end up being circular rehashing of the same discussions we’ve had for years and no one learns anything new. Everyone already knows robotaxis are a big deal if Tesla solves the technical challenges and everyone knows there’s great disagreement and uncertainty about how long that might take if it ever even is achieved at all. All too often FSD discussions here devolve into snippy poop-flinging battles that consume too much of the thread bandwidth. I’m pretty sure that’s why the mods put a moratorium on them. Whenever something genuinely new comes up like a big update to Dojo or whatever it seems to me that the mods have usually allowed discussion to proceed while it’s still adding significant value.
