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

[mongo]

I came to a similar conclusion and focus on the interface points. Maybe they try to build a kind of hybrid connection for electric and cooling with the required physical strength. You do see connections with a combination of high power electric, communication and pressure lines today. Why not scale this concept to a new level?

It really shouldn't be that difficult. You can go on
epc.tesla.com and see how few interface points Cybertruck has. Sides to firewall and sides to rear.
Electrical, plumbing, brakes connect from sides at the firewall. Electrical from sides to rear section.

 

[Buckminster]

So we have a major unsolved crime:

What are the hard to copy machines that build Redwood using unboxed method?

Must be bots right?

Right?

Simple poll to get to the bottom of this mystery:
Snap poll: What is the machine that will build gen 3 that is hard to copy?
Closes in 2 days.

 

[alhounos]

I think folks are reading too much into that statement. I expect they mean larger, more advanced castings. Not as sexy but likely a bigger cost savings and quality improvement than having humanoid robots doing assembly.

 

[Skryll]

I think folks are reading too much into that statement. I expect they mean larger, more advanced castings. Not as sexy but likely a bigger cost savings and quality improvement than having humanoid robots doing assembly.

I think they mean Tesla the company as being the machine that innovates and creates new methods and supply chains and factories (machines) that manufacture new products (machines)

 

[Krugerrand]

I’m not saying that Elon literally said Dojo wasn’t succeeding. I’m saying he made it *sound* like it wasn’t likely to succeed, with these quotes pulled right from the transcript:

Elon: “But I would think of Dojo as a long shot.”

Elon: “But it's not something that is a high probability. It's not like a sure thing at all.”

He went on to say it’s working, but the tone was very much underwhelming. My question was why he seemed to crap so hardly on Dojo’s probability of success and at the same time confirm they’re investing a half billion in a compute center.

Incorrect interpretation of his words and mood in context. Happens all the time when he tweets things, doesn’t it? Happens all the time on these ER calls.

Tesla - long shot. Don’t you remember how he used to talk about starting a car company? Remember chewing glass, looking over an abyss, 9 levels of Hell?
SpaceX - long shot. Don’t you remember how he used to talk about a private space company getting to orbit, making reusable rockets etc?
Dojo - long shot. Now his comments seem entirely in line, huh? They in no way he meant Dojo dead or dying. He meant what he said, high risk, high reward.

People hear what they want to hear. It’s often not what the person meant at all.

 

[lascavarian]

I think folks are reading too much into that statement. I expect they mean larger, more advanced castings. Not as sexy but likely a bigger cost savings and quality improvement than having humanoid robots doing assembly.

I think I have unconventional views (spouse confirms) but I view castings as a solution related to higher gravity Earth related products. I think casting technical development is about complete.

In further development is the exoskeleton for use off-world. I don't think manufacturing in orbit, the Moon or Mars will be based on large castings. There needs to be unboxed solutions involving exoskeleton structures. Sheet metal construction based on bending rather than joining with heat, adhesives or connectors minimizes complexity, weight and maintenance.

We won't need paint in space but we can probably use protective films instead. Films that can be efficiently moved and stored and applied. Energy supplying wiring and data comms can use something like POE+ but we may need better connector options. Hydraulics should be minimized full stop.

I suspect the mystery machine is the machine that makes custom electric actuators utilizing custom electrical windings for the novel bot design.

I think the further development of the 4680 line is partially in consideration of making the line StarShip friendly so it can be easily established and started up on Mars or the Moon. Seems silly to take essentially dirt into orbit to make batteries when there is a lot of dirt already available off-world. Manufacturing methods off-world needs to be in active development.

A lot of those humanoid bots are going to lead the way to space rather than cleaning your litter box Low gravity bots can be built optimized for low gravity. Bot parts can be efficiently packaged for orbital delivery or lunar delivery where a few assembly bots will assemble their mates. Build for Mars but perfect on the Moon (or orbit).

I see a lot of the CT as design exercises for Lunar or Martian vehicles. Pressurized battery packs, 4 wheel steering, Steer by wire, adaptive steering ratios, adaptive suspension, meteor resistant cabin and mostly planar design where possible. This is very efficient for containerization for the StarShip. The Lunar rovers will have a lot in common with the CT IMO.

Right now the challenge is to finish Optimus and extend capabilities (particularly for low gravity utility). Really understand making batteries. Deliver the promise of StarShip. Explore AI abilities. And find a way for Earthly products to fund the leap into space which is likely to be a new line of very popular vehicles and some not so cheap bots for early adopters (and FSD).

I am sure I have gotten a lot of this wrong and missed some things but this is my thinking. We are entering an age when it is not about exit strategies for venture capital and IPOs. We are entering an age of breathtaking leaps starting with fleets of orbital ships, Lunar colonies and planetary expeditions.

Well monied interests will line up to insure huge stakes in this controversal achievement. That is what EM may have influencial concerns about in the sense that there will be not just individuals but even nation states competing for control.

Another comment. Would it not be possible to establish a fund holding only Tesla stock with the explicit design that shares held in the fund were voted by the shareowner assignment such as to EM and whoever else. Tesla stock holders could sell/buy a portion of their holdings to the fund and thereby solve the influence concern without delution. Taxes may make this impractical but it seems like something akin to this might have some possibilities.

 

[phantasms]

I think folks are reading too much into that statement.

Welcome to the TMC investors section.

 

[2daMoon]

OT OT OT
I doubt for burger flippers due to surgery and slight decrease in balance tho...

(this is way off topic. so prob no further responses)
At least for spouse there is a bit of decrease in balance

vaguely like neuralink in that you get electrodes you "train"
"this input means that"

No, no, I meant installing Neuralink in the teenagers to help make them better at flipping burgers, counting change, etc., not installing hearing devices on them.
Hearing devices wouldn't help. Everybody knows that teenagers won't listen.

 

[spacerfc]

I’m not saying that Elon literally said Dojo wasn’t succeeding. I’m saying he made it *sound* like it wasn’t likely to succeed, with these quotes pulled right from the transcript:

Elon: “But I would think of Dojo as a long shot.”

Elon: “But it's not something that is a high probability. It's not like a sure thing at all.”

He went on to say it’s working, but the tone was very much underwhelming. My question was why he seemed to crap so hardly on Dojo’s probability of success and at the same time confirm they’re investing a half billion in a compute center.

Elon sounds very cautious when they're in the early stage of the S-curve, that's not new. For example in early 2020 he mentioned every LEO constellation so far has gone bankrupt and SpaceX/Starlink is focusing on "not going bankrupt". I think this just means they're in the thickest part of the tech development and are seeing all the problems that need to be solved.

 

[Carl Raymond]

Weekend Off Topic

Ever wondered how the Starlink stationary disk creates and listens to a narrow beam signal, and directs it to a satellite crossing 100° field of view in three minutes? Then this vid is for you.

I watched this morning, riveted. This afternoon I find myself reflecting that all of this tech occupies a tiny portion of Elon’s brain. If he’s ever mentioned “phased array antenna“, I missed it. Next question I ask myself is: Which project is harder, Starlink or Optimus?

On that social media site I’m getting immediate negative responses to my Optimus optimism. They say it’s a toy, it’s fake, that it’s harder than FSD, that FSD doesn’t work thus nor can bot, that it can’t be done profitably. It feels as though trolls have been given a list, that there’s a fear of bot fever spreading wild.

I admit I’ve got bot fever. Since watching Omar‘s v12 drives, got it bad. For Tesla and Elon Musk, where’s the hard part?

 

[EQC_]

...
Elon sounds very cautious when they're in the early stage of the S-curve, that's not new.
...

Patterns repeat...

Today: Elon says something to indicate caution today about a developing product. Press is negative, Tesla is doomed.

Flash forward a few years when the product is working great, but isn't (yet?) hitting every predicted performance or price metric. The press will be wailing about how the product is late and Elon has broken yet another "promise." He's a fraud! Nobody should buy anything from Tesla! This expert named Gordon will tell you all about how Toyota could totally do it better if they wanted to.

Every other company throws out concepts they don't even intend to produce, and it is just accepted. Tesla gets raked across the coals for being late or not hitting every predicted price and performance metric fast enough...but what they produce gets darned close to the original announcement, and usually ends up better after a few years.

 

[AndrewZ]

@ Dojo, we’ve known since the middle of
last year that Tesla was already planning on spending big money this year, Elon talked about it when Dan Levy asked a question in the Q2 earnings call

Well, we're not going to be open loop on our Dojo expenditure, so. But I mean, I think we will be spending, you know, certainly north of a billion over the next year on -- through -- through the end of next year. It's well over $1 billion in Dojo. And, yeah, so, I mean we've -- we've got a truly staggering amount of -- of video data to do training on.

This $500million is merely a piece of that coming to fruition.

 

[Artful Dodger]

FSD Beta v12 has been the star of a surprisingly large collection of drives in and around San Francisco posted by "Whole Mars Catalog" (Omar). Surprisingly, his car has HD4 which Elon said would lag approx. 6 mths behind HD3 (which is the majority of the fleet right now).

So, its not surprising that the first "public" beta tester would be selected from SFO (or that they have a well-known social media presence). What is surprising, and what we may speculate about, is what is the state of FSD on HD3? Presumably, there is much more data (and more geographic coverage) from the HD3 Fleet, so does that imply the HD3 version of v12 should be more advanced right now?

Elon did say the priority was to get FSD working really well on HD3 and to get a release approved for Europe. And recently in China we've seen new visualizations for AP which seem based upon, but more advanced than, the current N.American FSD beta v11.

We now expect a wider roll-out of FSD beta v12 in the coming weeks. I expect that will begin with HD3-equipped cars, since SFO is probably the only region where currently Tesla has enough data / miles of testing on HD4 to create an early beta build of v12 (remember those 15K employee/testers of FSD? I expect most are in the Bay area).

Hopefully the deployment goes smoothly, and Tesla can move on to the next big step in the wider deployment of FSD: that is converting Std AP to the v12 FSD stack, which turns the entire fleet into a data collection engine. That's 4 Million cars collecting data daily instead of just 400 thousand beta testers. This step-change in data volume will feed the next round of training for edge cases & geography-specific tweeks, and will absolutely need more training compute (hence Tesla's increase in GPU spend this year).

Either way, we'll see more in a few weeks. Exciting times!

Cheers!

 

[Cult Member]

It really shouldn't be that difficult. You can go on
epc.tesla.com and see how few interface points Cybertruck has. Sides to firewall and sides to rear.
Electrical, plumbing, brakes connect from sides at the firewall. Electrical from sides to rear section.

Ok, but we are looking for the critical points where you need the unique machines that can't be easily copied.
They must be something completely new or different in the design of this vehicle. I thought hybrid connectors had a disruptive potential, but maybe that's completely wrong.
What else could it be?

 

[unk45]

Incorrect interpretation of his words and mood in context. Happens all the time when he tweets things, doesn’t it? Happens all the time on these ER calls.

Tesla - long shot. Don’t you remember how he used to talk about starting a car company? Remember chewing glass, looking over an abyss, 9 levels of Hell?
SpaceX - long shot. Don’t you remember how he used to talk about a private space company getting to orbit, making reusable rockets etc?
Dojo - long shot. Now his comments seem entirely in line, huh? They in no way he meant Dojo dead or dying. He meant what he said, high risk, high reward.

People hear what they want to hear. It’s often not what the person meant at all.

This may be the single most relevant post from @Krugerrand is a long time!
By now all of us should be familiar with Elon's absolute candor. "high risk, high reward" has been his mantra since before either Tesla or SpaceX existed. Back before zip2 became that Elon had an acute sensitivity to cash flow "Don’t spend more than you are sure you have.” (that quotation was in several contemporaneous sources in the mid-1990's).
Seriously, look at the beginning;

This is What Elon Musk's First Website (Zip2) Looked Like

A timeline showing Elon Musk's first website (Zip2) and its evolutions over the years, starting from 1996 and ending in 2004.

loopinput.com

While that was happening I was working in the LA area as a consultant to a large auto company, in late 1996 the zip2 "Auto Guide" appeared. In a semi-unbelievable coincidence Anderson Chevrolet in Meno Park was one of the first users. After it closed in around 2005 the site became the first Tesla factory. (OK, wildly offf topic, perhaps, but the very early Musk frugality and ingenuity did use physical calls to local businesses to upsell from simple Yellow Pages to something that actually sent customers.

Obviously that was a tiny effort, but it did end out funding later efforts. Always Elon has favored high reward ides and have been willing to accept high risk if hard work, determination, better engineering could overcome impossible odds.

The very things that have made many of us much more financially successful are the ones that many of us now denigrate, because they do not happen as quickly as we expect.

Elon really has not changed so very much. Retail and institutional investors have changed. Now, with SpaceX and Tesla as giant successes with repeated technological breakthroughs, we forget how we arrived in this excellent place.

When we remember how all this happened we might also remember that the magic is still continuing, albeit with giant spotlights in idiosyncratic behavior. It's not really the behavior that has changed but our perception of just how exceptional our investments really are.

Pay attention to @Krugerrand when he simply reminds us of what we all should already know.

 

[Krugerrand]

This may be the single most relevant post from @Krugerrand is a long time!
By now all of us should be familiar with Elon's absolute candor. "high risk, high reward" has been his mantra since before either Tesla or SpaceX existed. Back before zip2 became that Elon had an acute sensitivity to cash flow "Don’t spend more than you are sure you have.” (that quotation was in several contemporaneous sources in the mid-1990's).
Seriously, look at the beginning;

This is What Elon Musk's First Website (Zip2) Looked Like

A timeline showing Elon Musk's first website (Zip2) and its evolutions over the years, starting from 1996 and ending in 2004.

loopinput.com

While that was happening I was working in the LA area as a consultant to a large auto company, in late 1996 the zip2 "Auto Guide" appeared. In a semi-unbelievable coincidence Anderson Chevrolet in Meno Park was one of the first users. After it closed in around 2005 the site became the first Tesla factory. (OK, wildly offf topic, perhaps, but the very early Musk frugality and ingenuity did use physical calls to local businesses to upsell from simple Yellow Pages to something that actually sent customers.

Obviously that was a tiny effort, but it did end out funding later efforts. Always Elon has favored high reward ides and have been willing to accept high risk if hard work, determination, better engineering could overcome impossible odds.

The very things that have made many of us much more financially successful are the ones that many of us now denigrate, because they do not happen as quickly as we expect.

Elon really has not changed so very much. Retail and institutional investors have changed. Now, with SpaceX and Tesla as giant successes with repeated technological breakthroughs, we forget how we arrived in this excellent place.

When we remember how all this happened we might also remember that the magic is still continuing, albeit with giant spotlights in idiosyncratic behavior. It's not really the behavior that has changed but our perception of just how exceptional our investments really are.

Pay attention to @Krugerrand when he simply reminds us of what we all should already know.

Let me emphasize my previous comment to belabor the point.

How dare you say I don’t make relevant posts.

 

[Krugerrand]

Ok, but we are looking for the critical points where you need the unique machines that can't be easily copied.
They must be something completely new or different in the design of this vehicle. I thought hybrid connectors had a disruptive potential, but maybe that's completely wrong.
What else could it be?

We can’t know what we don’t know. It’s really that simple.

What I do know is that I can’t take two years of speculation. I can’t I tell ya!

 

[The Accountant]

The very things that have made many of us much more financially successful are the ones that many of us now denigrate, because they do not happen as quickly as we expect.

I often have to remind myself that if something is going to provide a competitive advantage that delivers incredible cash flow that expands valuations , the degree of difficulty is likely going to be high and consequently going to take time. If something is difficult for Tesla, I anticipate that its's triply difficult for competitors.

 

[Jim Holder]

Anyone have handy the percentage of Tesla sales adds within China (not export) to Tesla’s bottom line profits? If China’s economy falters and dumps through the rest of 2024 wouldn’t that add more pressure on TSLA and hinder any recovery for the SP anytime soon and even depress it more?

 

[scaesare]

It isn't about "Styling". It is about the lack of meeting firm goals that were continuously stated over time, and were never questioned. The form was supposed to be functional. And I guess you can argue it still has some functionality, But not because of the form.The stainless steel panels are "strong." But the form has little to do with it. The form makes the trunk less useful. It is as if Elon wanted to think his son was on to something; "Why doesn't the future look like the future?" Was a question from a child. Not a reason to "design" a vehicle to look like what a child thinks the future will look like.

I think you are missing my point... the comment I was replying to was in the context of the assertion that Elon & Co. were counting on the CT being a "growth story".

My response providing that quote was to illustrate that, no, they weren't. They had no real idea if it would be a hit, with styling (before they determined if it was practical to do production with the target specs), being the thing they were the most unsure about.