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

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His TAAS forecasts were anchored on 2020 approval, which did happen, and complete takeover by 2030 with TAAS providing 95% of all passenger miles, the US car fleet down to 44m cars, etc.

Those two dates are in the "ReThinking Transportation" summary, so no need to download the full report. He gives more forecasts in his talks. Here he shows a series of graphs. The TAAS forecasts for 2024:
  • 15 cent/mile cost
  • 1 trillion passenger miles
  • US fleet down from ~250m to <200m vehicles
  • Zero new US car sales to consumers
He goes on to call an oil demand peak in 2020 at 100m bpd and a permanent price collapse to $25/bbl by 2021-22.

This could be balanced with other things he got wrong. i.e.: Battery manufacturing costs going down quite a bit faster than Tony expected them to.

As long as Tony Seba is trying to "be less wrong" it would seem foolish to toss out any of the work he has done on the effect of technological disruption and how entrenched markets have been displaced, from a historical perspective.

The thing to focus on is whether or not the trend he has shared is supported over time.

Once all the dust settles, calling precisely how and when it happens won't make as much difference as the fact that the disruption happened.
 
Yes and spacex still has 1 q of profit. 1. Since inceptions. They wouldn't have any without huge govt subsidies via silly $ that nasa spends. I love space exploration but Spacex is a business case in how to minimize constant and ongoing forever losses, not how to make profit.

Uber is a terrible business, it was a capital destroying pig that has only just started making slim profits and Waymo will gut them in the USA before Tesla gets there to do it. Though much of Waymos profit comes from outside the USA, Brazil for example. Where art though RT profits then? Will Tesla and Waymo go to 0 margins to win business. Economic theory says they will. Remember, profits are all in dense urban areas and it is not likely to change anytime soon. When Tesla can do RT, profitably, outside dense urban areas then and only then will it have a differentiation.

My skepticism on TaaS only grows. I believe the idea that RT will replace individual ownership is deeply flawed. When phones became mobile and then smart phones it didn't cause families to share phones...no, it led to everyone owning 1 or even 2 phones. I believe any deep dive into the modern movement of people in industrial and post industrial society will expose flaws in Tony Sebas musings. He predicted TaaS would be widely more successful by now than it has been. It's easy to see why he was wrong if you peel back Ubers business if you understand how and why people move.

Elon's goal for SpaceX was never about pure profit. It was about how to fund his need to build rockets to get to Mars. Launch services, gov't contracts, Starlink, etc... are all just a means to an end.
 
That is because he left the country and fired them while away so he could avoid answering the question. This in and of itself...raises questions.
How does that even make it so he could avoid answering questions? Was he in a communication blackhole? (I'm pretty sure he has a phone/email/X everywhere he goes; he doesn't stop working just because he is out of the country.)
 
Cmon Starlink is a satellite constellation while Superchargers are basically fancy electric outlets there is no comparison in terms of product complexity.

The context was the amount of work that needs to be done with individual localities, site locations, contractor engagements, etc...

Certainly, Starlink is complex technically, but there's relatively few ground locations by comparison, so that management complexity is probably on a different order.
 
Yeah, but they won’t get to work for Tesla anymore — where they worked hard, and loved their work and the company. The company will suffer in execution if it turns into a sweatshop where people work hard largely because of threat, in that kind of environment the mission becomes lip service and another stick to hold over peoples’ heads.

Well, that's understandable - though I never worked at Tesla nor for Elon Musk or any of these executives that were fired. I do have an investment in Tesla. Are you invested in Tesla after these firings?
 
I don't think we know exactly why this was done, but as you state, it's your total guess/speculation that the managers weren't willing to cut a mere 10% of their staff. I think they were and Elon wanted that whole team gone for another reason and rebuild it from scratch. It's demon mode and anyone not on his priorities is on the chopping block now.

Managers lay people off (it's their job) and I doubt they refused to do that personally. For a manager with probably a family, kids, their own mortgage, expenses, firing 50 is better than losing your own job and why would anyone at his company feel they can challenge Elon of all people?

Sorta interesting/funny that Twitter has 100+ jobs posted.

Indeed. And we don't know what internal goals were and if they may have been missed and by how badly....
 
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From @Jim Holder on the options thread: Wiki - Selling TSLA Options - Be the House

S&P Says Tesla 'BBB' Ratings Affirmed Despite Pressure On Margins and Cash Flows Outlook Stable​

May 1, 202410:40 EDT
  • S&P - TESLA INC. 'BBB' RATINGS AFFIRMED DESPITE PRESSURE ON MARGINS AND CASH FLOWS; OUTLOOK STABLE
  • S&P - EXPECT TESLA INC. TO MAINTAIN AN ADEQUATE RATINGS CUSHION RELATIVE TO INVESTMENT-GRADE PEERS IN 2024 AND 2025
  • S&P - TESLA WILL MAINTAIN LOW DEBT
 
Have you considered that the new product and supercharger teams may have lost direction and that's why swift and decisive action had to be taken instead of spending months trying to rectify it (if it was rectifiable).

Could this be similar to a building project where you've gotten to a stage where the walls are being built in the wrong place, using the wrong materials by the wrong workers and the project manager has been assuring you all along (while you've been busy on other stuff) that everything is going to plan and it'll all be finished on time to the agreed spec. but actually it's become clear that it's not gone the way you hoped and your budget is under a lot of pressure.

You can either carry on spending the agreed budget with them and hope they deliver in the end.
Or fire just the PM and hope a new one gets the problems fixed with the existing workers (if they are any good).
Or maybe just start with a new, smaller, more capable team who will have a fresh approach to the job with a new agreed budget.
Sometimes pausing construction, cutting your losses and starting fresh is the best approach.

Open questions (for anyone):
If SuC rollout/expansion (NOT maintenance) was paused for 3 months from now, what affect would that have?
Which inter-city routes in U.S. are not served by SuCs currently?
How many of the "500 " SuC employees were taken on in the last 6-12 months?
How has SuC usage grown as a result of opening them up to non-Teslas?
How many over-utilized SuC sites are there compared to under-utilized ones?
Is there a stockpile of SuC hardware somewhere or are they built only when new sites are being readied?
What is the backlog of parts required to build new SuC hardware?

If there's a report someone can link to which answers all of these questions, I think it may help ;)
You ask which intra city routes are not served by Superchargers? Well there are too many for me to itemize. If you are interested, go over to the supercharger threads and look for the one that is titled longest distances between superchargers. Hint, I believe the longest is a bit more than 1000 miles! Floored me.
 
Yeah, but they won’t get to work for Tesla anymore — where they worked hard, and loved their work and the company. The company will suffer in execution if it turns into a sweatshop where people work hard largely because of threat, in that kind of environment the mission becomes lip service and another stick to hold over peoples’ heads.
That kind of environment also created unions.
 
His TAAS forecasts were anchored on 2020 approval, which did happen, and complete takeover by 2030 with TAAS providing 95% of all passenger miles, the US car fleet down to 44m cars, etc.

Those two dates are in the "ReThinking Transportation" summary, so you don't even need to download the full report. He gives more forecasts in his talks. Here he shows a series of graphs. The TAAS forecasts for 2024:
  • 15 cent/mile cost
  • 1 trillion passenger miles
  • US fleet down from ~250m to <200m vehicles
  • Zero new US car sales to consumers
He goes on to call an oil demand peak in 2020 at 100m bpd and a permanent price collapse to $25/bbl by 2021-22.


Sebas forecasts have been hilariously overoptimistic for basically forever-- anytime I'd called it out in the past I got hammered with disagrees, even when pointing out factual or logical errors in his presentations (for example he uses the famous NYC parade picture to show how "fast" the horse->car transition happened... despite the fact that it didn't happen NEARLY as fast as the picture suggests, with tens of thousands of horses still in use in NYC 1-2 decades after the "after" picture, and even longer before cars were a majority in much of the rest of the US.)

Now of course the "Seba is still important" goalposts have been moved- see below:


This could be balanced with other things he got wrong. i.e.: Battery manufacturing costs going down quite a bit faster than Tony expected them to.

As long as Tony Seba is trying to "be less wrong" it would seem foolish to toss out any of the work he has done on the effect of technological disruption and how entrenched markets have been displaced, from a historical perspective.

The thing to focus on is whether or not the trend he has shared is supported over time.

Once all the dust settles, calling precisely how and when it happens won't make as much difference as the fact that the disruption happened.


As an investor who is not functionally immortal, there's a massive difference to me on if his "X will replace Y" forcasts are accurate to within a few years versus if they're only accurate to within a few decades.


ANYBODY can tell you EVs will replace ICE eventually.

Seba claimed to have some magical history-based knowledge of how fast- and he's been flat out wrong about it.

While that does not mean he's wrong about everything it should cause one to view skeptically any other specific time-based predictions he's presented... especially when as Doggydogworld shows us above he's been badly wrong on multiple other things timeline wise.
 
Has everyone heard the joke about the guy that was only ever wrong once?

The one time was when they thought they may have been mistaken, and then realized they were actually right all along.


This mindset may be mandatory for anyone wanting to be a troll. If you don't hold this perspective it will make trolling very challenging.

This is why trolls cannot conceive of the benefit of someone humbly speaking upon the virtue of "being less wrong,"... as it would never apply to them.
 
If you are interested, go over to the supercharger threads and look for the one that is titled longest distances between superchargers. Hint, I believe the longest is a bit more than 1000 miles! Floored me.
And this points out one of the failings of the team. It almost seems as like they were "taking the easy win" and putting sites in where it was easy to get them, where they really need to work hard on filling actual gaps. (And adding capacity where necessary, especially in V2 islands.)

Hey, isn't that exactly what Elon says that they will start doing now, as the team is reset and rebuilt?



In addition, Elon likely had more insight to recent downtime stats which maybe weren't ideal. (Anecdotally, I have seen a lot more reports of problems at Supercharger sites lately than I had seen in the past.) Though reliability is likely mostly a result of the maintenance team, which, from what I have seen, wasn't let go.
 
This doesn't sound super mission friendly. We're at the very beginning of the EV transition and more superchargers are needed on the level of multiple orders of magnitude for a fully electrified world. Should it all be on Tesla's shoulders? No, of course not. But as the other manufacturers are backing away from EV implementation as fast as they can, Tesla certainly is (was?) the best hope.

 
Has everyone heard the joke about the guy that was only ever wrong once?

Here's how the actual discussion went though my dude:

Seba was wrong about this thing.

PROVE IT!

Ok, it's from this presentation. Also here's 3 other things he was also wrong about in the same presentation. Also here's a specific example where he fundamentally misunderstood his own evidence and so it's not surprising he reached bad conclusions and maybe you should look skeptically at other conclusions of his in light of all this.

HE IS TRYING TO BE LESS WRONG HOW DARE YOU QUESTION HIM YOU TROLLS.



I agree there's troll-like work happening here- but it's perhaps not from the direction you suggest.

Uberbulls choosing to ignore or rationalize away any errors, mistakes, bad data, or bad conclusions and predictions on their side of the argument are in no way better than the Uberbears doing so.

(see also the folks who keep trying to defend ARK/Cathie despite her actual fund performance being hilariously awful as well as every prediction/model they've done, other than getting lucky on a single price target, being wrong too.... remember when they 'projected' RTs would add 3-4% to annual GDP starting in 2022?)


The worst part is the (increasingly minority as they get driven away by fanatics on both sides) group of rational people who are willing to stick to facts rather than hope or hate end up getting attacked from both sides as they attempt to focus on reality instead of wishes.
 
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How many of the original supporters were only ok with supporting Elon so long as he spoke in agreement with their programmed political views? Critical thinking is nearly non-existent once politics are involved in the USA. Elon's views are based in logic and science, not loyalty to a political entity or emotions.

I don't know how to fix that. How to explain to people, in a way that they will consider it, that most of their views are filtered through a political lens that is not based on facts and truth.