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

[Mengy]

#2 The forward PE ratios of most healthy companies are in a certain ballpark, say 20-40. Usually the only companies higher than this are "startups" that are scaling up revenue very quickly, and there is hope that operational costs start flatlining / growing more slowly so operational leverage takes over. Often, this doesn't come to fruition and the bubble is popped. But sometimes it does.

This isn't a hard set rule though. For example, COST has a higher PE Ratio than TSLA does today.

 

[cliff harris]

Neural networks for self driving require enormous amounts of data. Easily 10,000 times what wyamo has, and thats being generous. They dont have the data, the infrastructure, or the talent to achieve this, and because of their business model they NEVER WILL.
And they will compensate by selling ads to passengers? this is laughable. How much do you think that is going to make? Do you know what the cost per thousand impressions for ads is? spoiler: its between $1 and $5. Lets be super generous and pick $5. So you earn an extra $0.005 per passenger.
How much does a LIDAR unit cost?

Waymo and Cruise are both utterly, utterly doomed.

 

[Zaddy Daddy]

This isn't a hard set rule though. For example, COST has a higher PE Ratio than TSLA does today.

Well first of all I agree there is no hard set rule. However I was speaking in terms of forward PE ratios (which skate to where the puck is going one year from now).

Based on Yahoo avg analysts EPS estimates for 2025, COST has a forward PE ratio of ~47.8. I'd argue that's pretty lofty.

TSLA has a forward PE ratio of 52.6, based on assuming $3.37 in EPS next year. Tesla will have to average over $0.80 per quarter to get to that.

 

[AudubonB]

I read it again several times, are you really serious here???

Well, let’s see if I can get you to reverse your downvote, or simply amass more such.

Yes, I most certainly am serious. I cannot abide someone who is a weasel with his words. Who dissembles. Who tergiversates (look those up if you have to).

I parsed out what is irresponsible in that statement; I can do it again:


We are starting to get to the point where, once known bugs are fixed, it will take over a year of driving to get even one intervention

So: what does the statement say of where we are?

• We’re not AT the point.
  • We’re not even getting to the point.
    • We’re STARTING.

What point? The point that,

• IF bugs are fixed, we’ll have a good product.

This is some 7 1/2 years after proclaiming reaching by year’s end (end 2017) US coast-to-coast self-driving without interventions.
In retrospect, that was a mistake. A rather large one, yet one that I and many - most, I am sure - accepted and forgave.

But a man who does not learn from his mistakes, but repeats and repeats and repeats what is effectively the same mistake is someone whose word means nothing. Who cannot be trusted.

A man who did not get my vote for an enormous incentive - by far the largest in nominal terms in the history of the world, and very likely in real terms as well - and who will not get my vote again this month.

Someone who does not belong at the helm of this critical company.

I long ago proclaimed myself as a long-term investor; I have tried to make this thread focused on same, rather than one for traders or for those who make use of derivative products.

I will today clarify that. I do not consider TSLA a “long term” holding, rather, I have set it up in our investment trust to be a multi-generational one. Just as one side of my family, those who over two centuries ago created the glass industry in Pittsburgh, “always” had PPG in the family, and another side held Std. Oil and its progeny as multigenerational investments.
As such, that Elon Musk presently is the company’s CEO is of fleeting consequence. There WILL be a time when he no longer is CEO, nor retired, nor even alive. He WILL be followed by others.

This misstatement - this series of misstatements - is serious but it is not the gravest he has made concerning Tesla. For me, that was his announcement that he needed to be ==given== enough shares for him to own 25% of the outstanding. Not that he would have clearance to purchase them to achieve the same goal, but that, in the purest distillation, to be gifted them.

To have made this statement after he not only earlier - 2015? - proclaimed “I will be the last one out”; after on Jan 4 2017 at the Gigafactory told a group of Wall St. professionals, including me, “You have nothing to worry about my selling any shares, at least not until I need to fund Mars colonization“; and then after selling shares - chasing the market downward as he funded his TWTR purchase - boggles any investor’s imagination.

Having voted “No” for his 2018 incentive package - for reasons I have laid out in an earlier, recent, post - makes it that much easier to overcome my distaste for the Delaware court’s ruling and its overreach of (other) investors - other shareholders!, and once again vote No.

Summarizing:
Mr Musk will not head this company for the entire time I - with my descendants - expect to be owning the handsome position I have built in what I consider to be the ascendant corporation of our time. He no longer has my vote of confidence and I would be happy to see his replacement at the helm, sooner rather than later.

 

[heltok]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1799132862928789740

 

[Todd Burch]

What matters is the cost, business model, functionality, and safety. Pretty much everyone knows E2E AI is the way to go, so the playing field for functionality has largely leveled.

Waymo uses Companies like Wayve uses e2e ai just like Tesla and Waymo uses much more AI than before. That leaves:

1. Cost

3 years ago, a car with Waymo cost about $180k, or maybe an incremental hw cost of $120k. With sensor costs and AI compute costs dropping 10x since then, I'd imagine the incremental cost would be closer to $30k today. Amortized over 5 years, $6k annually is not much of a disadvantage, especially if there are benefits

Any disadvantage is a disadvantage. Now consider the energy consumption of all of those additional sensors. Don't know what they're using for in-vehicle inference but it's likely higher power consumption per flop than Tesla's in-house designed chip. So Waymo might have 5x the energy consumption of the Tesla system (just a guess). So now not only is your efficiency measurably lower per mile (higher refuel cost per mile), but the number of trips you can make before recharging decreases--so now the utility of the vehicle decreases because it spends more time at the charger. Sure, these additional pieces are relatively small in the grand scheme of things--(the maintenance maybe not as much), but when you compete against an entrepreneur who plays a game of pennies, every little tiny piece really adds up.

2. Data

The minimum amount of data necessary is the amount needed for your model to drive as safely as a human. Nobody cares how many miles or hours of driving data that takes. A human can accomplish this task with a thousand miles of data. The Waymo stack seems fine with the amount of data they have.

Tesla has more data on different locations of course. Waymo has more data on being an operational robotaxi in one of the worst cities in the US. For example, waymo has to handle interactions like people who deliberately get in the way of driverless cars.

Yeah I'm definitely going to have to disagree with you here. Tesla has orders of magnitude more data that Waymo. As you do the march of nines, it gets exponentially more difficult to find data to solve extreme edge cases. Simulation can only take one so far. I think you massively underestimate Tesla's data advantage. Tesla has the same data in every Waymo city--plus tens of thousands more.

To scale, because Waymo has many orders of magnitude less miles, they have to have engineers thinking up various scenarios that might cause a disengagement, create a simulation for it, then feed it into the training data. And even then, it's only simulation.

Tesla literally can collect any disengagement that happens among hundreds of millions of miles driven a year. The likelihood of finding REAL edge cases is dramatically higher.

3. Maps

To me, it's pretty obvious that Waymo will no longer need high resolution maps with more use of E2E AI. The use of them was a crutch from years back when actual code handled much of the driving. What E2E AI allows Tesla to do let's Waymo do the same. They'll use maps for navigation, like everyone else.

I don't think maps gives anyone a moat. Crowdsourcing accurate map data is a relatively easy problem in the whole problem set. But with many years (decade+?) of architecture built around using premapped geofenced regions, what evidence do you have that Waymo can immediately ditch this and switch to pure E2E without any issues?

I recall a Tweet from a former Waymo engineer just a month or two ago who was hired onto the Tesla Autopilot team. His words were something along the lines of "I am blown away."

Someone who's seen the level of engineering happening at Tesla wouldn't use the term "blown away" if Waymo was doing similar things.

4. Safety

Waymo safety is about 7x better than a human. Empirically, they have found a way to get enough data. This is Tesla's biggest challenge by far.

Waymo is ahead here, no doubt. But it's rate of change that matters. Tesla is catching up fast. I wouldn't be surprised if it overtakes Waymo in a year or less from a safety metric standpoint. I have also heard there's some question about whether remote interventions by the Waymo safety team always go into that metric...don't know either way, just bringing it up.

5. Miscellaneous Thoughts

The great thing about e2e AI is that it can assimilate multiple modalities (LIDAR, vision, etc) to improve predictions. The sensor suite on Waymo should provide a much safer experience and over a wider range of conditions. For example, when a camera is blinded by the sun or needs to be washed, a sensor suite can rely on other modalities to make it through.

I don't entirely disagree with you here. Using e2e makes it significantly "easier" to fuse sensor data. But that also means your compute needs are significantly higher as well, which has a number of other drawbacks--cost, power, etc.

With respect to sun blinding, even now v12.3.6 slows down about 5 mph when driving right into the sun (at the same time that I have trouble seeing through the glare), but I have not seen issues with it appropriately identifying approaching vehicles, lane lines, etc. Even with all the other sensors, you still need cameras to function. Lidar ain't gonna help a bit in identifying whether a stoplight is red or green if the sun is behind the stoplight--but it can see contextual traffic clues looking in other directions. Turns out cameras can do the same--and the glare from the sun is only in one direction.

Waymo and other competing self driving efforts are not sitting still. They're not using outdated approaches, anymore than Tesla is stuck using v11.

Edit: I misread an article that I thought said Waymo was using E2E AI. Made corrections above.

While using high-definition premapped areas is not an "outdated" approach, it is inherently a limited approach. It's 2024 and they are still using that approach. It takes tons of time, money, and data storage just to do a single city. Now try to do the entire United States. Then try to do the rest of the world. Which one scales faster? It's not even close. Now try to drive from one city to another. Is my car going to download 100s of millions of MB while enroute to the next city? Or will have to have terabytes of onboard data storage in the car?

I don't know what your background is but you seem to drastically underestimate Tesla's advantage in this arena.

PS Say hi to the Monterey Peninsula for me...was stationed at NPS for a year. Man I miss that area (but it's too expensive!)

 

[M|S|M MYP]

T-Milli back out to get whomever he can:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1799187923020947492

 

[Ocelot]

@AudubonB . Wow. Anyone else saying that, people would have out their tar and feathers yelling to 'banish the troll'.
I agree with nearly everything you said, but I voted yes, as feel it was a done deal, which was reneged on. It is not like the board members and ties Elon had with them were a secret at the time. Good deal for shareholders? Nope. But sometimes that happens and time presents the benefit of a retrospective looking glass. have never sat on a board of a major corporation, but I imagine there are many many ties (and deals) between its CEO and the board, some apparent, and many not.

 

[Fred42]

T-Milli back out to get whomever he can:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1799187923020947492

This is slightly interesting, but Trevor's importance today is similar to that of a salami sandwich that's been in the desk since week before last.

 

[Dutchie]

Finally submitted my votes.

I was thinking hard about moving the company from Delaware to Texas. I though at first it was a childish tit-for-tad reaction by Elon. However, I saw a YouTube video that convinced me to vote for.

I dit vote against the appointment of Kimbal Musk and James Murdoch. I like the Board to be truly independent. It doesn’t help to put close buddies and even family members of the CEO on the board. Frankly, I think it should be illegal to have family members of the CEO on the Board.

For the rest I voted as per recommendation.

 

[aubreymcfato]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1799132862928789740

I admit Im in awe of the steel balls this man have in completely contradicting himself multiple times in the span of months. Elon and EVs were his enemy not long ago.

 

[elasalle]

Simple Experiment/Weekend OT

Elon's Next Compensation Package (if TSLA market cap in range of AAPL/Aramco combined)

Just a thought experiment .. If Elon can take TSLA market cap to AAPL/Aramco combined, I am OK with him getting another insane pay package?

teslamotorsclub.com

Vote carefully, results might induce me to change my vote for Jun 13th?
I voted YES , so I can sit on my LAZY ASS and let ELON sleep in factory floor. cheers!!

 

[elasalle]

We are starting to get to the point where, once known bugs are fixed, it will take over a year of driving to get even one intervention

So: what does the statement say of where we are?

• We’re not AT the point.
  • We’re not even getting to the point.
    • We’re STARTING.

This seems similar to the "beginning of the end" statement from Ashok.

my interpretation
We are at a point where we know X number of defects and if we solve them we will have ~ 1 intervention /year
We understand the issues and think we can solve them based on the approach we have.

So for me- "There are 99 issues to not vote for Elon, but this (*****) ain't one" - J Z.


+ I've been driving a lot of FSD these days (has issues), and that gives me perspective.

cheers!!

 

[Southpasfan]

Well, let’s see if I can get you to reverse your downvote, or simply amass more such.

Yes, I most certainly am serious. I cannot abide someone who is a weasel with his words. Who dissembles. Who tergiversates (look those up if you have to).

I parsed out what is irresponsible in that statement; I can do it again:


We are starting to get to the point where, once known bugs are fixed, it will take over a year of driving to get even one intervention

So: what does the statement say of where we are?

• We’re not AT the point.
  • We’re not even getting to the point.
    • We’re STARTING.

What point? The point that,

• IF bugs are fixed, we’ll have a good product.

This is some 7 1/2 years after proclaiming reaching by year’s end (end 2017) US coast-to-coast self-driving without interventions.
In retrospect, that was a mistake. A rather large one, yet that I and many - most, I am sure, accepted and forgave.

But a man who does not learn from his mistakes, but repeats and repeats and repeats what is effectively the same mistake is someone whose word means nothing. Who cannot be trusted.

Someone who did not get my vote for an enormous incentive - by far the largest in nominal terms in the history of the world, and very likely in real terms as well, and who will not get it again this month.

Someone who does not belong at the helm of this critical company.

I long ago proclaimed myself as a long-term investor; I have tried to make this thread focused on same rather than one for traders or for those who make use of derivative products.

I will today clarify that. I do not consider TSLA a “long term” holding, rather, I have set it up in our investment trust to be a multi-generational one. Just as one side of my family, those who over two centuries ago created the glass industry in Pittsburgh “always” had PPG in the family, and another side held Std. Oil and its progeny as multigenerational ones.
As such, that Elon Musk presently is the company’s CEO is of fleeting consequence. There WILL be a time when he no longer is CEO, nor retired , nor even alive. He WILL be followed by others.

This misstatement - this series of misstatements - is serious but it is not the gravest he has made concerning Tesla. For me, that was his announcement that he needed to be ==given== enough shares for him to own 25% of the outstanding. Not that he would have clearance to purchase them to achieve the same goal, but that, in the purest distillation, to be gifted them.

To have made this statement after he not only earlier - 2015? - proclaimed “I will be the last one out”; after on Jan 4 2017 at the Gigafactory told a group of Wall St. professionals, including me, “You have nothing to worry about my selling any shares, at least not until I need to fund Mars colonization“; and then after selling shares - chasing the market downward as he funded his TWTR purchase - boggles any investor’s imagination.

Having voted “No” for his 2018 incentive package - for reasons I have laid out in an earlier, recent, post - makes it that much easier to overcome my distaste for the Delaware court’s ruling and its overreach of (other) investors - other shareholders!, and once again vote No.

Summarizing:
Mr Musk will not head this company for the entire time I - with my descendants- expect to be owning the handsome position I have built in what I consider to be the ascendant corporation of our time. He no longer has my vote of confidence and I would be happy to see his replacement at the helm, sooner rather than later.

The thing I have come to accept is that Elon simply believes that anyone, including him, ought to be able to roll up a joint and tweet from the crapper and that there ought to be little to no consequences for whatever is said.

I really don't know when in human history there was a state of affairs where public statements where viewed as "so what its just a statement" -- rather the contrary, given half a chance humans love to place limits on speech, and the main limit was politeness -- since actual physical confrontation could, and did, break out at any time, it was better to simply hold one's tongue.

Anyway, Elon does not believe in that. So his statements cannot (to me, anyway) be analyzed as if he puts thought into them.

 

[sunwarriors]

Simple Experiment/Weekend OT

Elon's Next Compensation Package (if TSLA market cap in range of AAPL/Aramco combined)

Just a thought experiment .. If Elon can take TSLA market cap to AAPL/Aramco combined, I am OK with him getting another insane pay package?

teslamotorsclub.com

Vote carefully, results might induce me to change my vote for Jun 13th?
I voted YES , so I can sit on my LAZY ASS and let ELON sleep in factory floor. cheers!!

I don't see how giving Musk billions more at this point really does much for the company, shareholders, his work hours or mission. They'd be better off dumping a ton more equity to hire key people than to give it to Musk who already is the CEO and has a very sizeable stake/ownership already in the company. Most early employees/founders just have such an outsized stake that more shares/$$ isn't going to get them to work any harder. If anything, Musk isn't/can't be at Tesla full time with the other companies. It'll be dilutive to all other shareholders and looks more like a gift vs. incentive to work hard.

At the end of the day, it just looks greedy IMO. You can do whatever you wish of course. NVDA Huang got paid in the millions last year. He's been getting paid millions yearly. Zuck gets millions. Pretty much all CEOs/founders don't get these comp plans and I think it's a waste to every other shareholder. 2018 was probably a diff beast since Tesla almost went bankrupt, but the board isn't that independent. Maybe Tesla can pay a dividend like Meta which netted Zuck $700 million a year alone.

 

[mrmage]

Any disadvantage is a disadvantage. Now consider the energy consumption of all of those additional sensors. Don't know what they're using for in-vehicle inference but it's likely higher power consumption per flop than Tesla's in-house designed chip. So Waymo might have 5x the energy consumption of the Tesla system (just a guess). So now not only is your efficiency measurably lower per mile (higher refuel cost per mile), but the number of trips you can make before recharging decreases--so now the utility of the vehicle decreases because it spends more time at the charger. Sure, these additional pieces are relatively small in the grand scheme of things--(the maintenance maybe not as much), but when you compete against an entrepreneur who plays a game of pennies, every little tiny piece really adds up.


Yeah I'm definitely going to have to disagree with you here. Tesla has orders of magnitude more data that Waymo. As you do the march of nines, it gets exponentially more difficult to find data to solve extreme edge cases. Simulation can only take one so far. I think you massively underestimate Tesla's data advantage. Tesla has the same data in every Waymo city--plus tens of thousands more.

To scale, because Waymo has many orders of magnitude less miles, they have to have engineers thinking up various scenarios that might cause a disengagement, create a simulation for it, then feed it into the training data. And even then, it's only simulation.

Tesla literally can collect any disengagement that happens among hundreds of millions of miles driven a year. The likelihood of finding REAL edge cases is dramatically higher.


I don't think maps gives anyone a moat. Crowdsourcing accurate map data is a relatively easy problem in the whole problem set. But with many years (decade+?) of architecture built around using premapped geofenced regions, what evidence do you have that Waymo can immediately ditch this and switch to pure E2E without any issues?

I recall a Tweet from a former Waymo engineer just a month or two ago who was hired onto the Tesla Autopilot team. His words were something along the lines of "I am blown away."

Someone who's seen the level of engineering happening at Tesla wouldn't use the term "blown away" if Waymo was doing similar things.


Waymo is ahead here, no doubt. But it's rate of change that matters. Tesla is catching up fast. I wouldn't be surprised if it overtakes Waymo in a year or less from a safety metric standpoint. I have also heard there's some question about whether remote interventions by the Waymo safety team always go into that metric...don't know either way, just bringing it up.

I don't entirely disagree with you here. Using e2e makes it significantly "easier" to fuse sensor data. But that also means your compute needs are significantly higher as well, which has a number of other drawbacks--cost, power, etc.

With respect to sun blinding, even now v12.3.6 slows down about 5 mph when driving right into the sun (at the same time that I have trouble seeing through the glare), but I have not seen issues with it appropriately identifying approaching vehicles, lane lines, etc. Even with all the other sensors, you still need cameras to function. Lidar ain't gonna help a bit in identifying whether a stoplight is red or green if the sun is behind the stoplight--but it can see contextual traffic clues looking in other directions. Turns out cameras can do the same--and the glare from the sun is only in one direction.


While using high-definition premapped areas is not an "outdated" approach, it is inherently a limited approach. It's 2024 and they are still using that approach. It takes tons of time, money, and data storage just to do a single city. Now try to do the entire United States. Then try to do the rest of the world. Which one scales faster? It's not even close. Now try to drive from one city to another. Is my car going to download 100s of millions of MB while enroute to the next city? Or will have to have terabytes of onboard data storage in the car?

I don't know what your background is but you seem to drastically underestimate Tesla's advantage in this arena.

PS Say hi to the Monterey Peninsula for me...was stationed at NPS for a year. Man I miss that area (but it's too expensive!)

I should clarify the location - SF Bay Area Peninsula, but close to Monterey but without the water. Naturally in software dev, management, and tech startups most my life, but spending more time surfing in SoCal now. Except when I have a nasty cold this week, which is why TMC is suffering through my posts recently

Anyway, getting to the points:

Data: Waymo has only .4 injury accidents per million miles, which is 7x better than humans. Tesla may need that data, but Waymo doesn't. It's necessary for Tesla, but not necessary for Waymo.

Sensors: If it's $6k today, it will be less every year. That's not a barrier. Energy consumption is similar - new GPUs use less power. It's not fixed, especially by the time it scales.

Maps: Waymo doesn't *need* HD maps even today, but they provide additional safety.

Although I don't *know* that they can completely eliminate HD maps (or whether they'd want to), but it would be silly to assume they can't when other companies already have. Just like saying you don't *know* Tesla can reduce errors by 4 orders of magnitude when companies like Waymo already have.

Tesla's accomplishment in E2E AI is amazing, but I think most people are underestimating the difficulty of taking it to production. Right now, Tesla has an FSD level 4/5 prototype, not even a robotaxi prototype.

However, I'm not arguing that Waymo or Tesla has the edge. The person I addressed said he felt Waymo was a dumb idea and thought what they were doing was crazy. My point was that a lot of his objections weren't true or that big a factor. Waymo is running a production service, expanding it to more cities this year, and presumably more the next. A few thousand dollars of sensor costs annually (or much less in future years) is not an "insane" burden.

 

[MC3OZ]

Well, let’s see if I can get you to reverse your downvote, or simply amass more such.

Yes, I most certainly am serious. I cannot abide someone who is a weasel with his words. Who dissembles. Who tergiversates (look those up if you have to).

I parsed out what is irresponsible in that statement; I can do it again:


We are starting to get to the point where, once known bugs are fixed, it will take over a year of driving to get even one intervention

So: what does the statement say of where we are?

• We’re not AT the point.
  • We’re not even getting to the point.
    • We’re STARTING.

What point? The point that,

• IF bugs are fixed, we’ll have a good product.

This is some 7 1/2 years after proclaiming reaching by year’s end (end 2017) US coast-to-coast self-driving without interventions.
In retrospect, that was a mistake. A rather large one, yet that I and many - most, I am sure, accepted and forgave.

But a man who does not learn from his mistakes, but repeats and repeats and repeats what is effectively the same mistake is someone whose word means nothing. Who cannot be trusted.

Someone who did not get my vote for an enormous incentive - by far the largest in nominal terms in the history of the world, and very likely in real terms as well, and who will not get it again this month.

Someone who does not belong at the helm of this critical company.

I long ago proclaimed myself as a long-term investor; I have tried to make this thread focused on same rather than one for traders or for those who make use of derivative products.

I will today clarify that. I do not consider TSLA a “long term” holding, rather, I have set it up in our investment trust to be a multi-generational one. Just as one side of my family, those who over two centuries ago created the glass industry in Pittsburgh “always” had PPG in the family, and another side held Std. Oil and its progeny as multigenerational ones.
As such, that Elon Musk presently is the company’s CEO is of fleeting consequence. There WILL be a time when he no longer is CEO, nor retired , nor even alive. He WILL be followed by others.

This misstatement - this series of misstatements - is serious but it is not the gravest he has made concerning Tesla. For me, that was his announcement that he needed to be ==given== enough shares for him to own 25% of the outstanding. Not that he would have clearance to purchase them to achieve the same goal, but that, in the purest distillation, to be gifted them.

To have made this statement after he not only earlier - 2015? - proclaimed “I will be the last one out”; after on Jan 4 2017 at the Gigafactory told a group of Wall St. professionals, including me, “You have nothing to worry about my selling any shares, at least not until I need to fund Mars colonization“; and then after selling shares - chasing the market downward as he funded his TWTR purchase - boggles any investor’s imagination.

Having voted “No” for his 2018 incentive package - for reasons I have laid out in an earlier, recent, post - makes it that much easier to overcome my distaste for the Delaware court’s ruling and its overreach of (other) investors - other shareholders!, and once again vote No.

Summarizing:
Mr Musk will not head this company for the entire time I - with my descendants- expect to be owning the handsome position I have built in what I consider to be the ascendant corporation of our time. He no longer has my vote of confidence and I would be happy to see his replacement at the helm, sooner rather than later.

Disagree, not because Musk is perfect, but because he is the best option for now.

I think there will probably be a time when the negatives outweigh the positives. but that will be when all of the major engineering a design problems have been solved.

For now I think there are still critical engineering and design issues to be solved in areas where Elon can make a difference.

And we need to view the performance of the company for the entire time he has been CEO, he still has net credits in the bank on that score.

And taking a slightly longer term view, I think some major credits will land in the next 2-3 years, (FSD, Optimus, Gen3) which will partially justify some of his current decisions.

As for how he spends his money and his public commentary outside of Tesla, I'm not a fan of that, but I also know we need to take the bad with the good,

For FSD it is a march of 9's, it will never be perfect, but then human drivers are far from perfect. The key criteria is X times better than the average human, and Y times better than the best human drivers, we don't need to worry about perfect human drivers. The only alternative to progress updates is, "no comment".

 

[Jim Holder]

Very interesting to hear what Murdoch says on behalf of the board (the first question/answer): “Will voting again on Elon’s Performance Award nullify the Delaware court’s decision?”

https://twitter.com/x/status/1799231857776582993

 

[AudubonB]

@AudubonB . Wow. Anyone else saying that, people would have out their tar and feathers yelling to 'banish the troll'.
I agree with nearly everything you said, but I voted yes, as feel it was a done deal, which was reneged on. It is not like the board members and ties Elon had with them were a secret at the time. Good deal for shareholders? Nope. But sometimes that happens and time presents the benefit of a retrospective looking glass. have never sat on a board of a major corporation, but I imagine there are many many ties (and deals) between its CEO and the board, some apparent, and many not.

I had to debate with myself for many weeks whether to change my 2018 vote from “no”, to a “yes”, this year. That “yes” would have been far more a reaction to the Chancery Court’s decision than it would have been a vote of confidence for Mr Musk, however. Had I indeed voted yes the first time around, I very likely would have grimaced and bore repeating the vote.

 

[Skryll]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1799132862928789740

..:he said with a smile while clutching the dagger handle hidden behind his back.