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

[Freder Reeve]

Before the bot, I was worried elon would get bored of Tesla and dip out for space-x and neuralink.
His excitement about new projects at Tesla scares the hell out of some people.

 

[nativewolf]

Think about having robots pulling the weeds in agricultural lands. Would practically eliminate the need for weed killing chemicals.

Great idea, give it 20 years and protection from caustic environment, why not a robot that is not anthro?

 

[nativewolf]

Per the call, Shanghai is running under capacity due to chip shortages. Thus, they have extra drive unit capacity (assuming inverter parts are in stock). Might as well ship those to Berlin. If inverter parts are a bottleneck it makes even more sense as it allows them total control over part distribution and production.

And without flufferBot there was audible tin canning of the floorpan. The fluff had a use, it just wasn't the two possibilities tested for when it was eliminated. Packs use foam tape now to prevent metal on metal noise (root cause of which (two material layers) is completely eliminated with structural packs).

They are limited so why start up a new facility unless tariffs exceed cost of shipping and Running Berlin at minimal levels

 

[H Mak]

My neighbor keeps saying that TSLA p/e is too high and thus won’t buy.

I was your neighbour in the 1990s when I looked into Apple and again in the 2000s when I looked into Amazon. PE too high, don't buy. Look where that got me. I vowed that when the next big one came along I wouldn't allow my moronic PE thinking to get in the way of my becoming rich. Then along came Tesla and I didn't, and I am.

 

[Buckminster]

Nobody supports the idea that humanoid robots are around the corner. NOBODY.

Ahem..

 

[Artful Dodger]

And flufferbot.com still redirects to tesla.com

Just as 4:20 is still the time to say hi.

Cheers!

 

[Artful Dodger]

Before the bot, I was worried elon would get bored of Tesla and dip out for space-x and neuralink.
His excitement about new projects at Tesla scares the hell out of some people.

And it's not just Elon who's excited about future AI/Robotics programs at Tesla. They are assembling a cadre of top scientists and engineers that are going to take this technology from it's infancy through adolenscence and into maturity:

Tesla AI director posts several job openings for Deep AI Learning Engineers

Tesla’s Director of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Andrej Karpathy announced he is hiring Deep Learning Engineers for the company’s AI Team. He also stated that the AI Team would apply everything they learned to the Tesla Bot, which Musk referred to as one of the company’s most important projects...

www.teslarati.com

Us old guys love watching this kind of growth. Winning!

Cheers!

 

[KMCC]

Think about having robots pulling the weeds in agricultural lands. Would practically eliminate the need for weed killing chemicals.

Pull the weeds with 1 hand in harvest the crop with the other!

 

[Featsbeyond50]

The takeaway I got from Elon's last earnings call, and his recent tweets, is that he is just getting started: Tesla has finally become a pure cash cow, giving him each quarter billions! in extra cash to accomplish his most ambitious dreams for 100-500 years in the future. AI, AGI, human-computer merger, lifetime extended to hundreds of years if not infinity, large scale interplanetary conquests of neighboring planets and moons, robots everywhere like in Asimov's Solaria with thousands per human, unlimited energy, on and on - electric cars and FSD are here merely to enable that.

World domination, here we come! I for one, welcome my Tesla overlord.

One, under the radar, bonus of the Optimus Project is it pretty much guarantees Elon will remain as CEO for 5 to 10 years longer than he would have otherwise.

 

[Sancho]

I have two interests in following the exploits of Tesla (which includes spending inordinate time reading this forum) : as an investor and as a futurist. Most of us here have similar interests, and it’s important for all of us to keep those motivations from blurring.

As an investor, I try to only look at what activities Tesla is doing that are likely to generate meaningful and predictable profits in the next two years, because that is all the stock market can put a value on. So I agree with the posters here who don’t think FSD, bots, etc are currently relevant to anyone’s investment hypothesis.

As a futurist, someone who is excited by future human progress and wants to play an active role in it, I am mesmerized by Elon’s future potential. Nobody in human history has combined:

1) a first principles/engineering mind, dedicated to relentless innovation;

2) the passion, persistence, courage and grit for tackling the biggest challenges, not for great wealth but for human progress;

3) a track record of entrepreneurial success;

4) an ability to attract the best talent globally;

5) billions of dollars of his own money, billions more being generated by his companies and billions more from those who would capitalize any project he wanted to launch;

6) a personal megaphone through Twitter that enables him to communicate directly with consumers, thought leaders and potential talent.

Those of us that have found our way to this forum are sharing the experience of watching human history unfold in real time, with accelerated progress. And if we don’t get too greedy and can stay focused on near term earnings, we can also profit from investing in that future, one year at a time.

 

[TSLA Pilot]

Nobody supports the idea that humanoid robots are around the corner. NOBODY. I am not arguing on the NN side of things. I am sure on the synthesis of mechanical & NN side of things. The thing that makes a human so neat just from a science pov. So lets look at it from an investor POV. Could you put any value today?

The goal of the society that promotes humanoid robotics is to be there by 2040 and to have robots play world class soccer by 2050. Literally not a single researcher on the planet thinks it will be there by 202X. None. It's not that I had to do much searching to confirm that since I last looked at it all things have continued at the same pace they had been, which is good solid progress, year by year with thousands of researchers across the world contributing. Korea to Japan to Germany to USA. I do not see Tesla having any special competency and as an investor Eyes Wide Open. A lot of people have been working on this for decades. The fundamental science and research is not held by tesla, it was not discovered by tesla and Tesla won't own any specific competency there. I freely admit I don't know much about a lot and robotics is one and yet even I know that the key breakthroughs have not happened. You'd see it in Science magazine if a prototype was able to do so. This is like IBM backed project winning a chess and then a go match; anybody in the world with a brain knew it had happened. That meant that AI was becoming hot, that economic activity in that field would increase and 10 years after you would expect to see some real life implications. TA DA. Once you see a humanoid able to do something in Science magazine (or whatever equivalent scientific journal) it is going to be several years of heated funding on practical VC type work. Tesla is announcing product without the supporting relevant discoveries.

Bot is a neat project but it bears no resemblance to Tesla starting EVs where the Tesla team started exactly where I started but a year earlier and with more money. They started looking at the work done by the group in CA and saying..hey, that's going to change the world. I saw it, at least 4 other groups saw it and combined with the work done by the RMI it was clear that technology existed that was going to enable a practical EV. We all knew it could change the world with some hard work. 2 groups combined and that became Tesla. Humanoid robotics have nothing in common, there is no breakthrough lightbulb going off moment where some discovery is making hands and joint movements and tactile senses trivial. The NN is not the holdup here. They can't physically construct a hand that today can perform even a subset of the task. They can barely model it.

So walk it back. It's not that 1 researcher agrees with me. It is that they all do and I can say that after only an hours worth of reading literature. I'm trying to be helpful by reducing the froth being generated from easily misconstrued comments by EM. EMs comments on this are dangerous if anyone is using those to justify any investment hypothesis with anything other than a decades long view and I mean HODL for 20-40 years. As the son of stockbrokers and the grandson of stockbrokers and the brother of stockbrokers I can tell you how rare that is. Again, nothing indicates Tesla has any particular competency in this space. I'll archive this post and if I'm alive in 2030 we can circle back with each other and see what's happened. In the meantime. Eyes wide open. Go read the literature on the field and go to the next humanoid conference and see how you feel after talking it through with hundreds of the best researchers in the field. If you are changing your hypothesis or exhorting others to do the same based on some value being attached to Bots than you are engaging in speculation.

The investment hypothesis to me is unchanged: EVs and Energy. Those are the competencies and they are all centered around batteries. To whit, to understand Tesla's value is to understand batteries. They are not even trying to take octovalve into HVAC. FSD was a reaction to a Waymo and the realization that 80% was easy and Waymo maybe a threat (smart realization) and a bit of hubris because he does not really get software and how hard this last bit is going to be. Teslas do not even have the hardware yet to get to L4, it's going to be an upgrade to the computers (they are maxed out and there is no redundancy) and (based on posters that seem credible) likely 2 more cameras. It's years away to L4/5. The new computer chips will likely require that the Samsung Fab is finished and working properly, 2-3 years (spitball)? Then 1 year to get to scale so 4 years on hardware? A year or 2 more on software? So 5-6 years til a trial L4/5 is my guess than a geofenced trail and that will be the highlight of the robotaxi valuation to me. That's for something that is "1 year away" and no I am not an expert on that at all. Not at all. I'm just spitballing. it's why I discount all the robotaxi valuation, it is years out at best and if you do a DCF analysis on revenues from years out with uncertainty etc than you'd be very careful of putting value on it. FSD when it comes will be worth something and Tesla is a leader today- that's fine for me. On the robotics side of things I can't even spitball so it is beyond 2030. Likely 2040. I can tell you with some certainty what a white oak will look like if we plant it today and come back in 2040. I'm used to making plans for forest that will be thriving long after I am dead. Most people don't invest with that same mentality.

You MAY be entirely correct.

HOWEVER, please substitute "self-landing, reusable rockets" for the current topic. It is an entirely different field, but another in which something that was effectively impossible, that could not and had not been done . . . but now has become commonplace due to EM's focus.

I don't think EM is a one- or two-trick pony, hence my massive investments in TSLA since 2013 and becoming a HODL'er.

 

[Unpilot]

This is common misinterpretation of what Elon said. For example, during an appearance on Joe Rogan's Podcast, Elon said that with conventional rocket technology, it is possible to colonize the entire galaxy within a million years.

This DOES NOT include intergalatic space travel. The nearest large galaxy, Andromedia, is over 2.5M light years away and is unreachable by chemical rockets.

But this too is a false narrative. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is hurtling through space even now and will merge to form a new spherical galaxy "Milkdromeda" in about 4.5B years (same age as our solar system).

So, the TAM for Teslabot is Pan-Galactic. all Elon has to do is wait, and stay healthy...

Cheers!

P.S. Eventually, all galaxies in our local group will either merge or have close passes, allowing humanity to colonize all reachable space. Outside the local group, where distant galaxies are not gravitationally bound to our own, eventually those places will fade from view with the Hubble flow (~75km/sec/Megaparsec). Elon will have to content himself with the ~120 Galaxies of the local group.

P.P.S. Physics is the Law; Everything else is a Suggestion. FTL travel changes the law....

You are a true LONG term investor.

 

[Unpilot]

Us old guys love watching this kind of growth. Winning!

Here Here old chap!

 

[nativewolf]

When an industry is disrupted - the current experts go into denial. Watch what Tony Seba has to say - he walk us through the distuptions in history.

Every time - the current experts told it was impossible, couldnt be done.. and the disruption happened in a matter on a decade or two, and every succesional disruptions happens quicker. Every time the experts said is was impossible.

Disruptions does very rarely (never) happen from within the field of "old experts". Those who have been working on a problem for 10-20-30 years are most often not the ones who solve the problem. There are a reason they have been working on it for deacdes, and are still nowehere near a solution. ;-)

Disruption requires a product, there is no product. Not even models. Not because they are not trying and improving. But hey ask tony. He is an approachable bloke

 

[Unpilot]

I hope Lucy lets Charlie Brown kick the football today.

No head fakes, please!

 

[Unpilot]

Disruption requires a product, there is no product. Not even models.

How do you know? Did you get an insider tour?
Now, I am not saying there is a model....but I would not be so bold as to state there is not.

 

[Surfer of Life]

Think about having robots pulling the weeds in agricultural lands. Would practically eliminate the need for weed killing chemicals.

They already make them. Non anthro.

 

[mongo]

They are limited so why start up a new facility unless tariffs exceed cost of shipping and Running Berlin at minimal levels

That's a great point. Berlin's production replaces imports (no net production increase due to supply limits), thus offsetting the margin hit of a ramp with the gains of less tariffs and shipping costs.
As it ramps, Berlin can reduce/eliminate Y vehicle imports even if it requires pack and drive unit imports in the near term.

 

[lascavarian]

How do you know? Did you get an insider tour?
Now, I am not saying there is a model....but I would not be so bold as to state there is not.

I think he is saying the “disruption“ model is not applicable because there is no existing humanoid robot model to disrupt.

 

[elasalle]

New electric vehicle sales triple in Australia with Tesla outstripping other makers

US company’s Model 3 makes up more than half the electric cars sold in Australia in 2021, as EV market share grows to 1.95%

www.theguardian.com