Agreed with the last part, although I mostly find your posts full of confirmation bias, like the other 90% of comments on this forum. Have you assigned a non-zero probability to the following?
- You are wrong about Elon's goals.
- The FUD is actually fact.
- Tesla is way overvalued.
I wouldn't be so heavily invested in Tesla (have a company that depends 100% on Tesla as we are a rental/taxi business exclusive to Teslas). Also, I've been following Elon for a decade. If he's actually an evil fraudster then he's failing spectacularly at being an evil fraudster. Both SpaceX and Tesla are companies on a mission and both are delivering. The only thing I agree with is that Elon time is a real thing and one has to account for it. But his goals are not a question at all.
The majority of FUD is just that, FUD. If there is an occasional fact in there, that's firstly unlikely, but secondly oh well, she who cried wolf... The fudsters have been so ridiculously wrong so many times and it's been so obvious that their credibility is at 0%.
Tesla isn't overvalued. It just means you cannot assign it value using your assumptions. Under my assumptions Tesla is waaay undervalued or to be more precise the execution risk discount is quite high. I have no doubt that Tesla will be a major player in many sectors in the coming decades, timelines might be off 3-5 yeas on some things, but considering the rest of the market and competition that's not really a problem. Let's just say that I see Tesla as the top carmaker in the world, major grid utility in many many many regions down the path. The question is wether that's 10y, 20y or 30y in the future. In any case the company isn't overvalued. Risks vary and stock price with it, but this is mouse nut arguments and one of the reasons Elon wants to take the company out of the Wall str mania of Q-o-Q reporting.
Do you think that shorts caused these ?
- Ugly quarterly reports quarter after quarter
- Declining service quality
- Sales plunge in Norway & Germany
Why ugly? The quarterly reports have been pretty much what we've been expecting throughout the years. There have been more positive surprises for us than negative ones. The fact that you cannot fathom a negative EPS QR being a good one shows your limited vision in investing.
Declining service quality and related to it the sales plunge is indeed partially caused by shorts. I think it's relatively sure that the constant attack of shorts did create a liquidity event where Tesla wasn't able to raise capital when it should have due to heavy FUD causing the bond and finance markets to get more cautious. This made Tesla go on a diet internally meaning also reducing the rollout of service centers and creating bigger spare part pools. In a market where Tesla could have taken any amount of capital those problems wouldn't have happened and it was somewhat caused by shorts and somewhat by management. Well noone's perfect and I've personally felt the service quality and parts deficit. Then again, it's still mostly better than many other manufacturers and I attribute some of the service attitude to Finnish culture...
When will Tesla sell the solar roofs that were ready and shown to investors in 2016?
They have installations, also non-employee ones. But as I understood there were some initial installation discoveries that they thought better to improve on before rolling out massive scale production. Reasonable and not everything can be lab tested.
When will the highway on ramp to off ramp be real, that was promised 4 years ago?
In 4-6 weeks.
Where is FSD that was sold to customers for $5k apiece?
First elements 4-6 weeks, but it was quite clear that it was a future option that will not be activated for a while and will also depend on regulatory approval. This was stated clearly during purchase. Buying that gives me now free HW3 upgrade for example and as it was just 3k when I bought the car then 3k on a 115k car that I financed was a minuscule difference in monthly payments, but future proofed the car.
What happened to the much gloated alien dreadnought? Who ate the humble pie there?
Nothing happened to it. They bit at it too much too early. Had to scale back somewhat, revise and are continuing on it. It's still coming and we knew the Model 3 line would be AD v 0.5, not 1.0. The GA3 line was just built too tight and needed to be revised somewhat, the design will evolve and automation % will keep increasing. I don't understand if you've been following this topic at all or not? Elon and team have clearly stated this in conference calls and elsewhere.
Do you think shorts promised those or are holding back their development?
Shorts are spinning things out of proportion forcing the company to change plans and force things at times. In a fully private company or one that's not attacked by FUD we'd have <10% of the complaining and on valid topics, that would indeed improve the company as they take the feedback. But it's hard to find the true nuggets in the pile of horse *sugar* that shorts stream all the time.
The way I see it, Elon's bold over promises are falling apart, and so is the Tesla story.
Going private is the last resort for Elon to save the terribly sick business that is Tesla. I don't see what choice longs have here.
You either go private or go broke, or raise billions more.
Well you are in the boat of never believing anything even when 90% of Elons promises have all been delivered, you still have a mental image of him only promising. That's sadly the side effect of being unable to understand his work methodology and how that results in missed promised deadlines, but still faster delivery to market than other methods and sadly if you only read headlines the image of Elon and Tesla is a mirage not correlating to the actual man and his deeds.