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

[Cosmacelf]

Elon's Tweet: "Looks promising that Beta 10.1, about 2 weeks later, will be good enough for public opt in request button".

2 weeks! Take that to the bank!

 

[Cosmacelf]

Well with recent tweets Elon doesn't seem publicly worried about the NHTSA investigations. Days like today make me question the amount of money I have riding in TSLA. If they get the wings of autopilot clipped or altered, how does that effect the stock price?

Not much. Short term blip at most.

 

[EVNow]

I would estimate a large piece of the $1.32B would come to earnings when the Button is released. Maybe $800m to $1B?

What is the share of deferred revenue from US cars vs ROW ?

My guess would be around $500M to be recognized when FSD Beta is in wide release in US. May be $300M or so when it gets release in ROW - with the rest left over for future releases.

There is one important caveat though - if Tesla wants to argue that with FSD beta release they have completed ALL their obligation for the money they took for FSD - then they have recognize more of the revenue. This will hedge against any future class action ...

 

[generalenthu]

What is the share of deferred revenue from US cars vs ROW ?

My guess would be around $500M to be recognized when FSD Beta is in wide release in US. May be $300M or so when it gets release in ROW - with the rest left over for future releases.

There is one important caveat though - if Tesla wants to argue that with FSD beta release they have completed ALL their obligation for the money they took for FSD - then they have recognize more of the revenue. This will hedge against any future class action ...

FSD take rate outside of US had been miniscule per some numbers Troy was tracking. Not sure how grounded it was, but 5/8 in the US may be an underestimate imho.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

 

[AudubonB]

trying to remember a year that wasn't "mega drama" for Tesla.

2004 was a very good year.

 

[Todd Burch]

FSD take rate will increase noticeably once it's actually available to the public, and fortunately it can be purchased after the car is delivered. Should see nice revenue increases once FSD goes beta.

 

[RobDickinson]

FSD has been expensive and an unfulfilled promise, I'm not surprised the take rate is low.

That obviously changes if and when it can do what it is supposed to

 

[AudubonB]

The job of Directors is not to rubber-stamp top management, it's to provide oversight of top management.

James Murdoch signaled he put principles above money when he unexpectedly quit his families multi-billion dollar media empire where he had been CEO of two different arms for years. His resignation letter indicated it was over editorial content and other principles the corporation held as ideals. I don't think any serious person thinks this was all some kind of elaborate and misleading deception for nefarious purposes.

Your second paragraph is something with which I agree and accordingly, not only have I no philosophical or otherwise substantive beef with Mr James Murdoch, but rather I view his familial break as having given him a large - very large - number of my rarely doled-out Teslapoints. Good on him.

But your first paragraph is only somewhat correct. In a publicly-owned corporation the role of the Board of Directors is to act as the shareholders’ proxy, defensor, ombudsman, advocate, so that the officers of the company have the Board to answer to because it is beyond the capacity of the shareholders to so do. Thus, your wording of “oversight“ is correct but not sufficient: it is oversight on behalf of THEIR charges - who are the shareholders.

As such, it inherently is the case that the interaction between a Board and its corporation‘s officers is an adversarial one. In the USofA - I cannot speak with great experience in non-US cases - this is very, very often breached and rubber-stamping does, alas, come closer to how far too many Boards operate. But that is a perversion of the system.

 

[heltok]

People are forgetting that getting the deferred revenue is nice, but getting it for every future sale is even nicer. That $1B now, will be $1B/year once sales of new FSD/year equals all past sales of FSD. Times future growth. And this is just for this once release of deferred revenue… Plus take rate will go up. Plus sales will go up. It will just be so obvious to every buyer that getting that BMW without FSD is a worse idea than getting that Model Y with FSD.

I think it is pretty obvious to most rational people that Tesla earnings will very likely grow a lot over the coming quarters. Imo just HODL for a while, wait for reality to catch up with wallstreet. They are very dense, but eventually the numbers will be staring directly into their faces.

 

[jhm]

Suppose one day Tesla is able to demonstrate to regulators that FSD is 10X safer than a human driver. What happens when a competitor is only able to demonstrate that its autonomy tech is just 2X safer than human drivers. This would imply that Tesla's tech is abut 5X safer than the competitor's. Should regulators approve the inferior tech?

 

[insaneoctane]

Best they can do is negotiate supply agreements ahead of time.

This.^^ Vertical integration of chip fab is not economical. The fab tech moves at a breakneck cadence that only gigavolume justifies attempting. Many orders of magnitude beyond Tesla's needs, certainly for many years. Their best bet is to negotiate supplier agreements of significant volumes and pricing to guarantee your priority and supply. It needs to be a real partnership like with Panasonic such that it's dependable.

 

[StealthP3D]

Suppose one day Tesla is able to demonstrate to regulators that FSD is 10X safer than a human driver. What happens when a competitor is only able to demonstrate that its autonomy tech is just 2X safer than human drivers. This would imply that Tesla's tech is abut 5X safer than the competitor's. Should regulators approve the inferior tech?

Of course they should. The regulators are not going to force everyone to buy a Tesla simply because it's 5X safer than a human! They wouldn't do that anymore than they forced everyone to buy a Volvo in the 1970's because they were multiple times safer than anything else available.

 

[insaneoctane]

Tesla has the potential to create a regulatory mote by setting a high standard for compliance.

I believe Tesla has the ability to create a data mote....I do NOT believe US regulators can understand it.

 

[StealthP3D]

fundamentally how does such an amorphous meta variable like IV suddenly move in such a coordinated fashion? You can’t directly buy/sell IV so how does the market suddenly decide to rapidly revalue it? My assumption here is some big money started selling off call/put positions. Perhaps most of the selling was puts which would help explain a pop in underlying and then there is just some variety of correlation in IV across all tranches. That’s what I’m going with. Someone sold a lot of puts.

I believe the 'implied" in "implied volatility" is implied by the options pricing. Which, if the options are liquid, is determined by supply and demand. I don't know how market makers initially price them but once they start trading it's done with the bid and the ask, supply and demand.

 

[StealthP3D]

Well with recent tweets Elon doesn't seem publicly worried about the NHTSA investigations. Days like today make me question the amount of money I have riding in TSLA. If they get the wings of autopilot clipped or altered, how does that effect the stock price?

In the bigger picture, this is a big nothing-burger. You cannot stop an idea whose time has come.

Even if the regulators are not simply going through the motions of doing their job, they are too slow and ineffective to stop FSD. And they know we have courts to keep them in bounds. The worse they can do is cause a temporary kerfluffle followed by them losing respect. A talented regulator can be pretty powerful when acting in the public interest. Not so much if they are faking it.

 

[Buckminster]

V10.1 button date hasn't changed from 24th Sep.

 

[Buckminster]

Fab steps from Wikipedia:

• Wafer processing
  • Wet cleans
    • Cleaning by solvents such as acetone, trichloroethylene and ultrapure water
    • Piranha solution
    • RCA clean
  • Surface passivation
  • Photolithography
  • Ion implantation (in which dopants are embedded in the wafer creating regions of increased or decreased conductivity)
  • Etching (microfabrication)
    • Dry etching (Plasma etching)
      • Reactive-ion etching(RIE)
        • Deep reactive-ion etching
        • Atomic layer etching (ALE)
    • Wet etching
      • Buffered oxide etch
  • Plasma ashing
  • Thermal treatments
    • Rapid thermal anneal
    • Furnace anneals
    • Thermal oxidation
  • Chemical vapor deposition (CVD)
  • Atomic layer deposition (ALD)
  • Physical vapor deposition (PVD)
  • Molecular beam epitaxy (MBE)
  • Laser lift-off (for LED production[12])
  • Electrochemical deposition (ECD). See Electroplating
  • Chemical-mechanical polishing (CMP)
  • Wafer testing (where the electrical performance is verified using Automatic Test Equipment, binning and/or laser trimming may also be carried out at this step)
• Die preparation
  • Through-silicon via manufacture (For three-dimensional integrated circuits)
  • Wafer mounting (wafer is mounted onto a metal frame using Dicing tape)
  • Wafer backgrinding and polishing[13] (reduces the thickness of the wafer for thin devices like a smartcard or PCMCIA card or wafer bonding and stacking, this can also occur during wafer dicing, in a process known as Dice Before Grind or DBG[14][15])
  • Wafer bonding and stacking (For Three-dimensional integrated circuits and MEMS)
  • Redistribution layer manufacture (for WLCSP packages)
  • Wafer Bumping (For Flip chip BGA (Ball grid array), and WLCSP packages)
  • Die cutting or Wafer dicing
• IC packaging
  • Die attachment (The die is attached to a leadframe using conductive paste or die attach film[16][17])
  • IC bonding: Wire bonding, Thermosonic bonding, Flip chip or Tape Automated Bonding (TAB)
  • IC encapsulationor integrated heat spreader (IHS) installation
    • Molding (using special Molding compound that may contain glass powder as filler)
    • Baking
    • Electroplating (plates the copper leads of the lead frames with tin to make soldering easier)
    • Laser marking or silkscreen printing
    • Trim and form (separates the lead frames from each other, and bends the lead frame's pins so that they can be mounted on a Printed circuit board)
• IC testing

List of Applied Materials technologies that their products support"

• ALD
• CMP
• CVD
• ECD
• Epitaxy
• Etch
• Ion Implant
• Metrology and Inspection
• Photomask
• PVD
• Rapid Thermal Processing
• Analog
• Compound Semiconductors
• MEMS
• Power

Applied Materials do much of what is needed in a fab plant. Could Tesla have bought 9 different machines that together make a mini fab?

 

[Bet TSLA]

supercharge.info shows the latest new construction is a 30 stall V3 only about 10 miles from the VW factory in Wolfsburg. Nice!

 

[Buckminster]

Fab steps from Wikipedia:

• Wafer processing
  • Wet cleans
    • Cleaning by solvents such as acetone, trichloroethylene and ultrapure water
    • Piranha solution
    • RCA clean
  • Surface passivation
  • Photolithography
  • Ion implantation (in which dopants are embedded in the wafer creating regions of increased or decreased conductivity)
  • Etching (microfabrication)
    • Dry etching (Plasma etching)
      • Reactive-ion etching(RIE)
        • Deep reactive-ion etching
        • Atomic layer etching (ALE)
    • Wet etching
      • Buffered oxide etch
  • Plasma ashing
  • Thermal treatments
    • Rapid thermal anneal
    • Furnace anneals
    • Thermal oxidation
  • Chemical vapor deposition (CVD)
  • Atomic layer deposition (ALD)
  • Physical vapor deposition (PVD)
  • Molecular beam epitaxy (MBE)
  • Laser lift-off (for LED production[12])
  • Electrochemical deposition (ECD). See Electroplating
  • Chemical-mechanical polishing (CMP)
  • Wafer testing (where the electrical performance is verified using Automatic Test Equipment, binning and/or laser trimming may also be carried out at this step)
• Die preparation
  • Through-silicon via manufacture (For three-dimensional integrated circuits)
  • Wafer mounting (wafer is mounted onto a metal frame using Dicing tape)
  • Wafer backgrinding and polishing[13] (reduces the thickness of the wafer for thin devices like a smartcard or PCMCIA card or wafer bonding and stacking, this can also occur during wafer dicing, in a process known as Dice Before Grind or DBG[14][15])
  • Wafer bonding and stacking (For Three-dimensional integrated circuits and MEMS)
  • Redistribution layer manufacture (for WLCSP packages)
  • Wafer Bumping (For Flip chip BGA (Ball grid array), and WLCSP packages)
  • Die cutting or Wafer dicing
• IC packaging
  • Die attachment (The die is attached to a leadframe using conductive paste or die attach film[16][17])
  • IC bonding: Wire bonding, Thermosonic bonding, Flip chip or Tape Automated Bonding (TAB)
  • IC encapsulationor integrated heat spreader (IHS) installation
    • Molding (using special Molding compound that may contain glass powder as filler)
    • Baking
    • Electroplating (plates the copper leads of the lead frames with tin to make soldering easier)
    • Laser marking or silkscreen printing
    • Trim and form (separates the lead frames from each other, and bends the lead frame's pins so that they can be mounted on a Printed circuit board)
• IC testing

List of Applied Materials technologies that their products support"

• ALD
• CMP
• CVD
• ECD
• Epitaxy
• Etch
• Ion Implant
• Metrology and Inspection
• Photomask
• PVD
• Rapid Thermal Processing
• Analog
• Compound Semiconductors
• MEMS
• Power

Applied Materials do much of what is needed in a fab plant. Could Tesla have bought 9 different machines that together make a mini fab?

This tweet suggests Tesla are getting nine of these:

Applied® Sigmameltec® CTS Mask Coat Series | Applied Materials

Seems less likely as I am guessing that would produce too many chips when combined with all the other equipment.