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

[ZeApelido]

Supersonic EVTOL requires energy density in the thousands of Wh/kg (I am not making guesses, aero performance engineer here). That's why Elon tweeted today it would make his brain blow today. We will have to wait a little longer for this.

Regular EVTOLs is the most overcrowded aerospace startup environment I have seen in decades, and Elon has repeatedly said he had zero interest there (don't want all those little noisy buzzers flying over your head).

You are just making me become more bullish!

 

[UncaNed]

Lilium is as controversial in the aerospace industry as Nikola is in the automotive industry. Physics defying claims and all, and tons of naive investors piling in.

One of the most respected publication is of the opinion that Lilium is an impostor, which I fully agree with: Lilium: Weitere Experten unterstützen Kritik

Did it actually fly like in the video and was it a manned flight?

 

[Bet TSLA]

No, I'm saying that Tesla shareholders paid too much to bail out Solar City. Elon could have waited until it was obvious what was going on at Solar City and then have Tesla swoop in as savior for a lot less money. Tesla would still assume the debt/bonds, but Solar City shareholders would have been left holding the bag they rightfully should have been left holding. SolarCity was not worth $2.6 Billion. Just think how much sooner we'd have GF Shanghai without spending that money on SCTY.

This action hurt Tesla as a company, and those of us who were Tesla shareholders at the time.

Nah. Solar City was worth its price. Their only problem was a short attack designed to deprive them of capital. So long as they could raise capital their business plan worked fine. I think they would have failed if left to their own devices, but as part of Tesla their business was fine and worth the price.

Of course as it turned out Tesla couldn't devote sufficient resources to their Solar City business due to Model 3 production hell, so it didn't work out as well as it might have. But as a Tesla investor, I'm not unhappy with their purchase.

 

[gluu]

Supersonic EVTOL requires energy density in the thousands of Wh/kg (I am not making guesses, aero performance engineer here). That's why Elon tweeted today it would make his brain blow today. We will have to wait a little longer for this.

Regular EVTOLs is the most overcrowded aerospace startup environment I have seen in decades, and Elon has repeatedly said he had zero interest there (don't want all those little noisy buzzers flying over your head).

Why does it need to be in the thousands of Wh/kg? Are you doing jet engine gravimetric energy density * combustion efficiency of jet engine? If the batteries served structural purposes in the airframe, it seems like the battery energy density doesn't need to be in the thousands but I have no expertise here.

 

[The Martian]

Anyone have an approximation of when Tesla will cross 10 billion km of real world driving?

Elon Musk @elonmusk

Replying to
@flcnhvy @ICannot_Enough and @Tesla
This is out of our hands, so hard to predict. Maybe on order of 10 billion km of real world driving will be enough to convince regulators.
3:10 PM · Aug 15, 2020·Twitter for iPhone

To achieve 10 billion km actually doesn't take long. There're close to 1 million FSD capable Tesla cars right now. Assume each car runs 12k miles per year. 10 billion km is 6 billion miles. It will only take about half year with 1 million cars.

 

[CaliBear1]

Ask Christine.

Hmm I wonder how Audi adapts to a mood of suicidal depression with flashes of homicidal rage. Asking for a friend.

 

[Todd Burch]

Why can't Tesla do something like that? Everyone knows the noisier the vehicle, the bigger the penis.

So THAT’S why my wife keeps smiling at the Harley guy across the street.

 

[dhanson865]

OT. Peter Lynch, when should you sell.

so by that logic as long as there is another Gigafactory/Terafactory/whatever factory still in construction you just hold TSLA. because the growth is still coming.

Sell the day Elon says no we don't need any more additional factories for any of our products.

Anybody want to guess what decade TSLA stops being a growth company? I don't have plans that far out.

 

[Todd Burch]

Elon is huge on giving investors actual product to see/feel and touch. He's been like this since the initial Tesla IPO when he insisted on getting butts in prototype vehicles to help sell the company to investors.

So Tesla is likely to show off some cool stuff at battery day.

I hope it doesn’t involve throwing steel balls at batteries.

 

[FrankSG]

The possibility I envision is not that anyone is making out like a bandit with the full value of each "fake" share because eventually they have to cover. But if they can go long periods of time floating shares that don't exist by rotating them always to a new buyer then they have effectively increased the float (as long as they can keep the charade up). They could profit from the synthetic shares by increasing the number of them as the price rises and waiting for a downtrend before reducing the number of them. While they are not supposed to to keep any one position for more than a few days (without matching it with real shares), I imagine they may have developed a method to "float" as many of these as their daily trading volume can support. This "breathing" in the number of shares at any given moment could be quite profitable while also allowing them to manipulate prices down at key moments.

No, I don't know the exact method by which they might achieve this but I know there is a lot of "trust" in this business. Notice I didn't say "trust, but verify", just trust. The participants are largely assumed to be responsible adults, lol! So I don't think it's a stretch to think these kind of shenanigans occur.

Maybe, but still pretty difficult to imagine, because every (naked) short sale requires shares to be delivered within 4 days of the transaction date. Maybe after doing a naked short #1 on day 1, they could buy shares on day 2 to settle naked short #1 while opening a new naked short #2. Then as long as the shares bought on day 2 settle quickly, they can use them to settle naked short #1, and then on day 3 they can buy shares to settle naked short #2 while opening a naked short #3.

But even in this scenario I don't see how the stock split dividend hurts a practice like this. If they naked short on August 21st, they can just buy 1 share (with 4 dividend shares attached to it) on August 24th to deliver on this naked short, and open a new naked short to keep their position the same.

Same thing if they do a naked short on August 28th. They can buy 5 shares @ $300 on August 31st to deliver on this naked short, and open a new naked short for 5 shares to keep their position the same.

Besides me still not seeing any way that the stock dividend hurts any sort of naked shorting that may or may not be rampant, I think it's more likely that, in the case of TSLA, market makers manipulate the stock price by dipping into their delta hedge stock supply. TSLA (options) market makers are supposed to have a combined delta hedge supply of 10s of millions of shares, so it seems pretty easy to dip into this when they think they're able to manipulate the stock price in their favor on a Friday.

 

[Tes La Ferrari]

Are these guys going public ? -- anyway to invest in them ?

 

[Quesder]

I start to understand the real impact of the 1:5 split... it is all on option trading. Totally different stories. The reason is simple: there is a UNIT of 100 shares, and for now I believe most traders are not able to afford the $1600 * 100 risk.

If I have only 100 shares, to sell a covered call at $1800, I am risking myself on losing all the potential appreciation above $1800.
By splitting it to 500 shares with 1/5, I can risk only 1 fifth of my shares to get the premium. Let alone naked call players; more people will join the game.
Same applies to call buyers and put buyers/seller. The only pity is that it is not a 1:10 split to provide even better granularity.

Consequently, there will be more opportunists in the whole TSLA trade. Although I don't know how that will impact the SP.

 

[Tes La Ferrari]

I hope it doesn’t involve throwing steel balls at batteries.

That would most certainly require balls of steel.

 

[Tes La Ferrari]

so by that logic as long as there is another Gigafactory/Terafactory/whatever factory still in construction you just hold TSLA. because the growth is still coming.

Sell the day Elon says no we don't need any more additional factories for any of our products.

Anybody want to guess what decade TSLA stops being a growth company? I don't have plans that far out.

It will probably continue to be a growth company for as long as Elon is at the helm. Though it will be a serious shock when eventually the day comes when he is not.

Hopefully he invents a Neuralink add on feature product that gives him and us another 100 health filled years respectively.

Long live Elon!

 

[generalenthu]

I understand the process of a MM buying back a call option on a Friday afternoon and then no longer needing the stock hedge. Selling the hedge would place downward pressure on the stock price, of this I agree.

How then do you account for the consistent closing of the stock price very near the price that so closely aligns with the strike price of the most popular call option expiring that week that is within the market's ability to reach by end of trading on Friday? For example, the market wasn't going to be able to reach 1700 in the final hours of Friday afternoon (without big news or explosive macro climb). The 1650 strike stood as the most abundant call option expiring on Friday that the market could easily reach, and TSLA closed at 1650.71. What is the mechanism in your theory that brings the stock price so close to the strike price of the most popular expiring call option? Friday wasn't really the exception. It is more the norm. Thx.

This action is very natural and almost follows as a corollary. This is the standard pinning action. if more calls are sold off at expiry, it creates a downward draft and if more puts are sold off, it creates an upward draft.

In Tesla calls certainly outnumber the puts, especially after weeks like what we just saw, creating a downward pressure. If the stock generally takes a dive during the week, the newly in the money puts get sold on Friday creating an upward pressure. All of this is a somewhat delicate dance and sometimes instead of converging into a pinning equilibrium, the stock takes off into a Friday close, going up or down. This is the exception though.

There is no point going into detail of why pinning happens, because others have gone into a good bit of detail around this. A good example is here.

 

[CaliBear1]

If it’s truly lucrative, it does align with the mission to make humanity an interplanetary species that can survive “The Great Filter,” because the cost to achieve that goal is staggering.

Weekend ATH cheers!

And with that, Elon tweeted about something I believe people are not paying enough attention to:


Here is my ATH hyper bull case:

• Tesla is going to become the new Google+AWS for the era of software 2.0

What is means:

• AWS generated 35B revenue last year and contributed more than half of AMZN’s profit, it’s a very lucrative business model.
• I think Cloud computing for Software 2.0 (aka AI in hype word terminology) would be even bigger pretty soon.
• Tesla would have opportunity to provide services on top of their physical world understanding, also able to provide computing 2.0 as service.

Here is why Tesla:

• Cloud computing for AI is still an area everyone is fighting for, but no clear winner yet.
• Tesla with FSD chip and now Dojo will be one of the best platform for inference and training for image/video understanding, aka physical world understanding.(THE best if you ask me)
• Tesla would have millions of eyes on the streets all the time. With Tesla’s data source lead, they will become the leader in real world understanding. Google’s attempts for physical world understanding for example street view etc would look like toys in comparison.
  
• Tesla with the vast amount of real world data, combined with battle tested hardware would be able to attract best talents to join (their mission statement helps too). This alone would be a very important factor for success.

I suspect when Tesla decided to design their own FSD chip, they already have this in mind. Marginal cost for producing chips is very low compared to R&D costs, once they have the capacity to build data centers with their own chip, the margin would be astonishing.

I assign this to a hyper bull case, not because I doubt Tesla’s capability of doing it, only because it seems to not align well with the current mission.

It might happen when Tesla expand their mission again though, let’s see.

 

[SebastianR]

Hi folks,

it’s been a while... so on the 10 Billion miles to regulatory approval for FSD - I think Elon sets up a great new moat: I have only ever heard him and nobody else talk about this and it makes sense, there is no car maker / AI player who could do that as fast as Tesla.

Autonomous driving is likely to be a “winner takes all” problem - so no harm putting a bit of distance between you and the other players...

 

[Runarbt]

C'mon guys. It's pretty clear that if you are in the US there is nothing you have to do.

Are you saying, the rest of us have to do something to get the extra shares??!!

 

[Skryll]

Tesla battery researchers mention enabling electric aircraft with new batteries - Electrek
Tesla researchers show path to next-gen battery cell with breakthrough energy density - Electrek
These Tesla battery researchers wrote: “Such high energy density can increase the range of electric vehicles by approximately 280 km or even enable electrified urban aviation.”

280 km is 170 miles, so the model 3 SR+ with 250 mile range would then be at... 420 mile range !!!

 

[Runarbt]

I hope it doesn’t involve throwing steel balls at batteries.

Or throwing batteries at real balls..

Dont know why anyone would do that though..