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

[SOULPEDL]

Many here are coming along quite well into the future I see. Thinking about it more, accepting reality, planning a new life with RoboTaxi maybe even Optimus for some already. This is the most bullish signal I can get off this thread simply because it means that many many others are coming along into the future as well. This includes Big and Little Auto, Insurance, Energy, Oil, Media.... They are all on proper notice now. We have engaged.

Here's a theory. They're so convinced FSD is real, that headlines are already making claims Tesla is just a 3 letter trick called FSD. It's so classic. Put it on stage then start discrediting FSD with Robot Fear that beats all FUD hands down. Find differences with Waymo and exploit fears on some made up theory. Like "Waymo would never put your life at risk with ULTs" (risky left turns). Dan O'Doody types come out in full force now. Talk about it constantly, and freak people out in public. When it goofs (and it will), or we get some stupid recall, they make it sound like Tesla's just some puny car company that nobody can afford, intentionally ignoring Energy growth and margins in the background and down she goes again.

I'm sure this was always the FUD plan, but I think Tesla beat them to it with full release is my theory. At the same time, Tesla finds it more important to get some exposure globally in EU and China (India as well more than likely) with private demo rides, and even before going unsupervised in NA. This buys time to perfect it here at home in parallel, and more important to the mission is to educate the world to all swim in the same direction if they can.

This global exposure leads to a specific living room discussion on whether or not to buy another car, namely a Hybrid. It literally pushes the world into a future state from unbelievable to - been there done that! It's been very well played so far, but it's still gonna be a wild ride and I'm totally jazzed about all of it!

 

[Carl Raymond]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1784257467481756130

bottom line- try FSD

I was shocked to read that post. Generally Car Dealership Guy’s posts are blissfully unaware that EVs are eating away at the ICE market. His followers are high on the anti-EV index, probably from a high FUD diet. The last thing those followers want to hear is that Musk has the industry by the short n curlies. A brave and honest post that feels like a crack in the dam.

 

[wtlloyd]

Well lets look at the sustainability issue. It's all about batteries. We had this conversation a couple of years ago. It was all about batteries in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012,2013,2014,2016,2017, 2018 ....and still is about batteries.
Tesla did not invent small inexpensive Li batteries, 18650, 2170, etc. They simply followed on the work of some researchers who had assembled tiny little batteries into not so small packs and built an EV that was not dependent on weak lead acid nor on patent limit products. Without supplies at scale of these small batteries..no Tesla.

Fast forward from 2006 to 2017 and it is clear Tesla is scaling. The factory sleep in must have sucked but the 3 had seemingly unlimited demand. The excess capacity that had been around for poweralls was no longer there and Tesla had a different issue. They needed more battery capacity. One can be brutal and say they should have secured that in 2016 but by late 2017..surely. By 2018 they are building Shanghai but it didn't solve the battery issue. In fact the opposite. There was nothing in 2017 & 2018 to keep Tesla from investing in a second GF for battery capacity. It was abundantly clear Reno was not enough.

Solar was always tangential, not directly aligned because the core of that product was not a battery. The core of energy storage and EVs are batteries.
Today they continue to focus on the bright shiny objects instead of the boring business side of things.

They could have solved the battery capacity issue in many different ways. Partnered with CATL on 3 factories (one in each major geography), only $3bln in cash was a silly reason to not build battery capacity when it was clear margins were very high, capex was far lower than EVs, and the market was going to happen due to renewable deployment.

Perhaps @petit_bateau would jump in with thoughts. He is an industry expert.

Everybody's a genius in hindsight.
Lots of history to be read about companies indulging in hubris and overinvesting in growth that anything from black swan events to changes in consumers tastes results in torpedoing said company. Building cash reserves while expeditiously growing the company is certainly a wiser path.

 

[Discoducky]

FYI, PSA, whatever, I don't read, obviously, accounts I ignore, and by proxy, any response to said accounts.

Life is too short.

Also, day 13 of NO critical FSD disengagements. Today I drove to SpaceX Redmond and back. You couldn't wipe the smile off my face with a belt grinder.

 

[AnbaricBike]

Perhaps @petit_bateau would jump in with thoughts. He is an industry expert.

Yes, yes we all miss him very much.

 

[Thekiwi]

If there is no sales tax that is a subsidy, no? Or is Tesla paying the sales tax for the customer ?

No there is the normal sales tax here which is 15% on Teslas, I was just removing sales tax to show the underlying price comparison.

Presumably Tesla is still making a profit on these Shanghai produced vehicles, even with these very low prices.

 

[Thekiwi]

Sharing for the info (WS expectations)

 

[DragonWatch]

Forward Observing

Two memorable lack of FSD capabilities.

First, I was about eight plus or minus; probably around 1958; an on coming Full Self Driving Idiot (FSDI) hung out holding the steering wheel and door. This was a few weeks after finding a cat clinging to the radiator hose when we stopped at a friends house before getting to school.

Then when I was about fourteen my mother tempted fate by driving south on Hawthorn boulevard and failed to stop at the signal ~ FSDI. And you guessed it, seatbelts were waiting to be designed.

Cheers

 

[DarkandStormy]

I doubt the troll will post this, but I think this explains all, were would rather have invested your money? Hard one! I expect the next 5 years to look similar if not much better (for Tesla only).

View attachment 1042280

NVDA

 

[Singuy]

NVDA

You know what transformed the world? Software, making billions of profits a year. Nvda is the hardware supplier. Who made more money from cpus, Intel or Microsoft?

Nvda is a good company, but the ones who monetize the AI that was built using the hardware makes the lionshare.

 

[Artful Dodger]

Is Tesla building a top sales force? Or does Elon think they can just sell MP online and ignore sales and marketing? If TE customer service/sales is anything like automotive (non-existent and hard to find) then no wonder they don't get many projects.

This rhetoric would ring less hollow if Tesla hadn't just removed the ability to place new megapack orders from their website.

Wisdom is chasing you if you would just stop.

 

[nativewolf]

You know what transformed the world? Software, making billions of profits a year. Nvda is the hardware supplier. Who made more money from cpus, Intel or Microsoft?

Nvda is a good company, but the ones who monetize the AI that was built using the hardware makes the lionshare.

They are all part of the ecosystem, early in an adoption cycle it's the hardware that wins, software may or may not catchup and it's not a given.

Right now clearly it's Nividia winning. Later that will shift if the hardware stops advancing or the software scales. Right now openai is valued at some 80 bllion vs nvidia 2.1x trillion. So 22x more. Lots of AI companies will be competing to put solutions on that nividia chip.

Intel was managed terribly for over a decade and completely missed the transformation from desktop to cloud/data centers with Amazon and others rolling their own chips, etc. For many years in the 90s you'd have done better being in Intel. Until software scales and drives competitors out of business it is hard to make blanket assertions. If it remains a competitive dogfight in AI than Nividia will remain a safer, lucrative,play.

 

[Knightshade]

Also, day 13 of NO critical FSD disengagements. Today I drove to SpaceX Redmond and back. You couldn't wipe the smile off my face with a belt grinder.

FWIW I had one just an hour ago- exiting highway on the exit ramp (so unclear if it was on the v12 stack by then or not)- same as one I had a week ago in the same situation (but totally different exit ramp) where it seemed to think the shoulder was a lane and began diving into it...

Had another NON critical pure highway one (so still 11 presumably) where it needed to take an exit the traffic was backed up like half a mile to exit, it kept blissfully passing all the slowed/stopped cars 1 lane over, and then realizing just a couple hundred feet before the exit still doing 65 it had no chance to merge in I took over and managed to greatly annoy some folks getting in right at the exit ramp.

Only pure-city one I've had this week was when it got to a road closed no-thru traffic sign and just sat there with no idea what to do- so that was critical in the sense of wanting to not sit there forever, but not safety critical.

 

[Artful Dodger]

Maybe this is why Tesla isn't moving faster. If someone else is capably achieving that aspect of the Mission, it would be on par for Tesla to shift to technologies that will be more impactful where there is an absence of leading players.

Still, they could manage a 5% share of world megapack production and make good bank for decades, and also focus on other projects like BEV, AI, robotics, and whatever they come up with next.

Teslas and state production rate for mega pack needs to be enough to replace the existing fleet say about 5% and enough to support the extended deployment of superchargers. Eventually, all supercharger sites will have mega pack both to support the grid and to ease the duck curve from renewables.

 

[Artful Dodger]

Asking for trouble? She didn't have her hands on the wheel surprised FSD did not warn her or cancel out FSD.

Ha! This was not asking for trouble, this was watchful attentiveness and prepared for anything. Did you notice that FSD slowed down from 51 mph to 39 mph? And how did you even miss the screeching audible warning that the car emitted? Were you watching with the sound turned off?

 

[Singuy]

They are all part of the ecosystem, early in an adoption cycle it's the hardware that wins, software may or may not catchup and it's not a given.

Right now clearly it's Nividia winning. Later that will shift if the hardware stops advancing or the software scales. Right now openai is valued at some 80 bllion vs nvidia 2.1x trillion. So 22x more. Lots of AI companies will be competing to put solutions on that nividia chip.

Intel was managed terribly for over a decade and completely missed the transformation from desktop to cloud/data centers with Amazon and others rolling their own chips, etc. For many years in the 90s you'd have done better being in Intel. Until software scales and drives competitors out of business it is hard to make blanket assertions. If it remains a competitive dogfight in AI than Nividia will remain a safer, lucrative,play.

In the late 80s when microsoft ipoed, intel consistently had a larger marketcap than microsoft for almost a decade. Eventually hardware company just cannot scale like software companies in revenue and profit, and now microsoft is worth 15x of intel, or 10x of intel when intel was at their peak.

The same will happen with nvidia and those that profits from the AI they used their hardware to create.

 

[GatorMeat]

This rhetoric would ring less hollow if Tesla hadn't just removed the ability to place new megapack orders from their website.

Wisdom is chasing you if you would just stop.

You didn't answer the question. I don't think you can sell tens to hundreds of million dollar assets online. Thus why they have removed that option. A lot of the big integrators with skilled outside sales and engineering teams that are out there building relationships and pushing solutions have been selling everyone else's batteries lately. Sales personnel has never been Tesla's focus and for some reason Elon doesn't understand that Sales is the lifeblood of any company selling big ticket items. You can't just fill your sales centers with retail store caliber talent and pay and sells cars, and you sure as hell aren't going to sell but a fraction of Megapacks that way.

 

[GatorMeat]

FWIW I had one just an hour ago- exiting highway on the exit ramp (so unclear if it was on the v12 stack by then or not)- same as one I had a week ago in the same situation (but totally different exit ramp) where it seemed to think the shoulder was a lane and began diving into it...

Had another NON critical pure highway one (so still 11 presumably) where it needed to take an exit the traffic was backed up like half a mile to exit, it kept blissfully passing all the slowed/stopped cars 1 lane over, and then realizing just a couple hundred feet before the exit still doing 65 it had no chance to merge in I took over and managed to greatly annoy some folks getting in right at the exit ramp.

Only pure-city one I've had this week was when it got to a road closed no-thru traffic sign and just sat there with no idea what to do- so that was critical in the sense of wanting to not sit there forever, but not safety critical.

I had three today.
1. It wouldn't get into left turn lane and would have missed my turn.
The next 2 were novel edge cases for sure:
2. A road was temporarily blocked (for a special event) by cones with a cruiser with flashing lights and a cop standing in the road waving his light baton at me to stop and it wasn't going to.
3. At the next turn, nav was pointing to turn left, but it was coned off and a cop was blocking the option to go straight. Right was the only option, and even when I changed the left signal to right, the car wouldn't follow my lead and tried to go left.

 

[Discoducky]

FWIW I had one just an hour ago- exiting highway on the exit ramp (so unclear if it was on the v12 stack by then or not)- same as one I had a week ago in the same situation (but totally different exit ramp) where it seemed to think the shoulder was a lane and began diving into it...

Had another NON critical pure highway one (so still 11 presumably) where it needed to take an exit the traffic was backed up like half a mile to exit, it kept blissfully passing all the slowed/stopped cars 1 lane over, and then realizing just a couple hundred feet before the exit still doing 65 it had no chance to merge in I took over and managed to greatly annoy some folks getting in right at the exit ramp.

Only pure-city one I've had this week was when it got to a road closed no-thru traffic sign and just sat there with no idea what to do- so that was critical in the sense of wanting to not sit there forever, but not safety critical.

Yep, highway and advisory signs are not yet supported it would seem.

 

[loquitur]

NVDA

If you want more stocks in the 5 year category, though AMD is Avis to NVDA being Hertz, it's up +465% in five years.
Also, for general "consumer discretionary", fold in AAPL for +234% during that timespan.