Yeah... these are the guys making big buys around $300
The stock whipsawing is all short-term noise traders of various sorts.
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The stock whipsawing is all short-term noise traders of various sorts.
Buffet owns much of the western region utilities, the rail, as well as has significant holding around natural gas equipment, etc.
Buffett is in direct competition with Tesla Energy.
He also could see a rapidly increasing dent into his rail holdings happening over the next decade due to Tesla semi and other electric trucks platooning as well as other container advantages by going electric.
He got involved in attacking roof top solar in Nevada, of which he had a mutual common interest with the Kochs, who have also attacked roof top solar in many places around the country, just look at the history in Arizona for example.
I get that he is a legendary investor to many, but never forget that he doesn’t want anyone messing with his moats. He plays dirty behind the camera and the jolly persona. He isn’t a fan of competition in these areas and he literally says this every time he talks about moats and barriers to entry as good things.
Elon is about winning through innovation. Buffet is about winning by monopolization and regulating out completion.
He loves Tesla creating demand for electricity on his centralized grid... he just doesn’t like having electricity being produced and stored by distributed energy sources such as you and your roof. He surely doesn’t like the possibility of superchargers becoming self sufficient in charging the Tesla fleet either.
Ask the Vegas casinos about their attempts to leave NV Energy to either utiltize their own roof top solar or shop around for better rates...
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This is a fundamental yet common misunderstanding, that anyone advocating BEVs should try to avoid.
Anyone who drives a car knows the difference between position and velocity, with the latter being the rate of change of the former.
Similarly, power (measured in Watt) is the rate of change of energy (measured in Joule i.e. Watt/second or e.g. kWh).
The following statements are thus sensical (and possibly also true):
1) I charged my battery with a power of 18 kW for 5 minutes, so the added energy is 1.5 kWh.
2) At 60 miles/hour my car uses 300 Wh per mile, so if I drive 5 miles at that speed I will have spent 1.5 kWh.
3) At 60 miles/hour my car uses 300 Wh per mile, so if I drive 5 minutes at that speed I will have spent 1.5 kWh.
4) At 60 miles/hour my car uses 300 Wh per mile, so the power required to drive at that speed is 18 kW.
5) At 60 miles/hour my car uses (a power of) 18 kW, so if I drive for 5 minutes I will have spent 1.5 kWh.
Could not agree more:
Verified account Aug 29
So Morgan thinks Waymo is worth $175 bil yet their car cant get through intersections and is years away from $1 in revenue. But Tesla is fully valued to them. This is an example of udder ridiculousness.
Verified account Aug 29
So Morgan thinks Waymo is worth $175 bil yet their car cant get through intersections and is years away from $1 in revenue. But Tesla is fully valued to them. This is an example of udder ridiculousness.
Some People here demanding Elon to get off Twitter
But I don't want to miss that smile in the morning hours!
Verified account 7h7 hours ago
Replying to @CNN
Can Steve Bannon please insult me some more? Best PR I’ve had in a while
But I don't want to miss that smile in the morning hours!
Verified account 7h7 hours ago
Replying to @CNN
Can Steve Bannon please insult me some more? Best PR I’ve had in a while
Yeah - I'm still fighting the responses - thank goodness I'm on vacation and have all day to do so
Welcome to the world of pump and dump.Could not agree more:
Verified account Aug 29
So Morgan thinks Waymo is worth $175 bil yet their car cant get through intersections and is years away from $1 in revenue. But Tesla is fully valued to them. This is an example of udder ridiculousness.
FirebirdAlpha
Member
You don't find it at all worrying that, with over 400k reservations, you were able to purchase THREE Model 3s?
Moody's guidance is based on both 5k/week and the massive reservation list.
5k/week is under seige. Tesla's own guidance is 50k-55k this quarter, or 3800-4200 per week. Electrek published a report that they may miss this target. With many customers experiencing delivery delays (including Fred), this might be very problematic.
And customers like you raise questions as to the validity of the reservation list as a proxy for demand.
FirebirdAlpha
Member
Yeah - I'm still fighting the responses - thank goodness I'm on vacation and have all day to do so
So... If the SEC does bring charges against Elon for his tweets (naming a specific share price, saying "funding secured," or "only uncertainty thing is a sharehold vote"), how will your faith in Elon change?
Dan Detweiler
Active Member
If Tesla meets its targets and is profitable in Q3 and Q4 how will your short position change?
Dan
FirebirdAlpha
Member
If Tesla is cash flow positive in Q3 OR is GAAP profitable in Q3 without ZEVs or other regulatory credits, I will absolutely be covering.
If they have negative cash flow in Q3 in excess of 300M, they won't make it to the end of Q4. Covenants will force chapter 11. Especially true if they still keep 500M+ in planned CapEx for Q4 (1.2B remaining this year iirc).
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Why are SolarCity''s tweets protected?
Causalien
Prime 8 ball Oracle
After KrispyKreme's technical assault, I decided I Need to understand the electronics that handles the ai. So I started the search 2 days ago and finally found the thread with AP circuit board teardown and subsequent discussion today. Then took a deep dive into Nvidia's Parker (TA795SA-A2) general purpose gpu architecture and also the discreet Pascal GPU (GP106-510-KC) used. It was a deep dive, but I came out of it understanding that it is possible for Tesla to drop in a chip and enable Full Self driving. I will try to be as non technical and easy to understand as possible.
There were many experts chiming in both on this forum (for the sake of the person doing the teardown, will not link to it) and on Reddit's thread. However, not many have all the specialties required to see the full picture. I happen to have been an ASIC designer, firmware engineer, Machine Vision Application Engineer and in a jam, my managers have forced me to solder and troubleshoot PCBs so I know a bit of that. The only discipline I do not have is chip layout/routing and PCB layout/routing. (yes I jump ship every 3 years, jack of all trade and not an expert in any)
Here's my guess of how they use the hardware from looking at just the architecture.
Nvidia's Parker general purpose GPU is probably what Tesla intends to replace. Contained within is a multipurpose ARM Cpu and a small piece of its Discreet GPU. These GPUs have a bunch of units that process pixels in parallel and shove them into what they call Tensor units. Tensors units are programmable units that can be changed for other operations. I believe that these are used as the "Neurons" in neural network for decision making.
Some GPU parts not needed for AI
Nvidia, probably in a rush to bring a product to market, did not really design a GPU specifically for Neural Network, instead they brought their gaming discreet gpu and stuffed it with some control logics and called it a day. The Processing part of their GPU has a lot of waste. Things specifically made for gaming and displaying images can probably be taken out completely. Also all the calculations can probably be narrowed down to int8 once the neural network is sufficiently trained and the results can be locked down. For simple pre-processing, drawing contours and recognizing an object in an image. a 8 bit black and white image will suffice and TSLA uses the red spectrum to do that. Currently, many calculations passes through 16 bit floating points and 32 bit floating points (most likely necessary for training the neural network). These are very expensive operations and take up a lot of spaces.
AP 2.0 Model S, AP 2.0 Model 3, AP 2.5 Model 3
Model S tear down shows that it has 1 Parker general purpose and 1 discreet gpu. Model 3 tear down from Munroe shows 1 Parker general purpose and 2 discreet gpu. So there's some upgrade there. Then there's a potential AP 2.5 hardware showing up where extra connectors to a potential new board are present. In the future, there may be two board linked together to perform Full Self driving. My own guess is that it will evolve to two of the Nvidia board in parrallel for a while before Tesla have finished designing and testing their own chip. Both of the chips seems drop in replaceable as they both seems to sit on MXM. My guess is that there's a strong chance TSLA replaces both the General purpose and Discreet GPU.
I personally haven't done any calculation on how many chips is necessary to achieve full self driving. Potentially AP 2.0 Model S might have some trouble, but Tesla can just tapeout a chip with 7nm process for the older Model S which effectively doubles the amount of operations it can do. But this probably won't be possible if we stick to Nvidia solutions for the interim.
COST
However, the question is, is it worth it. Nvidia is forging ahead with their new plex 2.0 platform. More power consumption more heat generated, but it'd save TSLA the R&D cost as well as the design and tape out cost + equipment for analysis. I wouldn't be surprised that it will cost 1 mil or 2 to tapeout the first batch of chip (plus ~3$ a chip) and the chip design team of around 20 person x 100k salary (probalby 200k + if TSLA is using the best) x 2 years of time + equipment. On top of that, Taping out is a very rigid process and cannot be modified too much on the fly. There's only so many Engineering Change order you can do before the mass production.
What is so bad with sticking with NVidia and just increase cooling and power consumption, which was the reason why KrispyKreme was attacking Tsla's automated driving electronics. That reasoning is lost to me.
There were many experts chiming in both on this forum (for the sake of the person doing the teardown, will not link to it) and on Reddit's thread. However, not many have all the specialties required to see the full picture. I happen to have been an ASIC designer, firmware engineer, Machine Vision Application Engineer and in a jam, my managers have forced me to solder and troubleshoot PCBs so I know a bit of that. The only discipline I do not have is chip layout/routing and PCB layout/routing. (yes I jump ship every 3 years, jack of all trade and not an expert in any)
Here's my guess of how they use the hardware from looking at just the architecture.
Nvidia's Parker general purpose GPU is probably what Tesla intends to replace. Contained within is a multipurpose ARM Cpu and a small piece of its Discreet GPU. These GPUs have a bunch of units that process pixels in parallel and shove them into what they call Tensor units. Tensors units are programmable units that can be changed for other operations. I believe that these are used as the "Neurons" in neural network for decision making.
Some GPU parts not needed for AI
Nvidia, probably in a rush to bring a product to market, did not really design a GPU specifically for Neural Network, instead they brought their gaming discreet gpu and stuffed it with some control logics and called it a day. The Processing part of their GPU has a lot of waste. Things specifically made for gaming and displaying images can probably be taken out completely. Also all the calculations can probably be narrowed down to int8 once the neural network is sufficiently trained and the results can be locked down. For simple pre-processing, drawing contours and recognizing an object in an image. a 8 bit black and white image will suffice and TSLA uses the red spectrum to do that. Currently, many calculations passes through 16 bit floating points and 32 bit floating points (most likely necessary for training the neural network). These are very expensive operations and take up a lot of spaces.
AP 2.0 Model S, AP 2.0 Model 3, AP 2.5 Model 3
Model S tear down shows that it has 1 Parker general purpose and 1 discreet gpu. Model 3 tear down from Munroe shows 1 Parker general purpose and 2 discreet gpu. So there's some upgrade there. Then there's a potential AP 2.5 hardware showing up where extra connectors to a potential new board are present. In the future, there may be two board linked together to perform Full Self driving. My own guess is that it will evolve to two of the Nvidia board in parrallel for a while before Tesla have finished designing and testing their own chip. Both of the chips seems drop in replaceable as they both seems to sit on MXM. My guess is that there's a strong chance TSLA replaces both the General purpose and Discreet GPU.
I personally haven't done any calculation on how many chips is necessary to achieve full self driving. Potentially AP 2.0 Model S might have some trouble, but Tesla can just tapeout a chip with 7nm process for the older Model S which effectively doubles the amount of operations it can do. But this probably won't be possible if we stick to Nvidia solutions for the interim.
COST
However, the question is, is it worth it. Nvidia is forging ahead with their new plex 2.0 platform. More power consumption more heat generated, but it'd save TSLA the R&D cost as well as the design and tape out cost + equipment for analysis. I wouldn't be surprised that it will cost 1 mil or 2 to tapeout the first batch of chip (plus ~3$ a chip) and the chip design team of around 20 person x 100k salary (probalby 200k + if TSLA is using the best) x 2 years of time + equipment. On top of that, Taping out is a very rigid process and cannot be modified too much on the fly. There's only so many Engineering Change order you can do before the mass production.
What is so bad with sticking with NVidia and just increase cooling and power consumption, which was the reason why KrispyKreme was attacking Tsla's automated driving electronics. That reasoning is lost to me.
Surely you know that not all of the reservations are in North America and a significant percentage of people want versions which are not yet available and priority was given to certain customers.
The issue I have is that many shorts seem to engage in wishful thinking rather than accept facts.
I think I leaned a long time ago that the very exact size of actual sugar cubes derives from the railroad gauge in a complicated formula from so many sugars in a box, so many boxes in a crate, so many crates in a freight car etc. Most likey the same applies to standard module for freight containers. Which also dictates how big trucks are.
Fact Checking
Well-Known Member
Even if standard container dimensions were basically random numbers, their biggest value is in their standard size, i.e. the size is used by everyone in global manufacturing and logistics.
Tesla isn't going to change it - it won't happen, ever.
- 450k reservations to be exact (last time reported) and that`s a global number. It`s anyone guess how much of that is North America.
- They are only producing the highest end versions right now - Long range, LR AWD and P and white seats are exclusive to the top of the line.
We don`t have any numbers on this, but when I did a deep dive into Norway Model S deliveries last year (Q3 2017 data), I found that 55% took the lowest trim, the S75/S75D. I wouldn`t be surprised if Model 3 had an even higher number than that, as many people who only drove lot less expensive cars in the past (yours truly included) may be condescending buying the base Model 3 as the most expensive care they have ever owned. Tesla`s own data suggest most trade-ins already coming from cheaper cars like Cicivs and Priuses (Prii?). And these are your high end customers right now.
But even with only 55% going SR, you are looking at ~100K in NA going for LR, LR AWD or P. At the end of August we should already be around 60k model 3s delivered and if you go to the Tesla order page right now it estimates SR only being available in 5-8 months in the US... you do the math.
PS: oh and on that Electrek article.... they only said tesla may come in at the lower end of the 50-55k projection.
Fact Checking
Well-Known Member
Note that on the conference call they mentioned that they have functional, tested, compatible field-test units already, and successfully tested them on all vehicle variants. This is what Pete Bannon said on the CC:
"My team is leading currently the Hardware 3 development. The chips are up and working, and we have drop-in replacements for S, X and 3, all have been driven in the field. They support the current networks running today in the car at full frame rates with a lot of idle cycles to spare. So, I think we're all really excited about what Andrej and his team will be able to do with this hardware in the future."
This suggests they are in a very advanced stage:
- they already taped out the layout a couple of times and bootstrapped the AI chip, for a target process - for example for 14nm. They know who is making the chips and they have probably negotiated the exact volume pricing as well.
- they have developed and tested the glue, the firmware, the interfaces and the host CPU software (x86 - see below).
- they have a drop-in computing blade for all relevant vehicle platforms
My other guess is that they eliminated the ARM aspect of Nvidia's blade entirely, and are interfacing the x86 host CPUs (which I suspect runs the main vehicle control loop and Autopilot logic) to the AI chip directly. But this is very speculative, just based on the probable design of their system - and my guess could be wrong: it would cost Tesla very little to license a generic ARM core and integrate it into their AI-chip (Pete Bannon has done that at Apple) - but maybe they avoided even that step.
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