Tesla Q1 2020 Update | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Q1 2020 Update

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222 pointsvaibhavgandhi12372 comments

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Since, things are slow, my notes....

Misc:

- Fremont plant idle since March 23rd

- raised 2.3B in February, which seems really well timed now

- Musk venting with "FREE AMERICA NOW" tweet makes him seem almost crazy

- can see why Elon is going crazy on twitter, he'd almost turned around Telsa and now they may be in the worst cash crunch of their long life

- Shanghai Giga reopened on Feb 10th, showing the importance of multiple factories around the world( around 150,000 in capacity once they get going for Model 3, Model Y not yet and should be incremental on top of Model 3 number)

- Berlin Giga scheduled to start producing Model Y's in 2021, so capex drain for rest of year and probably into 2021

- TSLA trying to run an amazon HQ2 like process for Truck and Model Y factories, look for small, southern, and poor cities to bid and probably win

Numbers:

- 1Q Revenue $5.99B vs Estimate $5.81B

- 1Q Free Cash Flow ($895M) vs Estimate ($604.4M)

- GAAP net income of $16M for 1Q

- sale of ZEV in 1Q $354 million vs $133 million from Q4, not going to have this to bail out their quater in 2Q

- 35 Megawatts of solar( down by about a third Q/Q)

- sitting on $8.1B of cash, sweet!! but burn rate is approx ($3-4B) a year

After:

- semi not until 2021

- not reaffirming numbers, will check in again in 2Q, makes sense

Want to know:

- Solar roof? give up or start committing, hard to sell to consumer during shutdown

- battery storage for energy, growth area or sign of lack of focus and minor distraction to core business?

inventory growth? Building cars no one is buying or still not able to keep up with growth or finally found balance between the two?

- Will Elon stop with tweets that hurt Tesla? Appoint a CEO, or COO to run things to take pressure of Elon?

Also want to point out that TSLA is up about ~6-7% in after-hours trading

Edit: accuracy

I've noticed that companies' stock prices don't always correlate to the performance of their past quarter. Wonder why

Stock price is forward looking, not past.

Some combination of momentum with the market or sector, pricing in future growth, an earnings call that does a good job explaining the bad quarter.

If the news is expected to be bad, but is actually less bad than anticipated, then the stock goes up, even if it's bad. There's been a lot of that lately.

In what sense do you mean they don't correlate to performance? Overperforming or underperforming expectations will correlate very highly to the way the stock moves on the news

Change in stock price on earnings news tends to correlate to the performance relative to expectations. The estimated performance is already priced in, so the movement will be based on how much better or worse the actual results were than the estimated/anticipated ones. In this case, it was obviously a bad quarter for Tesla, but the bump suggests that traders expected it to be even worse.

To add something to this, traders have their own expectations of how companies will perform relative to their published estimates. I used to work at a unicorn that would consistently exceed its published estimates, and the stock price took a non-trivial hit the first time it ever met them.

> but the bump suggests that traders expected it to be even worse.

You're a bit too kind with your wording, it doesn't _suggests_ so much as it literally _means_ that. Plenty of websites show you what investors are expecting, if Tesla says more/less price fluctuates accordingly.

Normally, and apparently in this case, yes. It is possible for a stock to go up on earnings that don't beat expectations though, due to other concurrent factors, like unexpected positive news regarding future prospects, or even an unrelated broad market movement.

> Plenty of websites show you what investors are expecting

Yes and no. Plenty of websites make predictions. Most money in the market however is controlled by institutions that don't tell you shit about what they are expecting or anything else that they aren't legally required to tell you.

You buy stocks based on what you think they’ll do next, not what they did previously.

Stock price is extremely sensitive to both guidance from the company and analysis. There's almost always an analyst consensus on the expected performance of the stock given the knowns about the companys performance and the market. The stock is usually pegged right at that consensus, so if they lose less money than than the consensus was expecting (even if they lost more money) then the price goes up.

Maybe the market is not so intelligent after all.

After-hours trading doesn't necessarily mean much due to low liquidity and volume. You can get high swing for reasonably low volume in a single after-market trade.

Someone _please_ hire someone to follow EM with a phone jammer on. I can't take his BS anymore. Why do smart people like to have strong opinions on subjects they are not expert in?

(Disclosure: I own TSLA stocks.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

That's the opposite, dumb people believing their smart at everything, OP said smart people.

That's how democratic societies are typically intended to work; on issues of great social importance, everyone's encouraged to think about them and decide what they'd like to happen.

I think it's also how genius works. When you're really good at one thing, there's the risk of thinking you're good at everything.

Is that genius? Because it seems to be common in the unintelligent as well.

But without having the one thing they're really good at, then.

That's not genius. That's arrogance.

Truly smart people know that their abilities and success are fleeting and do not extend beyond their own little sphere. And if they do venture beyond they are humble and learn from the wisdom of experts. They never, ever think they are good at everything.

That just depends on what you mean by 'smart'. Plenty of people are intelligent, competent, have great ability at something, but lack the wisdom to recognise their limits.

It is indeed arrogance, but it is absolutely common in smart people. At least for some kinds of smarts.

Lots of average people tell us what "truly smart people" are like. No one actually knows.

The first thing I do when Elon posts something stupid is look at the timestamp. The later, the crazier. One of the ones mentioned in this thread was posted around 12:15 am. Put the phone down and go to bed, dude.

I love this comment so much, though i can't decide if it is sarcasm or not.

Musk has made a career breaking norms, and at times, rules. If you are an investor in $MUSK_CORP, you are frankly buying into that eccentricity. Personally, i love it for all the productivity and discomfort it brings us. He makes us think, if nothing else.

Musk is a maverick. Maybe 90% of the time that energy is channeled productively. As for the other 10%? Cost of doing business as far as i'm concerned. In an age when the younger generation seems to want to eat the rich, Musk stands out as someone using his time and money for good. The apparent flaws are cornerstone to his genius, just run amok.

There is nothing notable or good about his response to COVID-19.

It's been a disgraceful example of how a public figure should not act if they care about people's lives.

The lives of young people and the unemployed must be considered in the equation as well because it is unlikely we will have a vaccine anytime soon.

Because everyone likes to have opinions on things, and is encouraged by society to judge, review, critique and opine about every experience.

I’m so fed up of this growth of shaming everyone who isn’t an expert for speaking “out of turn”.

It has the “you should only do things that benefit me” entitlement of the recent demands on open source developers, along with the “know your place” implicit putdown, and the lameness of people who critic recipe authors for blogging about their lives instead of just giving me the recipe because I’m so important. It’s a terrible trend and if all I can do is ineffectually downvote you once, I will.

I fully expect you to reply that your investment in getting free money from Tesla employees is more important than Musk’s freedom of speech and right to be an individual and I preemptively disagree. If you can’t take his BS, don’t read it.

I think it is a mistake to assume that Elon's opinion on this is uninformed. People were dragging him and Tesla for supposedly procuring and distributing the "wrong kind" of ventilator a couple weeks ago and it turned out that the type they were sending out was the one that was delivering the best patient outcomes. Asked later he said he chose to focus on that type after talking to doctors in China about their experience.

The Tesla factory in China has been open for almost 2 months now post outbreak so I imagine their experience with that informs what can be done safely and effectively at their US factory.

It's ironic the number of things that Elon Musk and his companies have pulled off that many claimed were impossible and yet people's first assumption when Elon Tweets something w/o explanation is that he must be uninformed and talking out of his butt.

>- Musk venting with "FREE AMERICA NOW" tweet makes him seem almost crazy

Musk is on the verge of a three quarter of billion dollar windfall if Tesla's six month average market cap exceeds $100b. I would guess that motivates his desire to open as soon as possible.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-stocks-musk/teslas-...

I doubt it. He's worth $38.5 billion; $26b of that is in Tesla. He can shave off hundreds of millions of dollars from that any day of the week - if he cared to do so.

The compensation package is relatively small compared to his existing wealth already contained in Tesla. Wanting the company to succeed is what most likely motivates him, not the compensation package (which is aligned with his existing interests, even if you think he's primarily in it for the $26b (little evidence to support that, he's personally loaded with debt because he refuses to sell, that's called being all in; any good financial advisor would call it dangerous concentration and a poor choice to take on debt instead of selling)).

Then why have a compensation package like that if it's just a rounding error for him? Maybe people like him can't stand to lose out on a dollar, especially when they believe they deserve it.

Going to Mars isn't cheap.

Musk is worth $38.5 billion based on his current Tesla stock holdings at their current valuation.

If he hits the trigger in his compensation package, he gets even more Tesla stock which will vastly increase his net worth on paper

Also, Musk is loaded with debt because he leveraged his stock holdings to live a very lavish lifestyle, including multiple residential properties, vehicles, and very expensive dining choices.

There are no very expensive vehicles or dining choices when you’re worth tens of billions. It’s literally meaningless, like it would be for me if all my meals for a year cost me 1% of a penny.

What about a catered party for 500 with staff and celebrity chef? The wealthy can throw lavish events that are not necessarily a drop in the bucket, especially if common.

Let's say this thing costs $200 per person, so $100k per party. Let's say he does this every day (or throws a 3.5x as lavish party twice a week), that's $36.5M per year. He can do this for 10 years and it will still literally be a rounding error in his wealth.

Of his current wealth on paper, yes.

But almost all of Elon's wealth is in the form of his stock holdings, and stocks fluctuate in price. Moreover, his cash is almost all leveraged from his stock, and if the price collapses again, he could be wiped out by the margin call.

I want to read a book (or a few!) full of these dynamics of wealth - what it means to be paper wealthy, what leveraging that can do for your lifestyle, and why people live in fear of the margin call. Can I please ask you for any recommendations?

Or....he structured it as "let me borrow 60% of X, and here as some shares worth X as collateral.". Aka synthetically manufactured selling shared without actually doing it in order to fund his lifestyle.

Depending on the advance rate (the 60% in this case), someone will do that deal.

To take it to the absurd. If Elon wanted to fund his $35M daily party habit in the comment above, and he said to a bank "here is 3 billion in stock as pledged collateral which you can sell when the value goes to $500M but there's no recourse. Cool? Cool. " You would do that deal.

So the margin call concept does not seem realistic.

A $35m daily party habit would cause problems to Elon's wealth, among other things.

Actually verifiably not true, he had a margin call just last year, the stock hit $180.

Yet again people downvoting the truth.

How is that related to what I said? Did he have a margin call because his dining choices are too expensive, or because he's borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars against a volatile stock?

Also, since we're talking about what's "verifiably true", do you have any proof that he even had a margin call?

Very expensive dining choices? How much truffled avocado toast do you have to eat to make a dent in his kind of wealth?

You do know he almost went bankrupt awhile back - starting companies is incredibly expensive and his wealth is in the ownership of the companies - not just an investment portfolio.

> If he hits the trigger in his compensation package, he gets even more Tesla stock which will vastly increase his net worth on paper.

Elon currently holds ~34 million shares of Tesla. If TSLA market cap hits a 6-month running average of $100 billion his first of 12 tranches of stock options vest, which is 1.69 million shares at $350 per share.

Musk will spend $591 million to buy the 1.69 million shares, which on the open market are worth $1.352 billion. What actually happens is he executes the options and immediately sells shares to cover the execution cost, for a net gain of ~950k shares. He then also has to sell shares to cover the taxes due at the time of exercise, which we'll under-estimate at 20% of the profit ($450 * 1.69 million * 20%) = $152 million. That's another 190,000 shares gone. Now we're down to a net gain of 760k shares on the 1.69 million.

So when the tranche vests, he will own ~2.2% more TSLA stock than he did the day prior. Best case. If tax rate is higher, which it is because California, it's probably less than a 2% bump to Elon's overall TSLA holding.

EDIT: Oh, one other thing. Any shares which are not sold to cover the strike price and the taxes due I believe must be held by Elon at least 10 years before he can sell any.

So the primary effects of hitting a tranche are 1) it generates $591 million of cash flow for Tesla, a nice equity raise. 2) it generates at least $150 million in tax revenue for We The People.

2.2% more stock is a huge amount of stock when you're already talking about the company's biggest individual shareholder.

That aside, a HNWI would never liquidate stock to exercise options or to pay taxes, since each action triggers a realization event and an associated tax liability. They would take out loans secured by the stock, since that doesn't result in a huge tax bill. So in the real world, Musk would use the $591 million cash he already has in the bank (having previously taken out loans against his Tesla shares) and use that to exercise his options. He would then use some of the remaining few billion in his bank account (again, from the loans secured by his Tesla shares) to pay any state and federal taxes owed. The only time HNWIs deliberately trigger taxable events is when they have losses or credits to absorb the resultant tax liability.

I believe that the taxable event happens when the option is exercised, whether any shares are sold or not. Actually selling the shares doesn’t change the amount of tax due.

I don’t know that he will sell shares to cover the strike price or the taxes, but I can say certainly it is explicitly permitted for him to sell shares only for that reason. Otherwise they must be held for at least (EDIT) 5 years post exercise.

He can simply hold the vested option but not exercise it. All options expire by 2028, and all vested options must be exercised within 1 year if he loses the CEO title. He does not gain any shareholder rights from those shares until the options are exercised. So this delays the payment of the strike price and taxes, but does not alter the basic math.

In short, a 2% bump in his equity position is below the noise floor of the daily price change of the actual shares. Frankly it almost makes you wonder what’s the point. Once you own double digit percentages of an asset that could appreciate more than 10x it’s more important to focus on the size of the pie than the size of your slice.

The vast change in Elon’s wealth was through achieving an IPO and getting the share value upwards of $800. An extra few million shares to him is the same as the difference between selling on a Monday or a Tuesday.

This might make sense for $38.5 million.

For $38.5 billion, no lifestyle choice in the world has any impact on that money.

Elon Musk does not have $38.5 billion in unencumbered cash. Almost all of his cash is from loans taken against his Tesla stock.

If Tesla stock loses value, Elon Musk faces the risk of a margin call. In fact, this almost happened last year and the year before. It's one of the reasons that he wastes so much time going after shorts; it's not for fun--it's a matter of personal financial survival.

People don’t get and stay rich by not earning money.

Unless you say inherited a giant amount from your family, which can cover a lifetime amount of idiocy. Hmm.

Bonus probably goes straight to spacex

A military contactor? Not sure if you are aware but the money goes from corruption to private individual, not the other way around.

It's his personal toy, that just happens to take some military contracts

> Monday’s rally put Tesla’s market capitalization at $145 billion. Importantly for Musk, its stock market value reached a six-month average of $96 billion. Hitting a six-month average of $100 billion would trigger the vesting of the first of 12 tranches of options granted to the billionaire to buy Tesla stock as part of his two-year-old pay package.

> Each tranche gives Musk the option to buy 1.69 million Tesla shares at $350.02 each. Taking Monday’s Tesla closing stock price of $798.75 as an example, Musk could sell those shares for a profit of $758 million.

So it's $750m profit in each of the 12 tranches (assuming $TLSA holds)! That's nearly $9B in profit.

No. Elon can’t won’t sell his existing shares because he doesn’t want to dilute his voting power. Therefore, to spend money without borrowing, and to repay the debt he has already borrowed against his existing shares, he needs new shares. This makes them very valuable to him.

Or it might be the fact that he doesn't want a government to ruin his business when he believes the reasons for the lockdown are not good enough.

He has to keep these stocks for 5 years and to get even more money he need to hit even higher targets. Short term trying to hit one of those points is not really productive and that is not how he has ever operated.

- Will Elon stop with tweets that hurt Tesla? Appoint a CEO, or COO to run things to take pressure of Elon?

I have read this from so many people for the last 5 years all the time. Sure, the tweets show that Elon wants faster growth, and frustrated, and I didn't like that tweet either, but if you want a conservative CEO, buy IBM or Oracle stocks, please leave Tesla alone.

I think they may have been referring to more of a SpaceX leadership situation.

I just don't want a batshit crazy person running a company I invest in.

The batshit crazy person that managed to turn the company around?

But he’s the reason it’s a company worth investing in...

Pretty easy to miss investing in TSLA. FYI.

Then don't invest?

Seems like that would be a good personal indicator to not invest in Tesla then?

A lot of people invest in Tesla in part because it is run by a “batshit crazy” person, though I’m sure those investors might phrase it differently.

You say "batshit crazy", I say bold, forward thinking and disruptive... (:

I invested in Tesla because Elon is obsessive and bat shit crazy. To each their own risk adjusted investment strategies.

BRK.B for some, 420 funding secured for others. I'm paying for the crazy. Sometimes the crazy bites back, but them the breaks.

I am still debating if he is a sociopath or a psychopath.

From what I understand, they are the same thing. And many CEOs are apparently sociopaths.

And I think Musk is clearly one of the better ones. Admittedly crazy and dangerous when he starts picking stupid internet fights, but when he focuses on building his companies, he seems to work miracles, and he does seem to care about people and the planet, which is more than I can say from many others. There are plenty of psychopathic CEOs that suck at their job (like the one currently in the White House).

Batshit crazy? He just turned around Tesla, in an industry, where the last startup to succeed was over 80 years ago. Buy some Treasury bonds instead?

I don't know how you define "last startup to succeed", but... Hummer (1992, 28 years ago), Pagani (1992), McLaren (1985, 34 years ago), Kia (1974, 45 years ago), Hyundai (1967, 52 years ago) and even Jeep (1946, 74 years ago) and Saab (1945) seem like they would qualify as well?

Hummer and Jeep both had their original vehicle designs funded by the US military. None of the rest of those are US companies.

I'm not the best in expressing this, but I believe to think like Elon Musk (except I'm lazy and not that bright), I think there are quite a few that think like Elon. Yes, I know how it sounds, but if you're obsessed about truth there's a chance you think like him as well.

IMO Elon Musk is rational and also expressive. He thinks from first principles (aka how does the world really work?) and he communicates that way.

Most people can't handle that. They can't handle when someone is expressive (aka the Tesla @ 420 tweet, he simply expresses his opinion) or reasoning from first principles (weed is legal right? Yea, might smoke it, might not, does it matter? New experience is new data, hmm, doesn't seem too interesting).

They think he's insane. He isn't. He does live a bit in a bubble where he sometimes forgets that other people are judgmental, mostly in a conservative sense (compared to how he thinks). But those judgmental people don't see one thing: the guy is hunting for truth, finding it and he applies it to its product.

Nothing beats truth* (the fact that we're using computers now and not an abacus is evidence of that)

* All the standard considerations of science apply (falsification, learning from your mistakes and so on).

> Most people can't handle that

Right, we can't handle a billionaire demanding that everyone risk their lives to boost his stock price.

And since when are arguments derived from first principles delivered in 3 word all-caps tweets?

You think Elon Musk's motivation is greed? That people going back to work or not will greatly affect his lifestyle?

Is there any nuance when it comes to Elon Musk, or only fan-boys and haters?

I haven't seen him announce that he would make Tesla or Space X a non-profit so it's gotta be at least a little bit about money.

Not the OP. I don't think his motivation is greed in a strictly financial sense but he's a complete narcissist. When a government guy comes and shuts his factory down due to a pandemic he apparently can't live with the fact that he's a non-essential business and needs to lay low for a while.

It's the same thing with the mini-submarine paedophile fiasco. Some regular dude who has experience in what he's actually talking about tells him to go away and he can't handle it because he thinks he's Tony Stark or something.

I don't think his eccentric behaviour really leaves much space for nuance, that's not really on anyone commenting here.

He has lofty goals that require massive resources. Each also requires a long timeline. Specifically he is attempting to populate another planet, link computers to brains and turn transportation green. Each is an earth shattering accomplishment on their own. He is trying to do all 3 and in his mind at least he is driven by saving humanity not greed. He feels the current restrictions are going to have severe impact on what are for him lifetime goals.

Now is it narcissistic to think that he has to do it? Maybe. Often times though I would think that the people that changed our way of life have to be narcissistic. Gates, Jobs, Rockefeller, Ford, Edison. They are real people with flaws but sometimes those flaws also drive them. Not malignant narcissistic though, there is a difference.

He is definitely ill served by his twitter account though and these recent tweets are not great in regards to the opinions of many of those that support him.

Along the lines of what others have said elsewhere in this thread:

No one reasonable is criticizing Musk for being a visionary CEO, someone who is interested in taking risks that overcome historically difficult challenges.

They're criticizing him going completely off the handle; calling someone a pedophile on Twitter when they disagree with him, talking completely out of his ass about "taking the company private", or trying to play armchair epidemiologist when he _clearly_ has a vested interest in a potentially risky avenue of behavior.

I'm very happy to see the things that SpaceX has achieved [0] and I'm also happy that Tesla has done such a good job popularizing EVs [1], but I'm blown the fuck away whenever I see people responding to _entirely justified_ criticisms of Elon's character by pointing out what he's accomplished and how lofty the rest of his goals are.

Do we just not have standards for people in Musk's position? Do folks really think it's reasonable for someone to comport themselves the way he _routinely_ does?

[0] Although let's be honest, the company treats its employees pretty damn badly.

[1] Accurately representing the self-driving capabilities of their vehicles, on the other hand, leaves quite a bit to be desired.

I mean at least 45% of the country things its totally fine for the president of the united states to 'comport themselves the way he _routinely_ does' so I have to think that many people are willing to overlook how Musk acts. For the most part I am too (in regards to Musk), I don't expect perfection from business leaders. He is a flawed person as are we all. Unfortunately for him he chooses to amplify his flaws to a massive twitter following.

I think the guy is a once in a life time visionary. With that said I would never want to work for him but I hope he succeeds.

I feel like a there is a large percentage of the population that doesn't realize just how dire things are getting as a direct result of these lockdowns.

It really is frightening and there are some strong responses, both rational and irrational on many sides.

Um, it could greatly depending on how Tesla is affected by this current lockdown and the recession afterwards. Close to half of Elon Musk's stock has been used in loans to finance his lifestyle of buying mansions, flying around in a private jet, and financing his other unprofitable companies.

If the price of Tesla stock ever goes down too far his whole empire risks crumpling.

I don't get the first sentence fully. I guess it's a sarcastic remark about the 420 price, but I can't see how it "risks people their lives". Hmm... now that I think about it, 420... weed? I wonder if he made that as a suble joke, in any case. I do get your second point, let me go into that.

I have friends who have a lot of difficulty distinguishing expressiveness and rationality. I can't do that in a post.

The best way to see the difference: find a CS/psychologically-minded person that is capable of being rational but has a default state of being creative. Yep, kind of describing myself here (= easiest description to give). They're quite easy to spot:

- they have some creative thing they like (drawing, music, anything pertaining to multimedia)

- they are also capable of going from existential and psychedelic to rational and focused within one second

- they are capable of explaining why they act crazy when they do and tell you their emotional, rational perspective on it (on parties, for example, it has a lot of instrumental value).

Hangout with them for a year. And you'll see how expressiveness is mixed with rationality.

FYI the 3 word all-caps tweet is the expressive part of Elon.

Also, I could be wrong about all of this obviously, this is simply my current opinion about it, I thought quite a bit about it (also about my biases, can't rule them out) and I think I'm right but I've been proven wrong (and right) in beautiful ways before in my life. So I could be (horribly) wrong.

Tesla should have considered that before announcing in their Annual Report that they considered @tesla and @elon to be "Official Company Statements", then, no?

> They can't handle when someone is expressive (aka the Tesla @ 420 tweet, he simply expresses his opinion)

He tweeted about having money to take Tesla private, which from what I remember turned out to be false. Lying is not being expressive, it's just that: lying.

I don't know enough about this (how CEOs ought to behave) and I don't know to what extent Elon Musk cares.

But I do know what I'd think in his position: I'd care more about freedom of speech. I believe that I should be capable of saying whatever I want (usual restrictions apply, hate speech etc.). Even if that means that I'm tweeting on a social platform about the share price.

Twitter is not a platform where official stuff should be on. That is what press releases are for. If people believe Twitter, then where should I go (as the new imagined Tesla CEO) to just say whatever the hell I want?

In any case, that's how I would think about it.

You're correct though, it is lying. Lying is a consequence of saying whatever you want to say.

When he wrote that tweet, I thought nothing of it. I just thought that it was his own private ideas that he wrote out in the world because he likes to interact. I know how naive that sounds, but I would be that naive as Tesla's new imagned CEO. And there are a few hints that Elon might be that as well. But of course, that's a different discussion whether he actually is (on paper: probably not, when I look at his behavior: well... it could be).

Actually there was a big difference between this tweet (expressing his opinion) and the 420 tweet, which was a statement on a material fact. There exist special laws for CEOs of all public companies, and he should be extremely careful about those statements. The new CFO helps Elon with those though, and Elon just gives really boring statements about the future numbers (as opposed to the products, where he can get more crazy).

I think those "special laws" harm me as an investor. Corporate speak does not make my job as an investor any easier.

As an investor in Tesla, it's easy to agree. As an investor in Enron, prior, I'm not sure.

But were Enron's issues related to CEO speech, or were they just massive accounting fraud?

I can be in favor of more free communication but still vehemently opposed to misreporting. For that matter, I think it is terrible that we don't require more details in financial statements as it is.

> Twitter is not a platform where official stuff should be on. That is what press releases are for. If people believe Twitter, then where should I go (as the new imagined Tesla CEO) to just say whatever the hell I want?

It doesn't or didn't have to be. Tesla were the ones who stated in their Annual Reports that they considered Tesla and Elon's Twitters to be official sources for Tesla information.

This wasn't forced on him as a matter of censorship. _He_ chose that, his bed to lie in.

If you're making claims like this where opinions are polarized, then a source would be handy. I could Google, but too lazy (see above), I'll simply assume what you say is correct.

I didn't know this (anyone who assumes I spend a lot of time on reading about Elon is wrong). If he knew this then it was stupid.

If he ought to know this but he didn't, then I get it. Don't get me wrong, that should be reprimanded by the SEC, but I wouldn't call it stupid. It simply means you're (perhaps too) focused on other priorities.

There were many times where I ought to know things about the Dutch law as well and I didn't and I got burned [1]. You can't know everything, I'd rather pay the fine so I can focus my time on more interesting things.

[1]

a) Too late with VAT without having anything too declare.

b) Going on a public road that I wasn't allowed to go in between certain times, I didn't even know it was a thing and I didn't read the signage fast enough. Now I know that municipalities are allowed to block people from other municipalities.

Sure. Tesla’s 8-K filing (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000119312513...):

> For additional information, please follow Elon Musk’s and Tesla’s Twitter accounts.

This is the silliest defense I've read.

Stop making excuses for him and treating him like a child.

See, it's precisely this cult of personality I can't stand about Tesla.

I don't like the impression either.

With that said, if I were to comment on you, I wouldn't use words like "cult of personality". I'd try to make a comment about what I observe about the person, how I interpret that and how I think that to be wrong (and "wrong" is strongly worded here).

Unfortunately, it also takes more typing effort.

He thinks from first principles (aka how does the world really work?) and he communicates that way.

Everyone does that. Most of us just aren't stupid until to think that this means we suddenly experts in fields we know nothing about, especially when the "first principles" Musk deals with are just simplified abstractions of very complicated subjects.

Or all we all forgetting that Musk has claimed that a substance which kills people will cure coronavirus (it doesn't), that children are immune (they're not), and that coronavirus is less deadly than the seasonal flu (it's not)?

Moreover, Musk has demonstrated time and time again that he refuses to use scientific methods in his "reasoning" from "first principles", since when confronted with evidence that he is wrong he triples down on his assertions and begins making personal attacks on anyone who disagrees with him.

You have a couple of points that I would need to look into. I do remember that he was a bit too fast with certain things (seems to be an ailment of SV in general, fail fast and all that).

The comment that he acts like an expert where he isn't is probably a valid one (haven't looked into it, I'm hearing it sometimes though).

> Everyone does that.

You have a completely different social circle than me then. Some people don't believe in atoms, they believe in aura's.

You're right in all of these, he doesn't care about the virus, because he's focused on stopping global warming and getting to Mars. Also he's probably not the nicest person with everybody, as that's also not his focus.

I would be much more worried if he stopped developing the autopilot hardware for example, thinking that the current

version has enough capacity for the necessary calculations. The truth is, even if it has (with the right algorithm), more computations mean that self driving can launch earlier.

It would be better for example if the Model Y wouldn't be manufactured with lots of errors that QA should have caught, but that's also secondary to getting self driving, which is an extremely hard problem.

If Elon were truly focused on getting to Mars he would put more effort into robotics, agriculture/hydroponics, non-solar power generation and other things that would actually matter for a Martian mission, rather than wasting his money[1] into PR stunts like Boring Co which still haven't done anything that other boring companies have been doing for decades at bigger scale in far more complicated terrains and situations.

Tesla's inability to handle basic QA of their primary business activity nearly killed the company and doesn't speak well of their ability to properly QA something infinitely more complex like self-driving, especially when they've chosen to limit the available hardware.

[1] Boring Co is actually primarily financed by Tesla, and uses Tesla and SpaceX supplies and equipment, so Elon's not even investing his own money. He's investing other people's money and running.

I don't think people doubt his smarts or business acumen. I'm really impressed by the guy. But his behaviour also shows him to be reckless and a disregard for the rules. This is great to an extent when building a business but he just really has to rein it in with regards to his publicly traded companies, that shouldn't be too much to ask.

Well, we all know he's willing to lose it all.

> he just really has to rein it in with regards to his publicly traded companies, that shouldn't be too much to ask.

Sounds fair enough

> They can't handle when someone is expressive (aka the Tesla @ 420 tweet, he simply expresses his opinion)

How is faking a buyout offer for your company expressive? That's fraudulent.

> (weed is legal right? Yea, might smoke it, might not, does it matter? New experience is new data, hmm, doesn't seem too interesting).

Smoking weed on Joe Rogan's podcast forced the government to spend $2 million investigating the drug policies at SpaceX. Government contractors, especially those with security clearance are expected to have strict drug policies. Doing so sets an obviously bad example to all of your employees.

> They think he's insane. He isn't.

People don't think he's insane, they think he's a narcissist who is willing to say almost anything in order to satisfy his own ego or to meet some goal.

He needs to save his cousin's failing solar company, so he goes on stage with a fake product that has never come to fruition.

He needs to keep his shares a higher price in order to meet the debt convert convenants on some of his loans, so he fakes a buyout offer.

He has a cave diver see through his cynical PR move to insert himself in an international crisis, so he calls him a pedophile and pays a guy to try to dig up dirt on him.

He needs to re-open his Fremont factory in order to not keep burning cash in Q2, so he rails against "fascist policies" that close it down.

This isn't insanity; it's self-serving narcissism.

I felt that way and sold most of my stock after one of his previous tirades. I also thought that whole truck debacle would hurt them a lot more than it did. I've since learned.... don't bet against Musk

Depends on how long term your bet against him is.

I think it's important to put tweets into perspective. Twitter is a media platform not a window into someone's mind. I think his tweets are great and he should just keep them coming. It's entertainment.

Do conservative, PR polished, suits build great companies?

You are completely free to not buy Tesla stock. I for one want to have a company I invest ran by that type of person. Nobody is forced into buying stocks and if you disagree with how one is ran you are welcome to sell

What's the point of even writing a comment like this? Comprised of completely obvious platitudes. We all know that we don't have to buy Tesla stock or can sell it if we decide we don't like the CEO.

The point that people are making is that Elon is being highly irresponsible outside his management of the companies he is running (where he is doing a stunningly good job). He is also a public figure with a massive twitter following and the comments he is making on Covid-19 are misinformed and blind to existential & systemic risk and therefore dangerous. Even he has realised that with some, as shown by his deletion of a few of the stupider tweets. But as yet he hasn't apologised for or recognised the harm he has done. Fine for him to have an opinion, even a stupid one, but as a public figure there is responsibility on him to be much more circumspect in publicly sharing it.

Where is Elon acknowledging that if he hadn't been part of the crowd who were downplaying the risk through January, February, March and even now, the US may have acted sooner and thus limited the need to shutdown or, like Taiwan who started acting on December 31st last year, not have had to shut down at all?

To be fairly honest, lots of extremely competent people hold some batshit insane opinions about a lot of pretty important things.

I posit Steve Jobs and his alternative therapy beliefs: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4924574/

What did you want readers to get out of that link to support your argument that Steve Jobs therapy beliefs were batshit insane?

From the link:

"It is unknown whether Jobs’ outcomes would have been different if he had pursued surgery at the time of his diagnosis, or if had followed a specific chemotherapy protocol. And it is unknown how effective any of his acupuncture, botanical and dietary approaches may have been before or after his surgery."

Dr. McDougall concluded that "The overall consensus was, and still is, that Jobs acted selfishly, stupidly, and irresponsibly when he refused surgery in October of 2003, at the time of his original diagnosis. Based on the natural history of his disease, Jobs acted in none of these ways. The cancer had spread many years before his diagnosis, and was unstoppable by any means."

https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2011nl/nov/jobs.htm

While not about therapy, his strict fruit diet despite all warnings should be evidence enough of Ops point.

The difference being that Steve Jobs wasn't up at 2 am in the morning ranting about taking his company private at 420.

The reason why there's a pretty compelling reason to point out that Steve Jobs was a good leader was because he actually did good things, and the company struggled in his abscence.

What has Elon himself actually done that looks like good management? Put an adult in charge of the company and see if they can't do better.

> What has Elon himself actually done that looks like good management?

Plenty. I'm a huge critic of Elon's tweeting on Covid-19 (see elsewhere in this thread) but to argue that Elon is not a good manager of the companies he runs is completely in conflict with reality (the reality of his successfully founding and running two massively successful companies).

>but to argue that Elon is not a good manager of the companies he runs is completely in conflict with reality

it's really not because there are plenty of reasons why those companies are successful, none of which can be traced to Elon. If people want to fawn over someone they should pay some respect to Tom Mueller who actually builts the engines that make those rockets fly.

Again, if he is such a good manager, which of his moves were that great? In concrete terms, rather than just giving me some argument from correlation.

I would really like to be convinced why i should believe that those companies are successful because of, not despite of him running them. History has more than enough examples of horrible managers in charge of great businesses.

I'm not sure how to explain this to someone who seems outright determined to see Elon through some sort of negative lens, but it's not possible to be a "bad manager" and do what Elon has done.

I'm not sure if you even understand what makes a good manager. Why does Tom Muller work for SpaceX? Did you ever ask that question? Tom Muller was identified by Elon and recruited by Elon.

Great managers understand how to identify and attract talent, they understand who to promote and who to fire, who to listen to etc. If Tesla and SpaceX are doing well (and I'd argue they are both massive successes), then a huge part of that is down to Elon's hiring and people management skills, along with his strategic vision.

If Elon was such a terrible manager, he wouldn't have as talented people working for him. Also, if he was such a bad manager, he wouldn't have hired or found those people in the first place. One of my good friends (an engineer) recently left my previous company to go and work for Tesla, part of the reason he did that was due to Elon Musk. You can choose to dislike him, but people go to his companies often because of Elon himself.

One axiom of successful leadership or management is that the value of any leader is the total cumulative value produced by all the people under them in the leadership hierarchy since they are influencing, directly and indirectly, all of those people. We can rate Elon's success as a manager and leader as extremely high, because SpaceX and Tesla are hugely successful companies.

> lots of extremely competent people hold some batshit insane opinions about a lot of pretty important things.

Talking about the same industry and about extremely competent people, John Ford was a Nazi sympathiser and he actively promoted "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", which was pretty batshit insane.

He's been running the company since it was public so if you consider him batshit crazy then I'm sure you don't own any stock.

I invested in TSLA at $212 / share. Elon is nuts, but the 200 TLSA shares I'm still holding (I sold a few to cover all of my initial capital expense) are doing just fine.

Nuts or not, his track record is getting things done others thought impossible. Now the industry is starting to come around that yes, you can in fact use machine vision in place of lidar since Tesla has published how they essentially use the same algorithms as LIDAR due to the way they structured their neural nets. Let's not forget this is the guy that invented what became (x.com) paypal before online banking even existed. He also made one of the very first online "phone books" before going to invest in early stage Tesla and land orbital class rockets on boats, something no government has even ever done.

Or just hire a social media manager

If you build successful businesses in America it definitely sways your political beliefs and outlook. Are their very successful liberals who have built empires, of course, but Elon shouldn't be berated for being perhaps moderate or perhaps even conservative though I feel like he is mostly libertarian and a true capitalist.

"Silicon Valley has become Sanctimonious Valley!" -- Elon

You know, there just might be someone somewhere between Elon Musk and the CEO of IBM. And you know, maybe they could do a better job without literally being such a liability they have to write their own insurance contract.

There are ample number of companies between the two and CEOs as well. Tesla is doing just fine with Elon.

Are they? They've had a cumulative $18 billion invested in the company and have lost a total cumulative $7 billion.

Do you think any Tesla investors actually want some milquetoast professional manager?

And aggressive is not equivalent to irresponsible.

False dichotomy alert.

He cost the company $40 million with a single tweet 2 years ago: https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-226

Since when does a non-conservative CEO mean spouting crazy, uninformed opinions on Twitter? He has repeatedly downplayed the virus, "predicted" there would be zero cases by end of April, his Fremont factory played cat-and-mouse game with county officials for suspending production during lockdown. He's just another billionaire who doesn't care about anything other than his business even if people are dying.

Amusingly, Larry Ellison, the Oracle CEO, is a Tesla board member and personal friend of Musk.

You're right, somehow I didn't like the fact that that happened...maybe it's just because Oracle was very hard to use for me 15 years ago when I tried it in university (especially compared to open source DBs), but maybe it became much more user friendly since.

I remember that while in MySQL I could just set the id field to autoincrement, and in Oracle I had to create a special kind of counter, increment it and read its value to create a new id for example.

except he's a major owner of SpaceX and doesn't seem to do any batshit crazy tweets about it. So seems to have worked having a CEO there.

How Oracle is surviving at that point is something that really really interests me. How are they still in business given how much they burned the general public with their Java licensing shenanigans and enterprises with their expensive DB offering?! IBM can at least be a body shop/government consultant.

They idea that you can't have an aggressive CEO who doesn't tweet dangerously irresponsible things about a pandemic, call an international hero a pedophile, or fake the largest corporate buyout in history doesn't seem to hold water with me.

> can see why Elon is going crazy on twitter, he'd almost turned around Telsa and now they may be in the worst cash crunch of their long life

With 8 billion in cash, and 3-4 billion per year burn rate, that's a two year buffer assuming no improvement. That doesn't seem like the worst cash crunch of their long life. What am I missing?

Increasing capex for new products.

Plus there CapEx hasn't even met depreciation for years, indicating that they have been underinvesting in repairs and retooling.

He might be more concerned about the sales prospects instead of operational expenses. Automakers are getting hit really hard by this pandemic, and they need a healthy economy to sell cars.

Many economic forecasts are saying that a full recovery is 2-4 years away, although there are many different opinions.

Plus, the price of gas has gone down significantly, hurting one of the benefits of electric cars.

I don't believe the Tesla crowd bought theirs to save on gas anyway, so not sure if this is true.

Maybe not, but if gas had continued to go up in 2020 and 2021, you'd have to think that would help convince move people to shift over to electric.

I've somehow never believed that theory. There are tens of thousands who buy gas guzzlers, at whatever price of gas was/is. If only people were that rational, they'd stop buying them to save our planet.

You can tax cigarettes all you want, people are still gonna smoke.

Sure tens of thousands buy gas guzzlers because they can afford it / don't care. But there are also tens of thousands more that don't because they can't afford it.

I've always felt like the base Model 3 and base BMW 3 series were very comparable. Add in a couple of thousand, and the 3 looks like a bargain.

That becomes a harder sell when the Model 3 is actually more expensive to operate, as it is in some places now.

Its not that they are buying to save money vs the economical choices, but it does make a difference relative to their comps (RWD & AWD sport sedans).

Do customers really believe the current exceptionally low oil prices are going to be a permanent feature?

Last time the oil price went down this aggressively coincided with the massive uptick in people buying SUVs

Oil futures are under $40 all the way through the end of 2022: https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/future/clz22

I fully accept I may be wildly out of touch with the common man, but I tend to be thinking of 8-10 years product life when I'm considering the TCO of a new vehicle.

Oil futures don’t go that far out unfortunately

I personally don't, and I suspect a lot of others do not either.

Personally, I'd take an EV over even a high performance ICE car in terms of everyday driving fun. I used to drive a hardtop 335, and really loved that thing, but there's no throttle delay on the Model 3, let alone turbo lag.

It's always going to be a factor. Total cost of ownership is one of the biggest factors in car sales.

This is mostly the US because the externalities aren't taxed. In EU the taxes on gas are much higher. With VAT and everything Sweden currently has $4.5 per gallon, down from $5.8 last autumn, this makes any electric car much more compelling.

Sweden also has numerous tax breaks for buying electric vehicles, and does not properly tax the externalities of producing electric cars (running/refueling EVs, however, has very minimal negative externalities)

True, haven't looked at the data in some time but the breakeven point in regards to LCA comes fairly early though when comparing against ICE cars.

It depends greatly on the ICE car and driving assumptions. For someone who generally only makes short trips, a plugin hybrid is going to be a more environmentally friendly choice long term, given the significant amount of emissions needed to create the batteries for large range BEVs.

The other problem is chargers.

Before COVID-19 you were buying an EV knowing that there was a roadmap of chargers being rolled out. Now I would be wondering (a) are new ones going to be deployed at all and (b) are existing ones going to be maintained.

Everything non-essential is going to be deprioritised over the coming years.

Couple with this the massive glut of used cars thats about to get worse, the fact that many cities are seriously considering long term conversion of roadways to be pedestrian only and all the oil field pickups that are about to get repo'd (pertaining to the cyber truck).

What I'd really like to know is what will happen to Tesla's vehicles if the company goes under? Like will they get bricked essentially? I sincerely doubt Tesla will go under like that but, I'm curious none the less.

I wonder if cities will also start designating streets (or as a softer approach, significant amounts of parking) as EV-only.

A city that wants to electrify the vehicles driving there could do that very easily by converting a certain percentage of parking spots to EV-only every year. This will roughly ensure (at least) the same percentage of cars in the city being EVs (since if there's more, using a non-EV becomes extremely unattractive as you can't find parking).

Maybe but I doubt it, I feel like it would be all or nothing in regards to vehicles but who knows, would probably vary a lot. My understanding of the motivation is that it is only partially due to pollution and more to do with livability, comfort, health and that sort of thing.

BYD did just get the largest electric bus order in history from LA https://t.co/YaWN2ZKtBs?amp=1 as part of a green new deal, so you may not be far off in regards to cities moving towards focusing on accommodating electric vehicles.

Gov should require source-code escrow for certain technology and products...

Oil prices don't help the EV argument. However the main issue is that they have to deal with their products being priced high compared to the rest of the industry at a time when wages are likely to fall.

The EV argument != the Tesla argument.

Hasn't the Tesla argument always been that EVs are going to take over the entire auto industry? I don't see any version of Tesla's success without EV success.

Tesla relies on high volume to make money; the other automakers are pricing EVs based more on margin. An economic slow down hurts volume much more than it hurts margins.

Tesla also relies heavily on first-mover advantage to grow. With the virus stalling everything, all the more cash rich automakers get time to catch up on R&D, while Tesla is stalled from being unable to physically expand. Tesla also becomes more cash starved from falling stock prices than other automakers.

Then there's the drop in gasoline prices which naturally makes Tesla much less cost competitive vs ICE vehicles in its major markets (US/China). Added bonus of traditional automakers benefiting from low gasoline prices because historically consumers buy higher margin vehicles (truck/SUVs) when gas prices are low.

So it's multiple various disadvantages hitting Tesla all at once that's likely to continue for a couple of years.

Isn't China restricting the sale of new gasoline cars like what EU is doing? I agree US market could be hit badly as CA is still under lockdown and tech companies are laying off.

I don’t really think that any other automaker has a 25.5% margin on their mass produced electric vehicles.

Maybe the Porsche Taycan. The Porsche 911 was the most profitable car in 2019 with a 47% margin:

https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/porsche-911-most-prof...

Porsche is Volkswagen's most profitable brand.

>Porsche is Volkswagen's most profitable brand.

Which is pretty ironic, given the whole mess involved with Porsche trying to buy Volkswagen a few years ago.

Tesla relies on high margins, other automakers rely on volume.

Ford is in a much worse position than Tesla.

Ford for their current ICE lineup does rely heavily on volume and does appear to be in a hard spot.

Ford doesn't sell EVs yet. They have the Mach-E starting at $44k for 230mi launching in 2021. That does seem to have higher margins than a $40k Model 3.

> Tesla relies on high volume to make money; the other automakers are pricing EVs based more on margin.

This is just wrong. Tesla relies on margin. The other automakers don't make money with their EVs for the most part. They make money with their ICE vehicles.

> all the more cash rich automakers get time to catch up on R&D

Actually all the other automakers are stripping their R&D programs and dropping new EV vehicles to survive.

Tesla was stripping its R&D even before this pandemic though. They've cut R&D YoY from 2018 to 2019 which is basically unthinkable as a growth company.

I think R&D budget are a bit BS. The old companies still spend huge amounts on improving their ICE technology. Tesla is doing innovative stuff in production vehicles. For every other company half the tech in a Cybertruck would be R&D for most companies. Tesla just sees it as product development.

Can you name another growth company slashing its R&D budget?

I'm honestly surprised that Elon hasn't made some sort of tweet intimating that "Bioweapon Defense Mode" on Teslas may filter out covid-19.

its not on 3 or Y

He basically voiced this on the conference call, talking about how the Model S has HEPA filters and should filter out all COVID-19. Which was probably one of the more sane things he said on that conference call.

I think Tesla falls firmly in “luxury good” and with mass unemployment, Tesla might see much less demand for much longer than just the lockdown.

I’ve personally gone from “should I upgrade from a Mazda 3 to a Tesla 3” to “Should I just not get a car at all once this lease is up?” In a shockingly short period of time.

I bought 2014 3 HB GT manual when it first came out. Even though I used to be a huge car guy, I just don't care to own nicer car. Maybe it's because I'm 40 and have owned nicer cars before.

Cars are so expensive these days, but a $25k compact car is so nice, why pay another $20k for incrementally nicer car?

Keep your Mazda 3 for 10 years. It's a good car.

I’d actually prefer to not own a car at all. Since I work from home now, and walked to work before, I’d rather just not have one.

But I agree, the marginal value of nicer cars is questionable at best. The benefit of a Model 3 was mostly going to be tax rebates and access to the car pool lane for my wife in crowded Los Angeles.

It seems pretty impossible to go completely carless in Los Angeles. In somewhere like New York/Chicago/DC you could do it, but LA seems way to spread out to not have a car.

I have gone carless in LA before. I could & would do it again. You just need to be willing/capable to pay enough to live near work.

My wife on the other hand would need a career change.

$10 oil doesn’t exactly help either.

You're forgetting about Battery Day next month! You will find out that Tesla hits $100/kWh, which means they'll be able to sell an electric car for the price of a gas one, without giving up range. You're also forgetting that what they're selling has no real competition, just like the iPhone didn't skip a beat through the 2008-2009 crisis. Also their full self-driving tech is ahead of everyone, including Alphabet.

I think ARKinvest's 2024 bull case of $24k/share is correct. And if you don't, I guess we'll just have to wait and see! :grin:

For the price of WHAT gas car?

The best part of ARK is when Cathie goes on CNBC to pump garbage like this, then she spends the next week selling off millions of $s of it (thousands of shares). Merited a mention in the FT this week after their latest disclosure, the 3rd time in 4 months

Would love to take the other side of any wager you offer

Those are all positive factors, but I would imagine that car sales in general (electric or not) are going to take a big hit.

When you've taken a 25% in income this year, I think many people are going to put a hold on big purchases.

> their full self-driving tech is ahead of everyone, including Alphabet

This seems doubtful, I'd be really interested to read any source that advocates that :)

Ark's 24k/share translates to 4.4 Trillion. Would be worth more than most of the currently most valuable companies on earth now combined.

And how much of what the Fed is putting into the economy will end up in stocks? ;)

Of course, the Fed should just let bad companies fail! What they're doing will hurt the long-term prospects of the country as money is misallocated in zombie businesses, instead of in promising new companies with better technology.

This makes it even more important to invest in the few companies that are genuinely growing. It keeps you above inflation!

> You're also forgetting that what they're selling has no real competition

Europe is the world's second biggest car market after China. Volkswagen Group and the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance have both sold more BEVs than Tesla in Europe so far this year:

https://twitter.com/auto_schmidt/status/1250880399137529864

Across the course of the next year or two Hyundai Group will also start to sell more BEVs in Europe than Tesla does.

So far in 2020, the Audi e-tron has sold 3 times more in Europe than the Model S and Model X combined and it has also outsold both models globally:

https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2020/04/europe-march-2020.html

The coronavirus pandemic is going to put a dent in everyone's sales for a few years but BEV production will continue to ramp up. None of this is surprising. They're big car companies and they sell a lot of cars. The same pattern will play out in all markets eventually.

For one, accounts payable is almost $4B.

There's also a lot of questions on how much of that cash is tied into the China plant and Chinese relationship. Some analysts estimate that's about $2 billion of the $8B, so maybe a $1.5 billion buffer, and that's assuming some level of pre-covid demand.

Plus there's an argument to be made that a company isn't likely to actually run the cash all the way down to zero before waiving the desperation flag (I recall hearing GM had $1-$2 billion in cash when they filed bankruptcy in 2009).

Without knowing what the rest of 2020 demand looks like and the concerns above, the time horizon could easily be cut from your estimated 2 years down to 1. Only one year left to survive is a precarious situation.

Not saying that's guaranteed to happen, but the are plenty of valid concerns one would have as a common stock shareholder.

Tesla's way of counting cash is . . . quite imaginative to say the least.

If you used conventional metrics their cash is more like $2 BB, and a bunch of that is stuck in China (as in their agreement for Tesla Shanghai stipulates that cash cannot leave the country).

There is a real liquidity problem in there, but the people buying Tesla shares are not exactly the sharpest knives, or they're investing on the Tesla story, not financials.

1. Not all of that cash is accessible; much of it is tied up in other countries like China, so with certain bills they won't be able to access it.

2. Tesla still has a large number of debt payments to make in that time period

3. Cash at the end of quarter is not equivalent to cash during the quarter. Tesla generally optimizes its financials to display a high number for cash at the end of the quarter. If you look at the interest they are getting on savings throughout the quarter, you'll see that the average cash they have in the bank throughout the total quarter is much less than stated value.

If only he had time to finish them fully robotic assembly lines ..

It has been said before and should be said again:

Elon needs an assistant who shuts his fucking phone off at midnight.

It's like the moon comes out and he turns into a werewolf. There was a theory that he's Ambien-tweeting, but I suspect he just never learned in college like many of us that any idea that sounds really good at 1 am is probably really stupid.

Elon has done well by me. Every company he runs turns to gold. I wouldn't have him change a thing.

Seriously, given his performance over the long-term, I hope he tweets even more. It enrages people that can't think past the next quarter, and that's good for long-term shareholders like me!

You're claiming victory a bit early.

I have 108 shares. I'm not selling TSLA. In fact, I'm going to pick up more the next time it drops!

TSLA is going to make me a millionaire, but it will take a few more years before that happens.

X.com was a bust that pivoted into a PayPal clone and merged with them when both companies were nearly out of runway from buying each other's users. He was CEO of PayPal for just months before a mass revolt of the engineering team over his incompetence lead the board of directors to fire him. Tesla has been structurally bankrupt for most of its existence, burning billions of investors' cash and still making no profit selling cars after 12 years [1]. SolarCity was on the verge of bankruptcy so he bailed it out with his other company and is still being sued for that. He's been having Tesla sell car parts to SpaceX (a private company so you can't look at its financials), more shuffling of money around from one company to another to paper over losses. His side gigs -- The Boring Company to build unusable tunnels, Neuralink, etc -- have accomplished nothing. What exactly has he "turned to gold"?

1: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-burns-cash/

> What exactly has he "turned to gold"?

You wrote him off way too easily.

In my life I have not seen -

1. Two rockets landing simultaneously

2. An electric car that can take off like a plane, and self-drive on free ways

bloomberg for the past 5 years afaik has been trying to kill tesla. bloom energy may be the reason.

I knew a PayPal alum who would get grumpy if you mentioned Elon in any context. If you implied that he had anything to do with PayPal's success, he would turn red-faced and start to vibrate. It was scary so I only did it once (okay, twice, because I forgot)

I need to invest with less ethics. If you are in bed with the government, you will make money.

Elon needs an assistant who shuts his fucking phone off at midnight.

That sounds like a Joey Skaggs hoax: An agency for hiring an assistant who shuts your f#%king phone off at midnight.

> - can see why Elon is going crazy on twitter, he'd almost turned around Telsa and now they may be in the worst cash crunch of their long life

That's probably why he's going crazy. I bet the guy is stressed out. His baby is slowly bleeding after he has worked so hard to build it up and crush it in Q4.

Musk might just be venting on Twitter, as another commenter has suggested, but one way or another these tweets might turn out to benefit him. From what I can tell based on both personal and online interactions, it seems to me that U.S. public sentiment has been shifting against the lockdowns recently - and not just among some fringe protester groups, but among all kinds of demographically and ideologically different groups. Musk's tweets might appeal to those people and make him more popular. I'm no fan of, for example, Musk's lies about self-driving technology being just around the corner. But say what you will about Musk, he has a powerful talent when it comes to publicity.

Also, if there should be any trouble at all getting a dirt cheap bailout loan from the government, a solid history of holding the party line will be a guarantee for success. I don't know if Musk deliberately plays this strategy, but it would certainly be on my mind if I were in his shoes. I'm not at all shameless enough to do that kind of thing, thankfully.

If Tesla's able to survive through the current macroeconomic slowdown, this situation plays strongly to their advantage. They'll keep being capital constrained for another decade or so. Their ambition is to build 20 million cars per year. Need ten more factories to do that.

Zero interest bailout loans would be a godsend, as long as they can stay profitable and still have a healthy customer base. They're a growth company still. Nowhere near the ceiling of their potential market.

Although it's still a super uncertain and scary situation, it's much better place to be than being an established, no-growth automaker with thin margins falling to zero on a 10% sales decline.

> it seems to me that U.S. public sentiment has been shifting against the lockdowns recently - and not just among some fringe protester groups, but among all kinds of demographically and ideologically different groups

Unfortunately, I've noticed the same thing.

Nope, ending the lockdowns is not a popular movement.

More than twice as many people believe they don't go far enough as believe they go too far.[1]

"Only 12% of Americans say the measures where they live go too far. About twice as many people, 26%, believe the limits don’t go far enough. The majority of Americans — 61% — feel the steps taken by government officials to prevent infections of COVID-19 in their area are about right."

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/22/outbreak-poll-most-am...

With the current disaster that many states have for an unemployment system, dwindling funds and ramping job loss I think that is going to shift. People are actively running out of money, they are waiting in food lines for hours by the hundreds. The federal government has indicated it has no inclination to resolve this. People need money to eat. I think that sentiment is going to change soon. We should have implemented a massive stay at home order across the nation in early March and funded it with a UBI for 2 - 3 months and the situation would have been resolved. Now its too late and people are truly suffering. The only thing that is going to resolve that suffering is income.

Fate is a cruel mistress. Republicans are facing a decision between implementing leftist basic income policies or being decimated at the polls. They're trying to fight it by astroturfing resistance to wildly popular public health measures, but it's a bad look for them to be advocating the thing they smeared universal health care for in 2008: death panels.

This comment is going to get very down voted (mine not yours). The thing though, they don't care about hypocrisy. The democrats are made up of a wide coalition and are generally advocating for an increase in equality, wider access to voting, more equitable income distribution. Essentially they are all on some scale of democratic socialistic polices geared towards helping as many people as possible. Republicans are united in moving more wealth and power to the very top and owning the libs.

The polls do seem to show that the lockdowns are popular, but I feel like I have detected a real shifting of sentiment on social media recently. I think that my sample does reflect something about reality since I even have noticed the shift on places that just a few weeks ago were staunchly pro-lockdown.

I do not know how to reconcile my experience with the polls, though.

Twitter is not reality. Polling is pretty clear that ending lockdowns is quite unpopular.

> From what I can tell based on both personal and online interactions, it seems to me that U.S. public sentiment has been shifting against the lockdowns recently

People who talk like this should never be trusted.

Solar City installed 10x the megawatt capacity in 2016 as they did in 2019, with this quarter installed capacity down again. The business is non-existent.

> Will Elon stop with tweets that hurt Tesla? Appoint a CEO, or COO to run things

People have been saying that for years and years. It's beyond stale. Meanwhile Tesla and SpaceX have continued to succeed beyond expectations for over a decade now. If there's occasional twitter volatility in-between simultaneously landing two rockets returning from space... so be it.

Besides, if it bothers you that much, you don't have to buy their cars or invest or even pay attention to it. The constant handwringing, mind reading and speech policing is ridiculous. That's how we end up with nothing but layers upon layers of focus tested marketing speak and people afraid to challenge orthodoxy.

Of course what Musk does matters. He's the CEO.

And his erratic and reprehensible behaviour is degrading the Tesla brand as well as reaffirming the long held idea amongst shareholders that he is too unstable to be running the company.

Nobody is perfect. Mr. Musk shown that he could build from the ground up and manage several large companies. Could he be even better ? Maybe. But until Tesla and SpaceX can find someone unequivocally better than Mr. Musk, those companies will have to do (and maybe fail) with him.

I can think of no important way in which Tesla or SpaceX would be significantly more successful today if Musk had publicly communicated more like a standard CEO.

It's not degrading the Tesla brand though. Tesla is the second largest automaker in the world by market cap. Toyota, the only company larger than Tesla, was founded 65 years before Tesla. What Musk (and all Tesla employees) have built so far is nothing short of astounding. To imply he's leading them to ruin with his unfiltered twitter account could not be farther from the truth.

There would be no Tesla brand without him. The brand is quite literally "We are building electric cars, get the fuck out of our way!" so I think it's pretty on brand for him to be saying what he's saying.

The man demands action, if he didn't he wouldn't be running the most ambitious companies on the planet.

"There would be no Tesla brand without him."

> Founded as Tesla Motors, Tesla was incorporated on July 1, 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.

Yeah and who knew about it? Nobody.

Sure but being a good publicist doesn’t mean you’re a good CEO.

What products did they have before Elon?

Before Elon Tesla was 2 guys with a piece of paper saying 'we should build Electric cars'.

Elon provided most of the funding, and it wouldn't have gotten of the ground without him.

Next Eberhard ran the company straight into the ground and Elon had to take over.

Then Elon had to invest even more money to save the company.

From there he made it one of the most valuable car companies in the world.

Thus, anybody who thinks Tesla would actually exist without Elon is just a fool.

>> And his erratic and reprehensible behaviour is degrading the Tesla brand as well as reaffirming the long held idea amongst shareholders that he is too unstable to be running the company.

Good point. Stock is collapsing relative to SPY and the Q1 report was just brutal, wasn't it?

As Peter Thiel famously said, "Never bet against Elon Musk."

I'm a shareholder. I expect that Elon's leadership will make my shares go up an incredible amount in the future.

I have over half of my life savings at stake on TSLA, so I have a lot of skin in the game. If you think he's so bad, why don't you short his stock?

It would be fun to check back in six months and compare how we did!

> As Peter Thiel famously said, "Never bet against Elon Musk."

Yes, because for better or worse Elon is "seeing the future" and has the capability to execute it.

In a world where a lot of CxOs and Senior Executives "didn't believe" in remote work in January of this year, you see that the average group vision is poor and execution ability is even poorer

I think it's very helpful that Musk has an actual goal to achieve with his companies, that isn't "raking in tons of money" or "seeing the stocks soar". Most companies seem to be the real-world equivalent of clicker games. Do $whatever to make money. Use that money to do $whatever faster and better to make money. Ad infinitum. What that $whatever is is immaterial.

I sometimes call these "toilet paper companies", i.e. companies that would happily pivot from whatever they're doing into selling toilet paper if they could make more money with it. But with TP being a quite sensitive topic these days, I guess I'll need to find a better analogy.

Well, this was just unfortunate timing. I hope it sorts itself out in six months for you.

> as well as reaffirming the long held idea amongst shareholders that he is too unstable to be running the company.

I don't know a single person that believes this. This is what people who hate Elon and Tesla believe about Tesla stockholders.

Its honestly crazy if you look at what Tesla has done since Elon took over, to think that he is a problem. He is the opposite.

> Meanwhile Tesla and SpaceX have continued to succeed beyond expectations for over a decade now.

I think people underestimate how essential Gwynne Shotwell is to SpaceX.

Yeah for process but there’s no spacex without Elon.

I personally feel there's a big overlap between Jobs and Musk—but none more so than the fact that they had the key combination of sufficient intelligence, clear vision, high self-confidence and (most importantly) strong influence over corporate direction.

One of my favourite Steve Jobs quotes is just after he returned to Apple and began dismantling the massive pile of legacy cruft. When asked about a particular (terrible) technology that Apple scrapped, Steve went on a particularly insightful rant that holds numerous insights into what he believes to be key to a successful company. And history proved those insights to be exactly right.

The quote— "Some mistakes will be made along the way. That's good. Because at least some DECISIONS are being made along the way, and we'll find the mistakes and we'll fix them." https://youtu.be/yQ16_YxLbB8?t=3286

In other words, as long as you're right often enough, being decisive is more important than being right every single time. Musk strikes me as sharing that mentality. He's right often enough that it's more efficient to "fix" the mistakes than to suffocate big decisions with big committees. And it's not like any big committee is sure to be right more often than Jobs/Elon anyway.

(That YouTube video is fantastic IMHO. Watched with the benefit of hindsight it shows that Apple's success wasn't an accident. Steve really did understand the formula that ultimately led to it.)

I love this comment. Thanks for sharing.

I don’t think Jobs was ever as irresponsible as Elon is. At least not publically.

Far more in many respects. Treatment of Wozniak, the Apple II project, refusing to correct his vision on the Macintosh, etc. Treatment of key employees. It became public enough.

Steve had personality flaws at least as severe as Elon. The difference was Steve was a much better showman and had a laser focus on the nuances of messaging. Whereas Elon embodies the age of Twitter.

Yes, there are plenty of specific events where any sensible person would have slapped Elon on the back of the head and told him to stop being an idiot. Ultimately though, Elon's "irresponsibility" is largely a problem within the press, the short-sellers and with regulators who are lobbied by aforementioned short-sellers. Whatever. Let them sook. It's not like any of Elon's failings have affected Tesla sales or SpaceX successes.

I differ, in that I don't think Steve Jobs had a clear vision that he could communicate to others. I think he was very, very gifted as someone who could see the right path forward, and he seemed to execute ruthlessly.

The evidence I would put forth is that, in the decade since Steve Jobs died, Apple has added a watch to their lineup, and changed virtually nothing else. Their supply chain efficiencies might be better, but without Steve to look at what the rest of the world was offering, and to say, "That is all shit, THIS is what should be next", Apple has merely been a high-end manufacturer of electronics.

Elon, on the other hand, has a very clear vision, and it can be communicated in simple statements: "Humanity needs to be a multiplanetary species". "Electric vehicles are the only viable, sustainable means of mass short range travel".

When you combine this with the drive he has to succeed, you get people lined up behind him, not because they want to emulate him, but because their goals are aligned. The people who work at SpaceX want humanity to go to Mars - not because Elon says so, but because they know it has to happen for us to survive, and because Elon's company is the best hope we have right now.

> in the decade since Steve Jobs died, Apple has added a watch to their lineup, and changed virtually nothing else

The Watch is incredibly popular, AirPods are a runaway hit, the iPad Pro is killing it, the new Mac Pro is awesome, Apple Music took off, Apple Pay/Card is super popular....

I genuinely don't know why you say they haven't done anything.

If anything it's incredible that the company manages to stay true to itself time and time again. That's a testament to the strength of the culture Steve left behind.

People somehow hope that Apple can create an iPhone every 5/10 years, a product whole sales dwarf the revenues of Microsoft+Google taken entirely probably over the last 10 years. Yeah, not gonna happen. The iPhone is the most profitable consumer electronics product of all time maybe. You can't really re create it again and again.

Yeah and I believe if SJ had twitter at his (prime) time we would have seen a lot of "questionable" moments like we're seeing with Elon.

(Or at least it would have leaked much easier through the grapevine)

> I differ, in that I don't think Steve Jobs had a clear vision that he could communicate to others.

I never said he was a good communicator of vision. That said, just because Jobs failed to steer Apple from the grave isn’t evidence of failure on his part. The value of a person like Steve can’t be distilled into reproducible learnings—his value was in his ability to make real time decisions in service of a clear unified vision.

Even if you could find some replacement person who shared his vision, that doesn’t mean you can get everyone to cede to their proclamations like they would have with Steve.

He was an expert "editor" -- he knew what to say no to, and that's more powerful often than what to say yes to.

> Elon, on the other hand, has a very clear vision, and it can be communicated in simple statements

That’s only because Elon’s particular house style lends to such vacuous motherhood statements. I have no problem with vacuous motherhood statements, but please recognise that they are fan service, not company vision.

Elon’s style is great for growing a niche fan base. Steve perfected the art of turning niche fan base into mass market appeal.

> I don't think Steve Jobs had a clear vision that he could communicate to others

What are you basing this on? Seems to me that Apple leadership is pretty well aligned on a shared vision despite however large it's grown. That speaks to the fact that he managed to put (or at least didn't prevent) a successful leadership structure in place that continues to succeed regardless of his presence. It's a supremely difficult challenge & aligns with a lot of the insights that David Marquet makes in Turn This Ship Around. Regardless of any of the detail differences, the only way to measure successful leadership is it's resilience to changing out individuals in any given position.

I don't feel like she's underestimated. I do feel she's under-spoken.

Anyone who scratches the surface of SpaceX knows she's an absolute force.

Elon says things during press conferences ranging from semi-ridiculous to full on crazy and Shotwell rarely comments, but when she does, it's taken rather seriously.

> Shotwell rarely comments, but when she does, it's taken rather seriously

That's for sure. Elon can spout whatever he wants and space reporters, etc, will be like "Ok, Elon says this, but temper your expectations". When Gwynne Shotwell says something, the response is usually pretty much "Ok, this is happening."

I love Shotwell, but there are a number of people who could do a fair job to run rocket operations. Its not like other rocket companies have major issues with running operations. The part that no other company can do is the part that Elon does, and that is ultimately why the operation side is so successful.

Yeah, I don't see Dave Calhoun, Tory Bruno, or Peter Ruddock sleeping on the factory floor. That said, they don't need to. I'd want to work for Elon in my 20s. I'm not sure I'd want Elon to be my CEO one year before my pension vests.

"Its not like other rocket companies have major issues with running operations."

I think in light of the issues with SLS, you might want to reconsider this in terms of Boeing.

Boeing doesn't have rocket operations right now. They are building a rocket as a NASA contractor. NASA runs the operations and NASA made the design of SLS.

Is it so much to ask for him to tweet responsibly so we can enjoy the fun future stuff without all the bullshit?

> Is it so much to ask for him to tweet responsibly so we can enjoy the fun future stuff without all the bullshit?

I don't know, that rave cave in Berlin sounds pretty awesome, and that was from a tweet. The Pedo thing was in poor taste, sure, but they got Tesla guys working on a sub to get some kids out of the cave, so you have to see the positive outweighing the negative. Besides, he won that case and no one here cared.

The Truth is that his controversy is part of his Branding Prowess, him smoking weed on JRE created way much more awareness for everything he is involved in amongst the masses more than I thought it would. And I saw it happen live.

> - TSLA trying to run an amazon HQ2 like process for Truck and Model Y factories, look for small, southern, and poor cities to bid and probably win

Does this apply to Cybertruck or Semi? I was thinking of putting a deposit on a dual motor Cybertruck but I'm waiting to see where it will be built.

Fremont was already building Y does that mean they will stop if they get another US based factory online? I just don't understand why Sparks isn't being utilized, its so f'ing massive!

I didn't say he shouldn't tweet about having a dance club, try to save kids, smoke weed, or be weird.

He just shouldn't do irresponsible things like spread misinformation about a global pandemic or lie.

> The Pedo thing was in poor taste, sure

Poor taste is one thing, potentially ruining someone's life is another.

To be clear, he tried to destroy an innocent man/hero's life because said guy dared criticize his attempt to take the glory for himself. He then doubled and tripled down on it and hired a fraudulent private investigator to prove it (he did not). There are those of us that care very much and find actions like that horrific, but we're in the silent minority apparently. It struck me as the actions of a sociopath.

Why do you feel like that is appropriate behavior?

> Why do you feel like that is appropriate behavior?

Honestly, its a means to an end. He has beceome the defacto person for the EV movement, Mars colonization, and to a degree AI (for good or for bad).

many have tried before him, but none had the savvyness or presence that he has.

I worked for Kimabl and approached him several times while at work and I can tell you right now, I would never try that with Elon. My friend asked if I saw Elon at either Tesla or SpaceX when I went to my interviews, I told him if he was I'd walk other way. Definitely say thank you in passing, but that's about it.

He's not someone I'd bother, I like what he does and how it effects all the movements I care about, that's how I justify it. The polemics from his twitter antics can be entertaining at times, and that's engaging a broader audience so I encourage it as well.

His stance on COVID was misinformed to say the least, but he isn't an epidemiologist so I'm not going to listen to him on that. When i want to hear about Starship SN4 I'm all ears.

He’s not an epidemiologist. He’s not an engineer. He’s a businessman. And by pissing so many people off, he’s definitely not being a good businessman.

> He’s not an epidemiologist. He’s not an engineer. He’s a businessman. And by pissing so many people off, he’s definitely not being a good businessman.

Sure.

But you're pointing your ire at the wrong person, I'm not in the 'Cult of Elon' and here to defend his antics; I'm responding to someone asking why I accept it for what it is, and how it benefits the things I care about. I forgot to mention Starlink, too.

But, last I checked he is actually the Chief Engineer of SpaceX and Starship [1].

I don't entirely disagree with your assessment, but as I said, its a means to an end.

And the truth is he actually can piss off who ever he wants, and still be a good business man so long as he gets the Best Talent in the World lining up work for him (for little money) and people falling over themselves to give him funding and politicians letting him prototype stuff underground in one of the most seismically active places in N. America (SoCal/San Andreas Fault line) because he 'gets things done.'

1: https://www.spacex.com/news/2019/09/30/starship-update

And because I can't edit my first post:

Cybertruck is being made in Texas:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tesla-will-build-i...

Interesting choice, there were rumors at the SpaceX launch facility in Boca Chica that he was thinking of Texas as a new giga factory. But also, Texas has some of the cheapest gas in all of the US, I hadn't seen 99 cent gas since 1999 and yet on my trip there I saw it multiple times in various cities in Texas and there were so many big lifted trucks going 100 MPH everywhere.

He's definitely an engineer. He's going into his companies' factor floor, making engineering decisions day in and day out. Good or bad, the bucks stopped with him.

Is it so much to ask of the world to just get over the fact that sometimes highly intelligent and highly effective people are also sometimes highly disagreeable? I would argue this is often the case, but most of them are never allowed to flourish. Forcing everything to be cookie cutter agreeable niceness is how you achieve stagnation.

It's entirely normal and healthy to constantly question whether we've gone too far by locking everyone up inside for months on end. Even if that answer is mostly: no, it's not.

It seems people today are okay with trying to weed out anyone who they think is "wrong" from being able to communicate. That scares me more than Elon tweeting.

I strongly believe it's good having "crazy" or "wrong" people challenging the norms, especially when they have good intentions and contribute meaningfully to the conversation. Society has always had these sorts of people on the edges/fringes and the world didn't end. Frequently they helped move things along for the better.

That doesn't mean we should kill any conversation before it even starts - or, even crazier, calling to prevent them from running their own companies because they express unpopular opinions in their spare time.

You're talking as if he was frank but rude, or exprimed himself in crude words, "à la" Linus.

Elon is the one that leaked/lied about Saudi investment money, or chose to call a rescuer a pedophile (and by extension all expats in thailand pedophiles) just because the man in question was focusing on saving kids and couldn't be bothered with Elon's constant attention seeking during that crisis.

High executives being incisive, direct and sometimes not socially good enough is expected; only the best of the best manage to do that (one exemple in the tech world would be Gates). But being insulting and losing control is not.

Yes! it´s too much to ask someone who is trying to do non-conformist things to conform. You can´t have your cake and eat it too.

Also what you call bullshit is not bullshit to everyone. You don´t like it? dont invest. Leave the rest of us be.

Investor fraud isn't just whimsy nonconformism.

That's not what OP is saying. OP is saying what makes Elon good at his job is always what makes him say a meme tweet that gets him in trouble with the SEC. You get both.

Though he might have visionary moments of non-conformity, it sets an awful precedent to allow people to violate common ethics in order to allow them to just "be themselves."

It would be awful but ethics change often so what can you do.

> meme tweet that gets him in trouble with the SEC

The "meme tweet" defrauded investors. He barely got in any trouble with the SEC relative to what it was.

> non-conformist

I'd use the word "immature" instead.

For some definition of mature. You can think of behavior as being convergent or divergent. When performing optimally, convergent behavior follows the herd and produces incremental innovation. Again when performing optimally, divergent behavior shoots off in unexpected directions and produces disruptive innovation.

We tend to associate maturity with convergent behavior. Musk is clearly divergent so, in that sense, he is immature. As he should be.

Both behaviors are needed for society as a whole to progress. There is not one better optimization choice. Many Musk detractors or supporters make the error of assuming one optimization is better than the other, when it is not clearly the case.

Can we accept Musk as an immature valid individual? We should.

> We tend to associate maturity with convergent behavior.

Not me. A lot of very mature people were/are going against the flow, because their maturity does not allow them to participate in the madness that is the preexisting reality they find themselves in. For a trivial example, see for example how a lot of older, more mature developers have harder time adapting to shitty companies. For more extreme cases, see Simone Veil, Ghandi etc.

Ideally, yes, it's too much to ask - ever - since people should just brush off the bullshit and get on with their lives. However, society in general has developed a really thin skin over the past couple of decades, so realistically, no, it's not too much to ask - right now.

>That's how we end up with nothing but layers upon layers of focus tested marketing speak and people afraid to challenge orthodoxy.

A billionaire with a massive social media presence publicly mocking some random guy in Thailand: speaking truth to power.

A billionaire lying about his company going private: speaking the truth that others dare not.

So they have 2 years of cash reserves, which will take them over to the Cybertruck release and the Berlin Gigafactory being complete?

Was the "cash crunch" statement already including this?

> Musk venting with "FREE AMERICA NOW" tweet makes him seem almost crazy

Why. Personally I do think we should stay inside, but it's not an invalid argument to say that locking people in their homes on penalty of fine is a weird thing. Too much economic damage could cause deaths well beyond COVID-19 so there is a balance to be found.

But to go a step further and invalidate any criticism of locking people up inside their homes as 'crazy' is out of the playbook of 1984

No, what's 'crazy' is having to read a mind-numbing comment claiming anyone is 'locking up people in their homes', in service of defending an out-of-touch billionaire who flies twice a day on his private jet, 200,000 miles in just the last 3 months. https://twitter.com/evdefender/status/1252352769605791744?s=...

Why out of touch? Because 74% of Americans support the quarantine https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...

Why is this all particularly insane? Musk went on to praise China's reaction, which _actually locked people into their homes_ and their "opening" is our "locking up people in their homes". https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/29/asia/wuhan-coronavirus-lockdo...

This isn't your typicial political argument where you pick a side and dig in your heels. It's more like a goldilocks situation where we need "just enough" measures.

In that vein I don't think we should just silence the opposite side and dismiss people wanting to open up as "crazy".

Okay, but that conflicts directly with the idea we need to avoid labelling someone ranting about facism, locking people in their homes, and The Meaning Of America.

You can't praise China for its response then criticize the American response as fascism in your next sentence.

> multiple factories around the world

They'll also need not economically stressed out customers around the world, which right now isn't really happening. If the low oil-prices won't halt the electric cars industry then the fact that they still have comparatively high prices will most certainly will.

A few months ago I was saying that the industry needs cars worth 25,000-30,000 euros/dollars in order to really take off, i.e. that it needs its mass-produced electric Honda Civcs and VW Golfs, with this depression-like crisis that is about to commence I'd say that it needs its Mitsubishi Colts/Mirages, Dacia Sanderos or Nissan Versas, i.e. electric cars that will cost at most 10,000-12,000 euros/dollars.

Their potential market will certainly be _lower_ while the pandemic is ongoing, but there's plenty of high-income folks who haven't been materially effected by the epidemic and might still want a luxury car. Most people I know are in the work-from-home crowd.

There is the possibility that this might not be that big of a deal, given that they're a growth company. Depends how production-constrained they really are without trying to induce additional demand through advertising and so on.

Economic uncertainty, even with financial security, is almost certainly going to delay many car purchases. If you don't know whether we're going into 2021 with 20% unemployment, its pretty easy to decide to hold off a year. Also cars are being used close to 70% less during the lockdown.

I seriously hope nobody gets fooled into believing that those oil prices will last more than two years and consequently buy a gas guzzler.

Am I reading this right? They have 25% profit margin on each automotive? Feels like a tech company's margins. Does anyone know how it compares to traditional automakers?

Is 25% high? I have no clue.

For cars, yeah

And for tech?

SaaS has really high gross margins (>65%?), but I'm not sure that gross margin number is comparable with the 25% that Tesla reported.

Does anybody know why Saas on average have such high gross margin ?

It doesn't cost much to add a user to SaaS, but it costs a lot to write the software and convince people to pay for it.

Gross margins are calculated from per unit costs, so advertising expenses, servers, supporting SaaS, and the salaries of programmers and sales people are not included.

Also, physical products are made from relatively scarce resources. Software is typed, and words are not scarce.

SaaS companies have benefited from demand outstripping supply. SaaS replaces human labor, so it takes a SaaS competitor to drive down prices.

Gross margin = (Revenue - COGS) / Revenue.

So reason is very low costs... being that there is almost no physical inventory/material costs involved.

Just servers, a few programmers to make and maintain things, any other staff, and whatever bills they have (e.g. electricity/internet/advertising/fees from software they use).

Gross Margin = Revenue - Cost of Goods Sold

SaaS usually don't include development costs into COGS. Only directly attributable costs (hosting, customer support, etc.)

Tesla on the other hand has to include raw materials and even labor into COGS.

I don't think that includes CapEx. So they're making 25% on each car, but they have to spend several billion dollars building a factory to manufacture them that turned up on their balance sheet in previous years. In the same way they're making 25% margin on their car, but they're still losing money - because it all goes into building the facilities to manufacture their next model.

These numbers are not prepared under GAAP for the automotive industry, since there is no such thing as GAAP per-automotive profit margins for global auto manufacturers. Vehicle pricing is too dependent on both the class of the vehicle and the geographic market for a single global number to be meaningful. (For example, Toyota profitably sells vehicles that range from $1000 to commercial vehicles that sell for $250,000 or more.)

Tesla provides these numbers because its financials on a GAAP basis show it is under-performing most of its competitors. Despite selling more cars than all of its luxury competitors, Tesla lost money doing so. Its competitors may not sell as many vehicles, but they made profits on a GAAP basis...(and using Tesla's rubrics, would have even higher per-vehicle profits than Tesla since those profits account for capex and other items that Tesla excludes).

These are non-GAAP numbers. The real numbers are closer to 17%, which is still pretty good.

That would be 25% gross margin. That means before they've paid salaries and recurring expenses.

Nonetheless, for autos, that is world class. Last time I checked, only Toyota had higher gross margins.

Note that it's also before they've paid interest or principle on loans/bonds, before their capital spend (new factories & mfg. equipment). This type of spending is investing in future profits, such as building CyberTruck, adding capacity for more Model Ys, adding capacity for charge stations, etc.

20%. The other 5% is from selling credits to other automakers.

Serious question: I am confused as to why do we see so many comments lamenting, what is essentially freedom of speech of EM? I mean, it's not like he is conclusively wrong about "Free America Now" comment. He may be proven wrong over time or even right.

People don't like to allow discussions about things they disagree with anymore. Everything has become so polarized, it's as if simply allowing the conversation to happen risks bringing in new evidence that might prove a person wrong.

I'm not saying I personally think everyone should head back out on the streets, but I think it's important we a least begin to discuss the pros and cons of doing so.

In all of this, I've still never heard a single logical or rational discussion about what the hell are we going to do in the medium-long term. Even if we "flatten the curve" now and go back to "normal" in 3 months, what will happen when cases skyrocket again? same thing all over again?

Once we reopen, we aren't going to regain capacity in hospital beds overnight. How are parts of the US going to avoid being to be on lockdown every two to eight weeks for the remainder of the summer? I feel if everyone understood that this cycle is inevitable, we could constructively benefit from people arguing the threat of reopening vs the threat of continued exposure. Instead, it's a game of chicken who wants to open up the economy later than June—just in time for cases to spike in July.

In my opinion if you have a big platform and are an influential person, you owe it to the people who follow you to not tweet out stupid shit you don’t know anything about.

Elon should honestly delete his twitter but it’s clear he loves the attention of being a celebrity who can make headlines.

I think that it is a valid opinion to think that we should lift the lockdown - there is a huge cost to the shutdown, and flattening the curve was originally just to keep the hospitals below capacity, which they seem to be. However in the context of his other tweets, it seems irresponsible. He is retweeting conspiracy theories that hospitals are reporting cases of COVID for profit, and even made predictions they by the end of April we would have 0 cases (which has obviously not happened). He retweeted a YouTube video that was later removed for violating TOS, presumably because it was spreading false info about COVID (I disagree with that particular policy but it still indicates the video isn't something he should be retweeting).

He is not conclusively wrong to say that we should lift the lockdown. However the other things he is saying show that he is conclusively wrong about other aspects of the virus, and is spreading misinformation about it. Given how poor his predictions about it have been, his opinion is useless and dangerous given how many people listen and believe what he says.

I would love to know why you think it's a conspiracy theory that hospitals are reporting cases of COVID for profit. It's not like healthcare has never gamed the system. Not saying you are wrong, but it's a possibility that they indeed gamed the system. If he has made predictions that we will have 0 cases by end of April, that's just clearly brain-dead of him and it's fine if we are lamenting him for those stupid predictions.

The 0 cases tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/12407546572631449...

And to expand on the reporting of COVID for profit, I think it is possible for hospitals to be over reporting COVID cases, but I think it borders on conspiracy theory to suggest that it is a significant contributor to the numbers we are seeing now. Deaths don't lie and the increase in deaths we are seeing lines up with the positive test results. So in the context of arguing that we are overreacting to COVID, I think it is a poor argument.

Considering that there are 40,000 unaccounted for deaths[1], it is far more likely that hospitals/municipalities are under counting COVID19 deaths.

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...

Hospitals are actually suffering economically as a result of this entire crisis, too. They are postponing and cancelling more profitable elective procedures[1]. If anything, they're incentivized to underreport the # of cases.

[1] See the FT: "Counter-intuitively, healthcare was one of the sectors that provided the biggest drag on the economy, as hospitals stopped performing lucrative elective procedures in order to focus on dealing with coronavirus patients." https://www.ft.com/content/06493320-083a-4a7d-94cc-8db581f9e...

> why you think it's a conspiracy theory that hospitals are reporting cases of COVID for profit

The complete lack of evidence is a good start.

You can see some of the even more colorful stuff Elon said on the investor call covered here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/29/tesla-e...

He's not wrong.

So we have a democratically elected government doing what both science and popular opinion agree on. Somehow that isn't democratic because it forces successful business owners to loose money. Doing what Musk wants in this case would be closer to the economic side of fascism and certainly not democratic.

When you are miserable yourself all you can do is focus on the negative and dramatically make a big deal about everything.

Musk has probably been quite restrained in his tweets as it's pretty clear he thinks lockdowns are a stupid solution.

He is anything but restrained.[0]

He is not a Doctor, he is not an Epidemiologist, he is not a Statistician, he really, and I'm choosing my words wisely and with the amount of fandom he has, he really should shut the fuck up.

[0]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1239650597906898947?lang...

Freedom of speech is not right for freedom of criticism. He stands on the "It's just a flue" side of the things and people who don't believe that are not happy about the things he says and pushes for. Nobody is putting him in jail or anything like that, therefore his free speech rights are not violated.

A useful guide from XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1357/

Its alt text is golden:

> I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express.

HN is the most "doomer" place on the net, vehemently anti free-speech and insanely jealous of Elon musk. This is the perfect storm.

Har. You must be from Zerohedge.

I have literally never been on that site. Maybe I should though

Start here: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/down-rabbit-hole-eurodolla...

One of the best articles written on the subject if you´re interested

Is it? HN seems very pro-free speech and EM compared to places like Twitter and Reddit.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

edit: Also not exactly the most sane places to compare :D

Freedom of speech is not freedom of consequences.

Hmmm, I have been a ardent Tesla supporter for many years and actually own 2 teslas (my post history would confirm that), but alas starting today I am done with Tesla and Elon. I have given him a pass for - Promising autopilot in 15 days (after they abruptly terminated their contract with mobile eye) when I bought my model S in 2016 - saying FSD features are 3-6 months away in 2016 (some of these features launched this month in 2020) - pedo guy tweet - 420 tweet - other absurd hyperbolic claims like battery swap, coast to coast driving in 2018, top line Model S loaner cars for everyone, blah blah blah - a neural net driven rain sensor that barely works

I still believe that Model 3 and S are the two best cars I have ever driven. But I can't support Tesla anymore, which is not build for a mission, but seems to be build to squeeze workers and lie to customers.

I wonder if it’d be better with him more removed from the CEO role. I really like how innovative their designs are. But being abusive is a damnation.

Page 16 blew my mind. From 70 pieces of metal => 2 pieces of metal. Does anyone know how they do that?

They went from individual stampings welded together to very large die-cast parts.

Large casting machine. See Sandy Munro’s model Y tear down videos for a look at the casting

Tesla is going ham with thixotropic aluminum casting. Big-ass machines, big-ass castings, no heat-treat.

The goal is to get that down to a single casting. Not only does this simplify production further, but you can do it with no machining afterwards, no datums, nothing. You just tap the holes and put it together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pih4kU6yvz8

The Y is realizing a lot of things they were promising with the 3. It's a much more exciting vehicle from a production standpoint.

Casting.

Note that the Model 3 rear is a bit of a pathological case. In his teardown, Sandy Munro had a lot of good things to say about other parts of the car, but considered the tail end to be a horribly engineered overly expensive mess. So it looks so good because they started with the unambiguously worst piece in the car, and made it really good.

Curious to know how Tesla will (if it will) repatriate China profits. Perhaps they don't, but just ship China-sourced parts to Fremont and Berlin paid for with China profits?

The political climate could take a very ugly turn, China will want to keep cash within its borders.

According to their loan agreement w/ China, they must pay off their loans until they can repatriate anything.

by the agreement, they can't. Their financing conditions prevent them from doing so for a few years unless they pay their loans there.

As an investor, I like the format these results are presented in. The slide deck approach is a lot more approachable than the typical text-only SEC filing. An average investor is much more likely to open this and read it than the typical financial statement. It's not over-the-top marketing agency gloss, but it has some nice touches. Of course, you also get the text-only filing to follow.

As far as the key numbers, Tesla continues to push profitability and I think beat estimates by pulling off a profitable quarter in Q1. I can't imagine they will do it again in Q2, and they've suspended their guidance, but compare and contrast to, e.g. Ford, which is currently drawing all their credit lines to the max to stay afloat (to the tune of $15 billion).

They've never had spare inventory before, it will be interesting to see how fast they can clear it when things pick up. In a very long shutdown scenario, Tesla will come out way ahead of standard auto makers because their cars somewhat forego the "New Model Year" craze, and they can software update all their inventory. So while most carmakers will be looking at bursting full lots of "late model year" new cars, Tesla will be selling "Model 3" and "Model Y" through their configurator same as usual.

It's been fun watching the Munro tear-downs of the Model Y. I'm curious when and how quickly those improvements will make it back into a redesigned Model 3. They have definitely improved and simplified the design in important ways. They highlighted this in their slides at the end showing underbody components of Model 3 (70 pieces) vs Model Y (2 pieces, eventually 1).

Solar is unfortunately MIA in this report. Buffalo managed to get Solar Roof ramped up to 4MW per week (1,000 homes per week) just as the shutdown hit. I would imagine a lot of momentum has been lost in their installer recruitment and training efforts. I would have been very nice to see some ROI in 2020 from Solar Roof, but I'm not sure we'll get it this year.

Looking forward to getting to see a Model Y in person and feel how much more space it has. It seems like they've left a good deal of acceleration "in the tank" to unlock in future software updates, that will also be fun to see.

As an investor, these financials are so sexy. Historical quarterly data presented, cash flow statement presented quarterly, so many small examples of excellence and thoughtfulness in how the figures are presented.

Not an investor, but Tesla is looking increasingly like a money printing machine to me with so much untapped potential that they could pivot to in many ways.

The genius of the whole setup is that it's a car company that is basically a battery company but also a power infrastructure company.

IMHO, any battery produced in the next decades will have some way of being sold profitably. It just so happens that cars are a very profitable way to monetize them right now. But there are lots of other places where batteries could be equally useful (which Tesla has been exploring). When EVs commoditize over the next decade, they are ready to start pivoting to other things that will have a similarly insatiable demand for battery. Tesla using the same batteries in cars, semis, and grid storage means that any penny invested in more production capacity for batteries is not lost.

The reason semis are delayed is that they lack production capacity because it's maxed out. They're adding capacity as fast as they can at a jaw dropping pace and it's maxed out. That's not bad news but good news for Tesla.

Solar is a risky but genius move as well. I know they've gotten a lot of criticism for that and the so far underwhelming adoption rate. But it's a smart move if they can get that working. Pairing solar with batteries and car charging options (and maybe car to grid/house) is going to be a killer deal. And that's just the consumer market.

There are a lot of solar panel manufacturers out there but not a lot that are also selling grid storage solutions, mass producing cars, or have experience with building out direct sales to consumer type organizations. Add to that their approach to innovating mass production of batteries, cars, and indeed factories & machines. Tesla does all these things for the very simple reason that the sum of these things is more than the value of them individually. IMHO they'll bang on this until it starts working just right in a couple of years while dropping production cost at a pace that basically very few will be able to match and own the solar market as well.

I expect the prospects for the cybertruck are good enough to require an entire new battery factory of its own.

Numbers and all aside, the Solar Roof photo is very satisfying. Very clean and elegant for a solar installation.

This is the craziest rollercoaster of a stock I've seen.

Props to Elon for everything he does.

He gets a lot of flak about his tweets, I for one, couldn't care less.

Big picture, he's the Henry Ford of this generation.

TSLA to the moon! Or to Mars ..., Where art thou has our little Starman gone, so afar. Prices up / Prices Down. Let it fly high to where you are. As far to Deep Space like no man (or women) has gone before. Chasing you all the way to the light core. TSLA will lead the way. To new advances to tech, explorations, energy arrays, and more ... > cq cq cq cq jp-7ffecb3b54ada1e35e69814b3eaa7fd4 Open the door and light the way.

Infographic: Highlights of Tesla Q1 2020 earnings report https://news.alphastreet.com/tesla-inc-nasdaq-tsla-q1-2020-e...

Tesla Inc. turned to profit in the first quarter of 2020 aided by strong revenue growth, continuing the positive trend seen in the trailing two quarters.

Not a big deal but FYI Tesla IT people the page title is "Q3 2019 Updated".

Edit: fixed.

Excerpt:

"We enabled stop sign and traffic light recognition and braking for our Early Access Program users at the end of Q1 and to the wider public in April 2020".

That's awesome! They may very well release FSD in a year or two!

I’m watching in disbelief at the stock market making a V shaped recovery. Nasdaq is only a few percentage points off it’s all time high.

I guess don’t underestimate the American consumer even at a time of economic uncertainty? I don’t know how else to explain record sales from Tesla, Facebook, and Microsoft today.

Massive infusions of cash from Congress & the fed will do that for you. It’s far, far, far too early to draw conclusions about long term recovery.

As always, the capital owners just have their significant net worths temporarily reduced by 10-18% (looking at NYSE/NASDAQ/LSE) while millions lose 100% of their paychecks.

Don't lose sight of reality; business closings left and right, layoffs, pay cuts, etc.

Don't let the zero-hedge crowd turn you off to arguments about funny-money from the fed. This is a fairly predictable result. Fed supplies money. Money has to be put to use. Where is productive capital? Interest rates are itty bitty. Stocks look high but .. what else to do? Risk buying high now or inflation later.

But this can only remain decoupled from the economic reality for so long.

Outside the stock price movement the earnings today were all good though. Advertisers still seem to be spending money on ads, even into April.

It's nice when the good guys win.

Yeah, let me know when it happens.

I dig Tesla, but I wonder if Elon's own goals would be better served if they only produced motors and batteries and novel tech for the other car makers.

The only reason anyone would buy them is because tesla forced them to take electric seriously. And now that's why they can't, they need in-house tech or they're just Teslas with different chassis shapes.

Its a sad paradox.

I am not sure. Most car makers are releasing shitty hybrids to pass the emissions tests, but not really invested in electric vehicles for now.

That is the route Rivian is taking and Ford just announced the cancellation of their first planned model. Tesla’s draw isn’t the electric it’s the excellent performance, and incredible technology and user experience. The electric underlies those things but it isn’t the reason it’s a top selling car.

What's included in the list of things Musk promised for this year? I only remember 1 million self driving Teslas as taxis [0]. Would surprise me greatly if anything close to that happens.

[0]: https://www.engadget.com/2019-04-22-tesla-elon-musk-self-dri...

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