Comment by boboche | Hacker News Reader

Comment by boboche | Hacker News Reader

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Stopped reading at “tesla is a car company”. When I read that, it shows how little research has been done and not trusting anything else. Hate and downvote all you want, anyone who did basic research on the company, IP, and execution knows how bad that narrative will age. Its not about loving or hating Elon, its simple business.

While the P/E compression during a recession is completely normal, and yes, Tesla is overvalued looking stricly at P/E, they will survive a recession blow much better than a lot of companies because of their cash balance, margings, and operationnal excellence. Drops are expected and serious investors will see this as a unique buying opportunity. It could go down 90% for all I care, I would buy more shares.

If you are in the market for day trading, get out for a while because at times like this you will mostly get burned unless you really know what you are doing.

If you are in the long run, did your research, you shouldn’t sweat at reading all this doomsday material vs. any stocks you own. its as bad as bulls saying tesla will reach 5000 by the end of the year.

I agree with everything else you said except your first sentence. Saying that Tesla is a car company isn't untrue and there's no reason for you to have such a visceral reaction to it.

Tesla has made no indication that they'd ever license their self-driving or sensor tech to others. Pretty much every other project Tesla has suggested is vaporware. The one and only thing they'll successfully produce and launch, possibly in our lifetimes, is cars.

And yes, the car part of their company is not important to them, but it's what they're making, and it's what we're buying. It's also the weakest part of their company. Despite their production numbers being relatively low, the QC issues and service issues are pretty noticeable. They absolutely need to fix them to reach the average customer, which they'll need to. To reach full potential of their current stock values, they can't just rely on tech savvy individuals looking to overlook QC issues.

It's like saying "Apple isn't a phone company, it's a services company." Even though that might be true in a sense in terms of their revenue, the iPhone is the lynch pin of their business. If they fucked up iCloud and Apple TV+ and the App Store, it'd suck, but the company would survive. If they majorly fuck up the next iPhone? Probabaly not.

> Tesla has made no indication that they'd ever license their self-driving or sensor tech to others.

Do you mean self-driving or "self-driving"?

Elon Musk has stated at least twice that they would be willing to license FSD to others.

Grid energy storage is a successful and growing business segment. It doesn't yet have the scale of the car business but to call it vaporware is dishonest.

Not sure if this was before he tweeted. But Elon literally tweeted within the last few days that he will license FSD to other companies.

Not sure about the timeline, but regardless I wasn't aware of the tweet.

But I still stand by my comment, his tweets are somewhat irrelevant given how many false promises he has made. He made a statement years ago that he'd let other companies use his supercharger network, but dragged his feet on it. Until very recently where they've started piloting the project in Norway.

OK, but you realize you can say that about all the big techs now? Google is not an ad company. It’s really an “AI” company with far more valuable R&D. Same with Facebook.

If we are looking at tech companies purely from research assets accrued, I have to say Facebook is a bargain here. And even more so with Google.

Tesla on the other hand is more of a marketing company. Their R&D spend does not match all the hype. If they’re rolling out a revolutionary humanoid robot, I have to think that’s going to cost them more than $2B per year to develop.

>Google is not an ad company. It’s really an “AI” company with far more valuable R&D.Same with Facebook.

And which AI products do Google and Facebook sell to their customers for revenue?

Google and Facebook are ad companies plain and simple and invest into AI R&D to further improve their ad targeting capabilities.

Leads me to think you’ve not paid attention to ML space in the past decade.

Please correct me on what I said wrong.

Google Cloud has ML\AI offerings. Most of the Google hardware probably utilizes ML in some way. There's also the bets: Waymo, Deepmind etc.

Waymo and Deepmind are currently money sinks for Google constantly running at a loss and only supposed by Google's massive ad-funded war-chest. Same for Facebook's/Meta's endeavors into VR where Quest goggles are sold at a loss to consumer.

Please wake me up when Waymo and Deepening generate any profit on their own, without any funding from the mother ship, that doesn't revolve around ad targeting.

Well you didn't ask for profitable businesses, this is just to dispute that AI efforts are only for better ad targeting.

I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla is operating it's AI efforts at a loss as well.

Of course I asked for profitable business when I challenged your claim that Google is an AI/ML company. If that business line is not profitable but ad revenue is the main engine that keeps the lights on, then Google is first and foremost an ad company that also happens to fund AI/ML and other endeavors but at a loss.

What generates revenue is what defines a company straight and simple not what they want to call themselves, since they all say their mission is making the world a better place and other such BS.

So what makes Tesla not a car company? most of it's revenue is selling cars, no?

Where did I mention anything about Tesla?

This whole thread started from GP arguing that Tesla is not a "car company" :)

Anyway, no point in continuing it.

Please check that I only rebutted the claims that Google and Facebook ares ad companies and not ML companies, that's it. I didn't reply to anything mentioning Tesla and I can't be held accountable for other discussions in this thread, that I didn't take part in.

Remember in P/E the E is earnings, not revenue. Their P/E is probably astronomical. The only thing that suggests P/E isn't an accurate indicator for them is massive growth. Nobody can really say what E will be when the growth slows or stops. Nor do we know when it will.

Exactly, wall street is following guidance or lower while they are striving to exceed that by a lot, and are succeeding extremely well so far, but being realistic and doing your own research vs. trusting online “sources” for confirmation biases was my point.

Wow lots of passion you should see the points going up and down on this one ;).

The P/E for the latest quarter is about 100. At that valuation, growth only has to keep up for a year or two to hit a reasonable P/E. If you think growth will continue for longer, the stock is cheap.

Agreed. I have some good exposure to Tesla, but I would gladly increase it if they drop further.

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