Tesla Market Cap Falls Below $400B | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Market Cap Falls Below $400B

finance.yahoo.com

25 pointsmfiguiere15 comments

Pretty big hit today. Still not down to the pre pandemic value yet though.

I’ve heard people theorize that at some point the banks will sell off Musk’s collateral to secure what they can; I’m not familiar with those types of loans (not being rich enough) but if anyone here is I’d be curious if that’s even a possibility.

Certainly a possibility

Adjusting for inflation it is only about 60-70% over the pre-pandemic peak now.

Multiple other companies are operating real robotaxi services now with hundreds of cars on the road without drivers and public disengagement numbers that shame the FSD beta. The Vegas tunnel Teslas are on a fixed single lane loop and still need drivers.

Boring bought an existing sewer pipe drilling machine and got a multibillion valuation out of it. They claimed making bricks from the dirt would pay for the tunnels: then why not excavate instead and make bank making bricks? Because it was just hype. It still might be worth something in that a 3-person-per-train-plus-operator monorail salesman might get continued subsidies from various municipalities where the politicians want to affiliate with a celebrity.

Boring Co. has designed their own TBM based on the one they purchased. Their breakthrough is in bringing down cost per mile and time required to tunnel. As for requiring drivers, I believe that has to do with Nevada laws.

Having recently looked into the cost of tunnelling, I definitely see room for innovation, it’s an industry on the cusp of transition from “each time we make one of these it’s custom because <sound financial reasons>” to “I’ve got one that just finished its last project that should do the job for you” … similar to how extremely large cranes have become. Several decades ago if you needed a big mobile crane it was custom engineered and built… but industry advances and now you have companies like Liebherr building chassis and standard parts as a modular system and companies dedicated to owning and operating these reusable and reconfigurable pieces of specialist machinery so that when someone like SpaceX needs a crane for building a Starship launch tower or when Texas DoT need to move a huge bridge segment, they can just pay for the services of a company that operates one of these cranes, or even buy their own if they think they are going to need to use it a lot for a long time.

There are still projects where the TBMs are considered disposable and the projects have them dig further than the required end of the tunnel and they just build a wall at the end of the tunnel and basically brick up the TBM like medieval monk… it’s becoming much less common as companies who build them have been designing machines to avoid such wasteful practices in order to hopefully decrease the cost of their own future machines by having parts to refurbish and reuse from TBMs that have finished digging… but for large TBMs it’s not a given that the TBM will ever dig another tunnel.

Just like reusable all weather, airliner style rockets make it possible to decrease launch costs, the more standardised, all rock and soil capable, and reusable, a Tunnel Boring Machine can be made, the cheaper it should become to dig tunnels with it. It should come down to operating crew costs, worn cutting head part replacement costs, tunnel construction material (the tunnel lining) costs, and some transportation and logistics costs. With all the non recurring engineering cost cut away.

Collateral for what loan? Twitter’s debt is unsecured and doesn’t have anything to do with Musk personally.

I had understood that he secured at least part with TSLA stock; is that incorrect?

No, I am mistaken. Some of the loans are collateralized with TSLA.

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/equities/elo...

There's very little relative trading volume on the price slope below 165-150 here, I wouldn't be surprised to see a fall to 95 and down to 30-50 in the medium term, and a cap of "only" about $100-150bn.

One HN'er wrote he's shorting it to $50. Braver than me, that's for sure, still it doesn't look like that's impossible.

Same day the cops reports on the multicar crash in SF and the driver claims FSD was enabled, and that it suddenly slowed down to 20 miles.

The whole market is getting slaughtered today.

> The whole market is getting slaughtered today.

Sure, the markets down, and car companies moreso, but still...today:

S&P down 1.45%

Dow down 1.05%

F down 3.30%

GM down 6.60%

TSLA down 8.88%

And that's just today...

Comparing growth stocks to indices and value stocks doesn’t make sense.

Reading into stock prices alone is known as Technical Analysis and does not have a good track record. It’s pseudoscience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com