Tesla stock falls again, toward longest losing streak in more than 4 years
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But, conversely, if they stay on top, maybe that high valuation will stick around.
Porsche is selling a crap ton of Taycans, more than Tesla is selling Model S.
17% of Taycan buyers are trading in a Model S.
Whilst Tesla’s are still selling quite well I think they still are riding their early “we are the only ones who can do EVs right” wave and “Musk fame” and with both kinda dying down I don’t see Tesla being dominant for much longer.
There is too much competition from companies that are far more competent at making cars that are actually useful, all it took is for battery technology to become just a little bit more democratized and for car manufacturers to stop treating EVs as some concept car fab ala the i3…
The Taycan is one of the best cars I’ve ever have driven not just as far as EV’s go but period, and I’m getting to test drive the EQS SUV in about a week and from what I heard it also is a fantastic car.
And this is whilst not accounting for the mass of new EV companies and offerings coming out of China which some of them seem to be quite competitive on all fronts with Tesla too and this can really hurt Tesla especially in the Chinese market which I’m going to bet is a major growth driver for them.
Unless Tesla pulls out some magic battery tech out of their ass and I mean like truly magic as in not something that other manufacturers can compensate for by putting larger batteries or by slightly lowering the power output of their platforms I really don’t see them even remaining competitive in the long term.
Yes they still have their charging network but ironically it’s quickly becoming outdated with the new super fast charging standards coming out and most importantly it’s really only proving Tesla a huge advantage in the US as their charging network outside of it is of a much smaller scale if it exists at all.
They should have brought out another lower cost, smaller car by now. Why haven't they built a commercial van? Why is there no family MPV? The investment in FSD is ultimately a distraction that wastes resources and slows growth.
One day FSD will be a reality, but that shouldn't be their primary goal.
I agree, but for another reason...
There isn't much copyrightable or patentable in the self driving world. If someone makes a self driving car which is good enough to drive unsupervised, then it'll only be a year till all other manufacturers can do the same.
Being first won't buy them much.
Without any working product available on the market, I don't think potential customers know what they're missing. Having a truly working self-driving feature would be like having a 24 hour private chauffeur. It would dramatically change where people live, where they work, and how they take vacation. I'd probably by weekend home 10 hours away if I could fall asleep in the car on Friday and wake up there Saturday morning.
If L4+ self-driving is coming soon, I would doubt that Tesla is the one that finally nails it.
A few years ago, when progress toward self-driving seemed to be, well, progressing at a decent pace, I was very excited to see a self-driving future.
Now? I'm not realistically sure if I'll live to see one, and I'm only forty.
Sure, the street car revolution changed where people lived and where they worked and ultimately how cities were designed. But it has been a 100 years, and the public transit technology has gone through multiple iterations (including fully automatic [i.e. self-driving] systems and sleeper train cars). I honestly don’t see how self driving cars will change anything that public transit hasn’t changed already.
Tesla debt 1/10 of Ford Profit on par on significantly smaller number of units sold Tesla YoY growth 55%
For batteries, they still mostly just buy from suppliers.
1. Solar and Battery Tech 2. Entry into commercial trucking. 3. Bringing on their own Lithium refineries (IIRC the main thing constricting Lithium production isn’t extracting it’s Refining) that being said Elon said they were planning on bringing on their own refinery capacity in 2 years when the current lead time was generally 7.
Personally not buying any of those.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/heres-much-investing-1-000-12...
I could see this going either way. They won't come up with a wild world-changing idea without him, and you might lose some fanboy investors and employees, but a competent manager with auto industry experience would kill/spin off power wall and solar projects, scale back self-driving promises, and fix reliability issues. It'd be a better car company, but a worse dream company.
Four years ago Tesla was in the throes of model 3 production and had the potential of huge demand once they got going.
Where are things now? Other automakers have responded with alternatives. Good ones too, you can buy a Hyundai for a similar price and according to consumer reports, better reliability.
What’s on the horizon for Tesla? Trucks and Semis but those aren’t as mass market as model 3, and self driving cars have shown themselves to be… less than feasible.
What an absurd statement. Tesla's is ~30%, which is high but not too far off from the ~20% of Toyota and the Germans (VW, Audi, BMW, Mercedes).
But that's ignoring Porsche with ~85%.
I keep seeing this repeated, but I've yet to find a car that can compete in price and range, let alone price, range and features.
The most spectacular failure I know of is the case of Twitter. We knew the value of the stock to the penny starting in April of last year, but for months it traded at over a 25% discount. Why do we pretend this system of price discovery works when it can't even discover a price that has been printed in newspapers?
The rationality of the stock market reminds me of the Winston Churchhill quote: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." The market is irrational, but it's based on the best information we have. Admittedly, that information is limited and sucks. Heck, it sucks even if you actually work at a company in question! Even the people there can't be sure what the stock price will do.
> We knew the value of the stock to the penny starting in April of last year, but for months it traded at over a 25% discount. Why do we pretend this system of price discovery works when it can't even discover a price that has been printed in newspapers?
The answer is clear: the market wasn't confident the sale would go through, for good reason. Musk even tried to back out until he was forced to go through with it. If I recall correctly, things started getting much closer to the sale price once it became clear it was more likely to go through.
re: Twitter Price is just the last transaction to clear and the buyers can make that transaction for a million reasons, some of them betting that intrinsically the price doesn't reflect their value of the company. Seems fine to me. Wrong in the short term now looking back, but a million other things may have happened differently (TikTok could have been banned, Musk could have taken over differently, Macro trends could have reversed...etc)
Is there any rationality in giving one man (POTUS) more power than all the other 320M citizens combined? Arguably more power than ALL the other humans combined.
What about Hollywood and the acting business? If you picked a random theatre actor would it really underperform Daniel Day Lewis so bad to warrant Lewis paycheck?
Power's Law governs each and every system, on top of that you have stuff such as virality and survivorship bias which are unique to human systems and further amplify Power's Law effects.
That's how you end up with people like POTUS and the Forbes 400, that's also how you end up with stuff like the valuation of Tesla
The argument here would be that running a country requires fast decisions. Putting that in the hands of millions wouldn't allow us to respond fast enough. The rational decision here is to choose a representative of the people, allowing that person to make decisions quickly and more efficiently than the entire population.
Its berfectly rational to trade speed for accuracy depending on the situation.
>What about Hollywood and the acting business? If you picked a random theatre actor would it really underperform Daniel Day Lewis so bad to warrant Lewis paycheck?
People have limited time. They don't choose movies based on a close analysis of the quality of a given movie; that would be an irrational use of effort on something that you'll only spend 2 hours watching. Instead, the rational thing to do is to use other proxies for "quality" or "enjoyment value."
One of those is to see which actors are in the movie. If you like a particular actor and know that there is a baseline level of quality, you are much more likely to choose that movie. This is a large part of the value that Daniel Day Lewis provides, justifying his paycheck.
Sure but at that point isn't it better to have a lottery to establish who gets to be POTUS instead of going through the motions of campaign expenses and constant media coverage just to shove down people's throats the idea that POTUS is much better and more qualified of a person than all the other citizens combined?
> > One of those is to see which actors are in the movie. If you like a particular actor and know that there is a baseline level of quality, you are much more likely to choose that movie. This is a large part of the value that Daniel Day Lewis provides, justifying his paycheck.
You just described survivorship bias: Movie with Daniel Day Lewis is better because Daniel Day Lewis is in it.
The point is to find a person that is qualified and represents the will of the people. Electing a president is a tradeoff between efficiency and accuracy. A lottery would be much more efficient, but much less accurate in finding the "best" candidate for president. Elections are less efficient, but better than a lottery at choosing a competent and representative candidate.
>You just described survivorship bias: Movie with Daniel Day Lewis is better because Daniel Day Lewis is in it.
That's not survivorship bias. I fully admit that other actors could be better, and I'd imagine that many others do also. The point I'm making is that I have much more data on Daniel Day Lewis than I do on any random actor. As such, a rational individual will take that into account when deciding on a movie.
It's random chance that Daniel is famous. However, now that he's famous, we know much more about what he brings to a movie than most other actors. It would be irrational to ignore that info, regardless of how we got it.
The random winner of the lottery would try just as hard to follow the will of the people in order to be popular and convince the population to postpone the next lottery as much as they possibly can and thus stay in power.
> > It's random chance that Daniel is famous. However, now that he's famous, we know much more about what he brings to a movie than most other actors. It would be irrational to ignore that info, regardless of how we got it.
Or maybe it's not about the acting, but the budget allocated for promotion and shoving the movie down people's throats, see the huge flop of By the Sea (2015) starring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt who were also directors and producers. Only 10 million as the budget, which pales compared to the big studios mega-budget movies they ofter star in. And so with zero promotion Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are just regular actors and nobody went to see them. Even their fans do not know of this movie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_the_Sea_(2015_film)
Similarly the election circus and the huge media coverage it generates are the promotional service for the would be POTUS, shoving him down people's throats and convincing the population that he's the most qualified.
> > It's random chance that Daniel is famous. However, now that he's famous, we know much more about what he brings to a movie than most other actors. It would be irrational to ignore that info, regardless of how we got it.
You say information, for me it's promotion. Promotion is the opposite of information. If I were to give examples
It's always the dollar amount and human-hours spent on the promotion which matters.
A random person as president every term, that sounds like a better system to me, a person more likely in touch with the everyday problems and with far less political motivation. Plenty of reasons it wouldn't work like immediate corruption by companies wanting their own legislation by promising random person money and jobs after their term. Not necessarily worse than the corruption we have now. Interesting idea nonetheless.
The only point of buying Twitter stock is to sell it again later. If you know it'll sell months later at a specific price, then buying months earlier means tying up capital for a limited upside. Other investments have unlimited upsides, or at least pay dividends.
The bull case isn't "Tesla becomes a monopoly in automobiles." The bull case is "Tesla becomes a car monopoly, monopolizes self driving, creates a great semi truck, has solar panels on half of the buildings in the US, and supplies battery technology to every clean energy producer globally."
Now, does that justify the valuation? Probably not. But it certainly raises the ceiling on Tesla's valuation. I don't think it's an apples to apples comparison between Tesla and other auto manufacturers.
The discount on Twitter stock is related to the likelihood of a deal closing, compared to the market's perceived value of Twitter stock were the deal to fall through. If you think there is a less than 100% chance of the deal closing, the only sensible thing to do would be to price that in.
If you believed that was a likely outcome then the insane valuations would seem not so insane, which is why it got bet up to those levels.
RE the Twitter thing, you’re benefiting from hindsight a bit there. Musk almost immediately started trying to get out of the deal, and it was far from clear that he’d actually be forced to complete. It was quite reasonable that there’d be some price uncertainty.
The bet is on Tesla doing more than regular cars. How much does the calculus change when people think it will eat the taxi/rideshare market, the solar market, the backup battery market, the charger market, and potentially robotics?
Tesla’s valuation is entirely based on investing in that vision. That’s why it’s notable that it’s precipitously collapsing. People are losing faith and it might just become a regular old car company.
> We knew the value of the stock to the penny starting in April of last year, but for months it traded at over a 25% discount
No you didn’t. You knew the closing price of an offer that the buyer was trying to back out of.
$TSLA down 70%. Elon: "unfavorable market conditions"
Tesla, is growing, has leading margin, made 3 billion $ last quarter.
Totally comparable.
Wait for Lucid’s Model 3
Seriously, go and actually do the exercise, your mind will be blown.
90% or so of the voting stock would need to agree on a motion to remove him. That's a very high bar to reach and some activist shareholders have petitioned the board to remove those rules. Musk hasn't had a majority in Tesla for a long time now.
Maybe with his latest antics such a majority could be found and then his goose is cooked, at least, as far as Tesla is concerned. Shareholders are probably afraid that the stock would really crater if that were to happen (which, compared to where it is today would open the company up to - ironically - a hostile takeover).
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
> Nearly a third of used Teslas for sale in August were 2022 models up for resale, a sign that original buyers were aiming to flip, analysts said. That compares with about 5% of other brands on the used market, research firm Edmunds said.
I guess this doesn't impact overall demand, but does push up prices. And feeds the frenzy.
I'm still not bought in yet, probably a lot more room for it to crater.
I had to build my own Excel spreadsheet for this.
But I would love to find a place where they've already done this for me!
Source?
Also with a BEV if you have solar, you can literally fuel your car for free. Why bother with hydrogen?
AMZN P/E: 75
MCD P/E: 34
Ok, since it didn't make the news, I'm completely on the dark here... but are you talking about the supply of lithium?
If so, I have some news to you about one of the most common metals on Earth's surface.
If you don't tell what you want to say, I'm pretty comfortable to keep assuming the details are all wrong. And yes, it's a simple algorithm. Yet it seems to work quite well.
I'm not worried about the abundance of lithium, it is the speed at which we can get it that is the issue. One can still have a shortage even if there is an abundance of potential materials. And starting new mines is a long process. The quickest I have ever seen a decent mine come online from initial approval is 8 years.
Materials we should worry about long term in terms of total volume would be stuff like Cobalt, Nickle and Graphite. But not in the next decade.
A big part of the whole issue of mining is something I always have to bring up to some folks. There are four ways to categorize in which a material is available.
The is the resource, how much we theorize is available. Lithium is a great example, there is loads of the stuff.
There are the reserves, how much we actually know exists. Where it is, what grades etc. This is always lower than the resource.
There is if it is technically extract able. Do we have the technology to get it out? What good is a reserve if it is 200KM under ground? The total of this is always less than the reserves.
And finally, what is economically viable. Say we can still get the materials, are people willing to pay for it? This is my big argument against mining asteroids. This is always less than what is technically extract able.
Once you past through those 4 gates then we can start talking. Don't just talk strategy, talk logistics. It is boring an dirty but it is were the rubber meets the road.
The abundance argument is the same used for silicon and solar panels. Yes it is everywhere but there is a reason we mine quartz rather than just boiling up random patches of dirt to get the stuff.
I'm also unconvinced that we should be 100% in on only lithium for BEVs, it's important to have multiple technologies.
Just look as traditional ICE cars, we have Petrol and Diesel. I see Lithium as the Petrol of BEVs, what's the Diesel going to be?
I think the energy side of their business is about to grow tremendously and they'll reduce profit margin and continue growing crazy fast on the auto side.
“Last year, Musk tweeted, "A little red wine, vintage record, some Ambien ... and magic!" Sam Altman, the president of startup accelerator Y Combinator, replied: "ambien tweeting is a dangerous game."
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-ambien-use-tesla-b...
Now, add in TikTok potentially being banned in the US and you can see their social media apps being even stronger positioned.
Obviously if I knew the future I'd be rich already, but that's my 2 cents. shrug
If they had zero growth from 2022 Q3 for a year, then it's P/E be about 26 with the current stock price.
Musk is like the Manager who brought a club from 3rd division to the Premier League, but he was paid spectacularly and the club doesn't owe him nothing more than a fair handshake and a great send-off with a guaranteed spot in the club HOF.
It's time to thank him and bring in an adult who can guarantee a top-4 Champions League spot consistently season after season, otherwise the club will follow the manager on his descending arc down to 3rd Division again.
I don't think a regular CEO is going to be able to restore the reality distortion field that got TSLA overvalued by that much in the first place, but they might at least look interested in selling cars.
Problem is that selling cars is a much tougher business than selling hope.
I think it's too late for that. Tesla has lost half of their potential customer base because Musk couldn't stay out of politics.
If Tesla fires Musk, Tesla loses the fanboys. If they keep him, they lose everyone else. They're damned if they do and damned if they don't right now.
But that said, it's probably best that Tesla take their losses now and fire him and bring in someone else that can restructure the company in the downturn.
Absurd comparison. There is no Tesla without Elon. There is no EV market without Elon. Elon is the first non traditional CEO to blow past all others. Only comparison can be made is to Steve Jobs. People constantly doubt Elon but time and time again he pushes technology like no other. Elon didn’t make Tesla stock overpriced, dumb investors did. Elon knows recession is coming and is going to hit another win making the most popular website in the world popular. Tesla will stand the test of time because of Elon. Any other CEO will make Tesla dissapear
Imagine if they were spending that time and money on developing a smaller cheaper car for the masses, getting more industrial vehicles out (god know why they have not done a traditional Van?). That's is the growth that is needed to justify their market cap. Not some fancy thing that's not relevant or of interest to 90% of the market.
I say, just take your win and go home. Close out your short and buy yourself a nice dinner. You deserve it.
EDIT: Maybe hold onto a few shorts for fun. But if you're already winning this hard, you really should just take profits. Its not like you can get much more profits out of this.
If you have reason to invest on the thesis that the stock will go down to $68 from $109, being short from $105, $150, or $300 is all the same at this point.
We'll see what the 4th Quarter holds but it's still possible that EPS will grow and the price will still tank as it becomes clear that the market becomes saturated with Elon's big ego.
Even $68 is would mean a P/E of around 20 which is still ~3 times higher than Ford's.
But still, there's a big issue of risk vs reward at play here. A short-seller would have made a significant amount of money if they've been short since $300 (or higher).
There's always a time to "Collect your chips off the table". It always feels too early when you do so. But you gotta run the calculation: is staying in and possibly losing everything worth the risk? If so, how much reward do you think you're gonna make?
By staying short, the full $190 / share gains from this trade remains at risk. And for what? The chance that it maybe turns into $230 / share gains? There's definitely a risk/reward calculation at play here. If you're really certain about that $70 price point coming up, then yeah, hold onto the shorts a bit longer. But anyone who has watched a 70% collapse of a stock that they sold short really should be considering just taking profits. How much further do you think it really can fall?
----
If you're certain to hold onto those shorts... maybe buy a couple of call options to lock in your wins, at the cost of theta-decay. There's other ways to hedge and "lock in" some of the winnings.
But no trader should be the idiot who "bets it all on black" over-and-over-and-over again. You gotta take your chips off the table at some point, and today is a good day as any other day.
Well that's a great question. If you think Tesla is close to bankruptcy than the answer is: all the way down.
But even so, downward pressure can create more downward pressure if Tesla has been over leveraged to obtain loans or to buy Twitter.
Let's say Tesla stock was used as collateral for loans, with a promise that the stock won't go below $100, e.g. If it does go below $100 then someone is on the hook to provide cash collateral to offset the loss of the value of the stock. The primary way to do that is to sell Tesla stock to raise cash. That creates further downward pressure on the stock price.
Or Tesla might be lying about something materially related to the stock price, which you've discovered and are pointing out to the WSJ, because you know, you have a reporter over there on speed dial (not everyone does, of course, but if your trades are $100M at a time then you should).
Or maybe you're betting that Elon is going to self implode and jump out of the window, or murdered because of shady dealings with Russia. Sure that's long odds maybe, but not entirely unheard of.
Derogatory information about a company or it's CEO might be a gamble that's worth taking. I'm sure there's a lot of dirt in Fortune 500 companies that is waiting to be found with the right team of private investigators.
Exactly. And what is that value? $0.
If you're someone who has short-sold at $300, that means you've already achieved over 60% of the possible value you can extract (even if TSLA goes _completely_ bankrupt). Or in other words, you've made $200, and the worst it could _possibly_ be for TSLA is a decline to $0, the remaining $110 or so of the stock price.
Its... a bit of an unfavorable odds, don't you think?
------------
Don't get me wrong. I think there's some sketchy as hell things going on to TSLA's books. CFOs were running away from this company for years. I do think that a long-term, hidden fraud case, could be possible... which would lead to a bankruptcy-like $0 (or maybe $1 to $2) valuation.
But I have no such evidence on this. Its purely speculative, based on how the CFOs of TSLA have acted, as well as the weird nepotism moves of Elon Musk + Solar City (Kimball Musk).
A lot of smoke, but without proof, its a rather risky trade.
Careful.
https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/TSLA/#eyJpbnRlcnZhbCI6ImRheS...
While the markets have been closed, two major stories about Tesla have broken.
A. Tesla is shutting down factories because demand is plummeting.
B. Musk praised a truly insane Russian propaganda tweet, predicting the fall of the west
It seems notable that the price of used Telsas has fallen 15%+ since August as well, which is about double the trend for used car prices in general: https://www.cargurus.com/Cars/price-trends/Tesla-m112
(Which isn’t to say it makes the market feel better, but come on…)
For one, the fact that Musk is even being recommended that kind of content is concerning. Twitters algorithm is set up in such a way that to get exposure to that kind of content, you have to be intentionally engaging with pretty delirious circles of narratives.
Additionally, of all the possible jokes to make on all the possible pieces to riff off of, he chose a pretty mediocre joke on an almostly tepidly incoherent take - his joke isn't necessarily endorsement, but it's still an intentional choice that doesn't really signal the kind of responsibility investors are probably looking for.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Popehat%27s%...
It gets posted on HN and upvoted to the top because many HN folks hate Tesla and want to spread FUD about it.
Meanwhile, in reality, Tesla has been announcing plans to build a new Mexico plant.
If anything, I'm mostly ambivalent about Musk. So not all of us :)
That said, the media response to it -- pumping his first tweet without clarifying by virtue of the second tweet -- is emblematic of everything wrong with our current news/media/social-media culture.
> Epic thread!!
In fact surely that's a parody account? How could anyone possibly think Musk genuinely agreed with it?
People have lost their minds over Musk.
It's not a good look.
Meanwhile Twitter is banned for ordinary Russians by the Russian government, why isn't he questioning Medvedev over that?
Brianna Wu is a permabear who pretends to be a journalist and spreads disinfo without verifying.
I think Ford really is going to get traction with the F150 Lightning. That's the smartest move you could make, i.e. electrify the #1 selling vehicle with something similar and practical. That's what people want, and if you convert that demo, you basically win over the rest.
I agree, I think this will be huge. Tesla's moat really is narrowing. I'm still rooting for them, though, and I'd like to see some of the other startups get traction as well.
They took a lot of risk on it, but it was hedged with hybrids , including PHEVs (with which they have done quite well), and while they are a little late to the party with a pure BEV, they are rolling those out to.
There isn’t any real sense where I see them gambling on hydrogen now except as a side bet.
https://www.toyota.nl/modellen/mirai
The only non-commercial electric model they sell right now is the 'Proace City Verso', and it's not exactly a sales success. There is the BZ4X in the works (what a name) but you can only reserve it, they don't actually have them yet, production was halted, resumed, then halted again and they had a recall before they even shipped them (I don't know how that is even possible, the cause: wheel fell off).
https://www.toyota.nl/modellen/proace-city-verso-electric/bu...
The rest is - from what I can see - all hybrids, with minimal batteries. No Prius, Yaris, Aygo or Corolla with all electric drive, which would be an instant sales success. Their 2023 lineup? More hybrids. Meanwhile VW is on their second iteration of their all-electric line with four models across a broad spectrum.
Toyota has a new FCEV? The only thing thet seem to be pumping new on the EV front is their new BEV, the bZ4X.
Back a few years ago when "there aren't any women in the tech industry" was the crisis of the day, it seemed like they wanted to upgrade from knowing no women so they went out and met a few not very trustworthy people who had nominated themselves spokeswomen of all women, never noticed this, and stopped trying after that.
> Those are definitely the most absurd predictions I’ve ever heard, while also showing astonishing lack of awareness of the progress of artificial intelligence and sustainable energy.
Edit: including the after-hours market, according to
https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/tsla/after-hou...
> Data last updated Dec 23, 2022 08:00 PM ET.
> This page will resume updating on Dec 27, 2022 04:00 PM ET.
(Elon's second tweet was before the pre-market opened.)
If you have a better explanation about why it took him a couple of hours to try some damage control I'm all ears.
edit to your edit(s): If you think Musk doesn't have better access than you and I do then that's pretty naive, obviously he is monitoring Tesla's stock price like a hawk and if the sentiment drops he'll be aware of it well before the figures are published.
Just doing sentiment analysis on Twitter would give you a pretty good indication of where the price is headed and guess who happens to have access to the firehose? And that's before we get into personal phone calls from people holding large swaths of Tesla stock as security against dodgy loans.
edit2: too many ninja edits to keep up with...
This is not a thing. The figures come out in real time for very basic trading accounts and iirc google finance gives them real time from the exchanges.
Also, the opening price is not set by pre-market action unless there a massive amount of abnormal AH volume. The participants that show up for the opening bids are 3-4 orders of magnitude higher in volume than the pre-market traders. Gauging general market sentiment from after hours action is folly, even in highly traded instruments like the index futures or the SPY etf.
I don't understand the thesis that Musk is somehow pro-Russia. Generally his ventures are against Russia interests:
SpaceX, launched in the aftermath of Russia being uninterested in selling a leftover rocket to Musk, now dominates the launch industry to the detriment of Russia, among other things halting the cash flow from NASA to Russia to carry astronauts to ISS.
Tesla and former-SolarCity, reducing use of oil, while Russia is a major oil producer.
Starlink provides communications capability to the country Russia is attacking.
However, a likely macroeconomic slump in (electric and other) vehicle demand and Musk’s erratic way of running Twitter are real problems. I think these get the blame for stock issues, rather than the bizarre Russian thing.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/elon-musks-strange-s...
Then a few weeks later regime approved voices said we should consider peace and it was no longer considered propaganda.
It seems his push for peace is always one sided in that all his ridiculous plans end with Russia being rewarded for aggression and Ukraine losing territory.
He said the people in those regions should be able to decide which country they want to be part of and that the result should be enforced/respected by both sides.
It’s a stupid opinion, but he didn’t say what you said he did.
People who oppose war were discredited by the regime then and they are being discreted today. News at 11.
Russia is a Mongol horde. Suing for peace against tribal border raiders (cooperate) is a rational strategy. If they know you'll always cooperate, then their best strategy is to always come back and attack (defect). Each time you achieve peace you lose land.
So, rational strategies are bad. You want to adopt an irrational strategy where you appear to be a crazy person willing to hurt themselves to get revenge - now attackers won't risk themselves in the first place.
This is why societies develop an "honor culture" and why NATO has that mutual defense clause.
In real life Putin changed strategies in a way that made his country worse (turned into a Mongol horde) but personally improved him (gave him more power over the country).
You can ignore anything he says; it's not meant for you and he doesn't care if you hear it or believe it. It's like when Russians say that Ukraine is run by Jewish Nazis. It's not intended to be truthful, which is why they don't care they've caused /more/ countries on their border to join NATO.
By "professors" you presumably mean Meerscheimer, who's basically like a cynical politics poster who thinks everything is about "making hard choices" and so is in favor of anything that sounds like it's "making hard choices" even if it's wrong.
If you don’t believe it condemns more people to be colonial subjects and the be redeployed to destroy Ukraine, I can see the confusion.
A lot of tycoons aren’t commenting about the war at all if the fear how the judgement will affect business.
Then he eventually sleeps, gets a bunch of "we're getting hammered by the public" emails when he wakes up and says "ah, but it's all engagement you see. This is my business genius."
Ignoring that the reason that sounds right to him is because it excuses him from the idea that he's ever done anything wrong.
Assuming they live long enough. Look at what's left of the cities that Russia has withdrawn from.
He's already taken calls with Putin and randomly decided to announce Ukraine should negotiate peace with Russia, then lost interest and dropped it.
(Note, the way Elon "talks" in tweets would be sarcastic if it was someone younger, but remember he's middle aged and still calls things epic unironically.)
espcially since the us has sanctions targeted at medvedev by name, it's no joke
I'm not sure if he's personally sanctioned but the former president of Iran also strangely likes trolling American politicians and commenting on sports. Sometimes gets replies from their social media interns.
https://twitter.com/Ahmadinejad1956/status/10372992643161661...
https://twitter.com/Ahmadinejad1956/status/10521783680729456...
Actually I'm surprised Iranians are allowed to have Twitter accounts, does that not count as "doing business"…?
Providing support to Ukraine (via starlink) is not enough. Proper denunciation speech is paramount.
(I am being sarcastic.)
This is actually quite odd behaviour. Most high-profile people, confronted with something they don’t understand, will keep quiet; looking stupid is too much of a risk for these people. If the former PM of Russia drunkenly tweets about you, _you do not engage_, no matter how nice he is about you.
I know you have written eloquently about HN in the past, but I think that site is gone. And I remember because I've been on it for over a decade. I joined an early stage start up on it.
Sadly, they give no means for deleting your account. But thought I'd flag to you anyway.
Anyway, I will be abandoning this account, but it's maybe something for other HN old timers to think about.
I had similar experiences suggesting covid had natural origins. I'm not sure the culture that HN possesses is the same as the one it alleges it desires.
Anyway, last post from this account. I am sure this one will equally be nuked... :)
the way he tweets is pretty much distilled 2012-ish reddit
There's a bit of a conspiracy theory going around that Musk was trying to get out of buying Twitter by publicly aligning with Russia/sabotaging Ukraine a bit. The idea would be being enough of a thorn in the US' backside that they might let him walk away from the deal.
It's a funny one in that Musk has done enough bizarre stunts by now that I don't see this as completely implausible on his part, but given that the US government isn't a dictatorship and has separation of powers I don't think such a deal would be possible even if some part of the US government wanted to take it.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ake44z/elon-musk-vladimir-pu...
https://www.businessinsider.com/musk-spotted-pro-putin-russi...
And of course, the one you're responding to: "Musk praised a truly insane Russian propaganda tweet, predicting the fall of the west"
At this point it just seems like he doesn't have any friends though.
What an absurd characterization. Don’t you have something better to do than wake up and post lies on the internet?
He said they should negotiate an end to the war, that’s not “pro-putin”.
It really bothers me when people like yourself post these blatantly false statements, and I can’t say I’m surprised this post is still up/not flagged.
People are trying to end this war and the next one. Anyone who believes Putin will back down after success in Ukraine isn't paying attention. Furthermore, the people who should be particularly quiet about what to do in Ukraine are those who swore that Russia would not invade in the first place, because they don't have a clue what makes Putin tick. The people who saw this war coming from a mile away are the ones who deserve attention now, and that's not Musk.
You don't understand, this time Russia and Putin will actually do what they agree to in a negotiation. Its not like Russia already agreed to never threaten Ukraines sovereignty already and decided they didn't like that agreement so they threw it out the window /s.
It's a pattern of pointless provocative nonsense by Musk, befitting a teenager, not the CEO of multiple multi-billion dollar companies.
I guess he's free to do what he wants, but people are free to read whatever they want into it as well. Dismissing it as humour is not a given.
And after all of it, here we are still talking about Elon, Tesla, and Twitter.
Come again? There are at least ten non-Tesla EVs that have a rated range of 300+ miles, and DC fast charging is everywhere. Look on PlugShare and filter out Tesla connectors.
Tesla is not the only game in town. And I say that as someone who recently bought a Model S Plaid.
I see people say this but I’m suspecting they don’t actually enjoy large road trips so don’t comprehend how terrible the difference is between 250 and 350 usable miles is.
What EVs can do LA to Salt Lake City with one full charging stop?
I don’t understand what you are asking.
>What EVs can do LA to Salt Lake City with one full charging stop?
I said that there are at least ten non-Tesla EVs that have a rated range over 300 miles.
LA to Salt Lake City is ~690 miles, half of which is 345 miles.
Few EV owners actually get their car’s rated range, and you’d have to be nuts to intentionally pull into a charging station with zero battery. Your scenario really calls for a car that has a rated range of ~400 miles, which, AFAIK, is currently limited to the Model S and the Lucid Air.
The longest range configuration of a Model S has a 405 mile rated range, though you’re not going to get that on a long road trip. The Lucid Air’s rated range is 516 miles. No idea how that bears out in reality, though I suspect it’s similarly less-efficient at interstate highway speeds. (Actual speeds, not speed limits.) I’ll be test driving one soon.
Whenever I think about Tesla I wonder why a company that had such a head start with electric cars doesn't basically own like half of the car industry now. He had a massive stock price which could have enabled huge growth.
There's a strong argument to be made that Musk has bungled it.
If he got paid for us talking about him, that'd be great. But he doesn't, not even on Twitter where advertising revenues were better before all the fuss. (There are people who get paid mostly from being famous, it's just they tend to operate well below "world's richest man" level, sell content or consumer goods considerably more mass market than the Model 3 and tend not see their net worth crash at the time their celebrity status goes mainstream)
Cause and effect is actually the reverse: the media started thinking his antics were interesting enough to cover because he'd already been very effective at promising spaceships and cars and organising people to deliver enough of his promises to earn him the status of maverick genius (and a lot of money). Nobody cares about your 420 jokes if you don't own a rocket company. He did the hype-man who delivers stuff well enough to more-or-less get away with dumb stuff that didn't exactly win the sort of headlines that sold Teslas (there is such thing as good free publicity; but they involve hyping his achievements and multiplanetary plans, not defending himself from libel actions). Then at some point he probably started reading his fans' takes on how his real genius was getting attention and so losing a board seat over a joke was actually 5D chess rather than a mistake to learn from, and now he's busy spending his fortune on being talked about...
(I guess you could still chalk that up as a win if you figure he always cared more about being noticed every day than stuff like going to Mars, but I don't think that's the case)
(Yet I would not bet against him making a success of Twitter, as he has Tesla and SpaceX.)
OTOH, I get the feeling people are being overly judgemental due to text being hard and 280 character text being even harder.
"I think the President and a small group of people know exactly what he meant."
That’s the intellectual level we strive for?
Saying "EPIC THREAD" is just his style of praising something, not mocking it. He had to add extra tweets to mock it five hours later because of the backslash.
Arguer: Musk is a pro-Russian asset who praised a Twitter thread in which a Russian government official predicted the fall of the West!
Respondent: That was trolling/sarcasm which Musk made clear in a subsequent tweet, if it wasn't already obvious.
Arguer: I just don't think CEOs of major companies should engage in trolling, especially about serious political topics!
1) Some people believe it should be something akin to Warren Buffett, Bill Gates or the late Queen of England Elizabeth II.
2) Some others believe it should be something like LBJ, Donald Trump, Howard Hughes/Elon Musk.
In reality the 'end of the road' looks different depending on the prevalent personality of the individuals who are being blessed by enormous amounts of luck to get in such high positions.
The amount of conspicuous consumption is approximately the same and cuts across all the different personality types.
And the coolness factor in contrast to other established brands was clearly damaged by Elno's escapades - and it's not getting any bette
Why tho? It’s not like they’re really good cars, the build quality is sub-par, as you note the brand has really suffered, the home-grown tech would be difficult to integrate, and the automation a liability.
The supercharger network seems like the major asset someone might be interested in.
And secondary would be a pretty strong software team as historic manufacturers have had a hard time taking that turn, but at the same time that would likely clash with the existing teams and practices so the benefit is not a sure thing.
They're not tho, the materials, QA, and fit and finish is absolutely garbage, has been for years, and apparently it's getting worse (https://youtu.be/kIW4moIM0zM).
Elon clarified it later with "Those are definitely the most absurd predictions I’ve ever heard, while also showing astonishing lack of awareness of the progress of artificial intelligence and sustainable energy."
I rented a model Y, and the ride, fit, finish, comfort, speed, venting is super cool, charging, range, power/speed settings that affect drive experience, all _amazing_ ... but... (no particular order)
- Door handles SUCK, open the wrong way and often require TWO hands. (I am not old/feeble)
- Unlocking the door SUCKS. You have to tap the key card multiple times, or in an exact spot.
- Locking the doors SUCK. You have to either find some obscure tiny lock icon on the touch screen... or just walk away an HOPE it locks. I actually couldn't tell if the car actually locked because it AUTO UNLOCKS when you get near it.
- The touch screen SUCKS. While many simple controls were easy enough, and the large screen was nice for navigation, most of it was miserably tedious. Repeat actions should be easy, but it was a constant chore to find and re-find.
- The physical controls on the steering wheel (you guessed it) SUCK. They are not labeled, and they are context sensitive so you are required to look at the screen to figure out what they are affecting. But sometimes, it's a tiny spot on the screen that it affects, and you can't see what it is doing. And since it changes what it affects, you can't rely on muscle memory.
- Lane controls SUCK. It constantly wines and alerts you, and warns you, and steers back into your lane. I tried multiple times to shut it all off, and I could simply not turn somethings off. (I work in IT, I googled it, there was nothing obviously locked down the rental company)
- Price (sucks)
Why is lane control seemly required? (my opinion) Because all the car's controls are out of your safe driving line of sight. Without this I think most Teslas would be in persistent minor/major accidents. The bad so far outweighs the good...
I hope they either allow disabling the babysitting features or make a simpler car without them. Add real physical buttons. Put a _real_ dashboard that you can see without getting distracted.
But a couple of these concerns are may be just because of the short experience renting?
Door handles: for the first week or so they seemed awkward, but I've been opening with a single hand ever since. The design is very similar to various exotic sports cars - and not well suited to a midpriced daily driver. Tradeoffs for aero, I think.
Unlocking and locking: bad experience on a rental with the card. As an owner, it locks and unlocks based on the phone-key automatically in daily use. I tried the key card a couple of times in the first month to understand how it worked - it's great as a backup key that fits in a wallet.
Touchscreen: I've used the touch UI in various brands of recent cars, and find the Tesla experience by far the best. Though I agree another $50 worth of physical buttons for the most commonly used features would be nice.
Steering wheel controls: after a few weeks you remember what they do and the physical minimalism is totally fine. Design optimized for owners, at the expense of renters.
Lane controls: there are about a dozen switches that control this behavior. It can be incredibly annoying, or no problem at all. Sounds like the defaults nowadays (or what the rental place sets) are awful, since as configured it ensured you won't buy one.
Price: they're selling all they can make at the price the market will bear. Would be nice if it was lower. Many industry watchers predict lower prices are all brands in 2023.
Fortunately it's a big industry, there are now some great electric cars competing with very different dashboards. I like variety, I'll pick a different one when I am ready to trade in.
They're not a good source of information even when they're right.
How is she being quoted talking about stock prices
2. Elon hasn't gotten much of the money for Strategic Defense Initiative contracts, nor is the entire program progressing much under Biden. He feels the Trump/Santis party, which embraced the project, needs to somehow continue by being boosted on Twitter.
This is pretty obvious when you read Chinese Weibo media and SpaceX history with Michael D. Griffin https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
Side note, so far the deliveries have been fine. Will have to wait and see on how Q4 went.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-v...
>currently sold with a 7500$ discount
Discount compared to what? They have been rising prices in the past two years since they couldn't satisfy the demand. They still have the highest margins by far.
But at the time, humans did not yet know that FSD seems to be un-achievable with a non-general AI. At least with current techniques.
People invested Tesla thinking something was possible and it turns out it isn’t. It happens
Despite years of dominating the headlines, the problem is Tesla was investing way less in research than the leaders and then tying both hands behind their backs with no Lidar and HD maps. I also think not trying to really master even a geofenced area is making them kick the can down the road on the thorny problems
This is how I became Elon sceptic, as I know thing or two about AI, and when he announced FSD I knew it was fraud.
Of course maybe Q4 and future quarters may change that, but there's no reason yet for shareholders to want another CEO.
But to address your question, it's completely compatible to think both that a) TSLA is overvalued b) Elon is the best CEO Tesla could have
Last week, Ford and GM were also falling, although today they are flat.
$112.78 at the moment, given the drop so far that's within reach, even today.
Much of Tesla's value was propped up by the personal brand of Elon Musk. And he has done significant damage to that brand, over the last few months, as he's courted a far-right extremist following. That has changed how most people look at him. Certainly many of the people who buy Tesla's are a bit left-of-center, and don't want to buy from a guy who they perceive as being far-right. The question is why Musk felt the need to be so public with his views. Every single CEO of a car company is a Republican, but they are not so loud about it. Why didn't Musk simply act like other CEOs and keep his conservative politics quiet and somewhat hidden? For a CEO, keeping one's politics hidden is the norm for a good reason. That Musk prioritizes self-expression over good business practices suggests he is currently in a mental space that would be appropriate for an artist but not a CEO. If he wants to engage in self-expression, he has the money that he can retire from his jobs and devote the rest of his life to advocacy. But it's a mistake to combine advocacy with being a CEO.
On this free speech issue he simply had logiced himself into incoherent tangle.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078841/
It’s deeply philosophical, simple, and humorous at the same time.
E needs to quit Twitter and get back to his real job. There’s massive value in the Semi line, but it probably needs a big push (like with Model 3) to get it ramped up (including battery capacity).
This IS a bad time for ramping production, though, as interest rates are higher.
Telsa is valued at the same as all the other manufacturers combined, which is obviously wrong and Elon got a free purchase of a social media company out of it.
All a bit bonkers really
I recently considered purchasing a Tesla Plaid, but ultimately decided against it because I did not want to indirectly support Elon Musk. Instead, I purchased a Porsche. I was in the market for a Luxury car - not necessarily an EV.
I used to be a big fan of Musk so much so that I wore the t-shirt ("Occupy Mars.") But, his opinions have become too personally problematic for me to feel comfortable supporting him. I mean it and want that to be absorbed, so I will say it again. His /personal opinions/ have become /too personally problematic/ for me as a consumer to feel comfortable supporting him. I have a personal boycott against him, if you will. I will do away with my Starlink just as soon as Amazon gets Kuiper online.
I am concerned that others may feel the same way, which could make it difficult for him to attract and hire talented people. It is unfortunate because I could always see the ~potential~ of Twitter under a visionary capitalist. You see, I am/was also Twitter's biggest fan, I am user-id 11,647 from 2006. I don't know that he can hire the right people, now, to meet that potential. I envision a platform that serves as a forum, creators' storefront, and a place for fans to subscribe and tip content creators. Twitter could grow a lot of these barely tapped markets. With the right moves on the chess-board, I have no doubt in my mind Twitter could rapidly become one of the top three mobile wallets if the cards were played correctly. There are so many ways for Twitter to become an old-fashioned business that takes cash from it's customers which would allow it to diversify out of the advertisement revenue. This would meet his goal of Twitter being a public square for its users not one that is required to appease it's advertisers. It would also ensure the continuity of Twitter. But, I am not convinced he can get THERE from HERE if others feel the same way I do.
"The Tesla Model S Plaid is a high-performance luxury electric car that Tesla says pumps out 1,020 horsepower and does 0-60 mph in 1.99 seconds. If all of that sounds impressive, that's because it is."
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Tesla has an advantage in electric cars in that they don't make IC cars. The IC car companies seem to have a hard time transitioning to electric-first. Ford has a nice electric pickup truck, which costs far too much and isn't produced in enough quantity to meet demand. Their electric work van is OK, although it's an IC conversion. Ford will probably do both better in the next iteration. Both are selling well. Tesla has nothing in either category.
Ford's utterly boring E-Transit van will probably dominate the dull and boring world of company owned van fleets. Those spend their nights at the company parking lot and then go out and make local trips during the day. Ideal situation for charging, paid for by companies who know their gasoline costs.
Tesla has been massively propped up by government subsidies and carbon credits, to the point that they tried not to break out their dependence on such things [1]. As more car companies embrace EVs those carbon credits are going to go away and the government subsidies are going to be more spread out.
Tesla has had years of over-promising and under-delivering, most recently with the Cybertruck. The Ford F150 Lightning is a dire warning for tesla. It takes a hugely popular truck and makes what seems to be a highly-regarded EV out of it. It remains to be seen if Ford can maintain volume and control costs. But the point remains that the F150 Lightning is real and the Cybertruck isn't.
Additionally, Teslas have been plagued with QC and design issues. The seat controls were prone to breaking to the point Tesla issued a software update to disable "excessive" seat adjustments [2] as just one example.
And then there's Elon himself. Elon's target market are, bsaically, rich coastal liberals. His politics are alienating his customer base.
But here's my favorite part: Elon has done more to dispel the myth of meritocracy than anyone who has come before him. Yes he still has his stans ("D** riders" if you prefer) but there sure seem to be less of them than a year ago. They seem to have been replaced by run-of-the-mill conservatives.
Many (including myself) were fooled by SpaceX but it's become increasingly clear that SpaceX succeeded in spite of Elon not because of him. There are a bunch of reports that SpaceX has competent management that has effectively insulated the company from Elon. As an aside, SpaceX too has had problems hitting targets throughout its whole history.
This is really breaking the spell of capitalist propaganda. The likes of Elon aren't so rich because they're amazing geniuses. It's really more luck and privilege than anything else.
Elon's fumbling of Twitter and desperate need for approval (eg "should I remain as CEO?" followed by "be careful what you wish for" is basically "do you like me?") has been entertaining to watch but at least a few people might stop venerating princelings who have simply failed upwards their entire careers. and that counts for something.
[1]: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Tesla-disclosed-government-cre...
[2]: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/271257/20220131/tesla-dis...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/23/elon-musk-tweets-that-he-con...
Scary
It is not like SPY is the only index fund around. There is a low-cost, well managed ETF for just about every angle on the market these days.
So why not invest in a fund that better aligns with your principles? TSLA is ~1% of the SPY, but only 0.04% of FNDX (another large cap fund).
It's not like you need to devote your life to picking stocks, but if owning tesla bothers you, making a one time effort to find something you like better than SPY seems like a reasonable move.
This is a condescending, ignorant, and stupid sentence.
> It might be shocking but
And so is this.
> PayPal
Ah yes, ecommerce, famously irrelevant to modern society.
I don't even know where to begin. We live in an information age, and this is one of the largest platforms of disseminating information there is. More importantly, the most prominent journalists in the world rely on Twitter for sharing information. Do you think the Saudis are so hell bent on infiltrating Twitter because it's irrelevant? Why do you think state actors spend so much effort trying to control narratives on social media?
And to the larger point: you're saying the richest man in the world and his attempts to mold modern society are irrelevant.
Source?
Then he bought Twitter, and suddenly his behavior was actively hurting his companies -- Tesla because he had to sell stock which affected prices and because he's tarnishing the brand by going political, and Twitter because he was making erratic decisions that drove away users and advertisers. So investors started to care.
People have indeed criticized both of those and many of the other things Musk has tweeted before the recent Tesla stock decline, and even the SEC has taken legal action based on ]Musk’s past tweets.
and
“Musk didn't change his behavior in response to complaints (except, perhaps, to lean into the behavior complained about even harder)”
are fundamentally different claims.