So I totally disagree on that end, as do most investors given teslas enormous valuation.
> So I totally disagree on that end, as do most investors given teslas enormous valuation.
Yes, and most Gamestop investors think the company is going to be the next Amazon. Buying a popular meme stock doesn't make their predictions right.
It’s now 2013, want to see a video of Starship taking off?
Sure and the guy is getting paid right now in cold hard cash, while all the synchopants keep ranting about hopes and dreams.
As Jack Nicholson said in 'the Departed' and I quote :
"What we generally do - in this country... is one guy brings the items and the other guy pays him. No tickee, no laundry!"
First the self-driving car for all Americans (the item), then the big payday for Mr.Musk, that's what happened with Mr. Ford back in the day, but what did the guy know? Nowadays you can just bluff your way into riches using the marvelous phenomenon of cult of personality and stock appreciation.
> > It’s now 2013, want to see a video of Starship taking off?
Want to see a sample of what Microsoft's ChatGPT can do?? It's amazing! But that has nothing to do with Microsoft giving Apple a run for its money in the smartphone market like Ballmer predicted back in 2012
There is no correlation between the 2 things just like there is no correlation between rockets and self driving cars, and it's laughable that synchopants think they are correlated just because thought leader and cult of personality enthusiast Elon Musk is both the founder of SpaceX and the petty individual who sued for the right to be called the founder of Tesla
That is what we used to do in America, since the days of JD Rockefeller, Henry Ford...but also Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Larry Ellison. I mean I used Windows before Gates became richest man in the world and so did hundreds of millions of people.
Musk got to #1 by selling go karts to a handful of rich people and promises of future selfdriving and total domination of the EV sector when EVs are not even sure to be the winner tech in the decarbonization of cars
The vast majority of Americans have never even set foot in a Tesla.
You seem to condone the poker game that Wall St. has become, I don't agree with that because entrepreneurship shouldn't be about bluffing and then offloading your hand to a bigger fool. We do that in Vegas, like men where at least you have to look in the eyes the dude you are screwing over.
Not so sure about that. Model 3s seem to rapidly replacing Civics as the Uber car of choice.
They say a sucker is born every minute
You seem to have a more personal vendetta against him, I’m just looking at his insane success and envying hype/ management style
His biggest success is the rocket industry. Let's examine top competitors - corrupt ULA which flies rockets on 50 year old engines and does cost+ contracts, his other competitor was Russia, a corrupt kleptocracy that stopped innovating when USSR fell apart. Russia would sell engines physically made in USSR to ULA. This market literally had no competition and no innovation for like 40 years.
So yes, his great achievement is that he could march finance into an industry that no-one would consider for investment. But results in other industries were not so great.
Tesla had a head start on electric, but they could not take advantage of this. Once other manufacturers woke up to the threat, it became clear Tesla has nothing on them, and car industry is fiercely competitive. His leadership was not good enough to take advantage of the head start he had and extremely high level of finance that he had.
Where is cybertruck? Other automakers are already selling electric trucks. VW and even Chinese automakers are eating Tesla's lunch.
Elon's boring company is an abject failure, as is hyperloop.
Is there any other car company in the world selling electric vehicles at a profit besides Tesla? Everyone else is losing money on their EVs most are losing a lot of money. Not only is Tesla profitable but they have better margins than many companies have on their gas cars.
Tesla is the only car to drop prices in 2023, and the only car that doesn’t feel like you are paying 50% more for whatever you got 3 years ago.
Anything else at the 40-50k usd range is simply a joke compared to model y, and Tesla is simply eating the market right now.
and I don't even like this guy, but this is just dishonest from you
By the way, if you or I owned either one of the companies you mentioned it would be considered a great success. Your question itself is putting Musk in a league of his own. I don't care that he's an asshole. If someone asked the three of us to eject into space a car that we built, only he could comply.
That being said, SpaceX and Tesla are successful, even if they took government subsidies to get started. There are many more companies which took a lot of government money yet managed to return nothing except fat bonuses for their executives. Or the number of large companies which have stopped innovating now (IBM and Intel for instance).
> What was successful after Tesla and SpaceX?
So I started wondering, can he be a good leader when he can't take criticism? How does he retain best pepple if his ego is this fragile?
I am quite happy to see more people reassess him as he demonstrates capricious and callous behavioir, for exanple the Twitter aquisition whoch he first wanted then tried to get out of.
I think you will come around when he targets something yoi carw about.
Just because you want him to be a failure or a con-artist or whatever doesn't mean he actually is.
"It's tempting to respond to everything online and hit enter but sometimes you don't have to if you don't have anything meaningful to say."
What a projection
Happy?
It's not reasonable to pretend like Tesla/spacex is not a smashing success story.
You're not dealing with human relationships. What are you talking about. The parent of my original comment is spinning a narrative about Elon's accomplishments because of his personality quirks.
so as an initial, I don't think your argument is reasonable at all. it goes against so of the most basic and recent facts about tesla. I can understand feeling different because you like him and he makes you feel fuzzy or something like that. but hard to say you are being reasonable - when you don't offer reasons!
> The parent of my original comment is spinning a narrative about Elon's accomplishments because of his personality quirks.
This is absolutely the boundaries of human relationships and is not better defined in the space of mathematics or physics, or even game theory, to the point you boil things down to being rational/un-rational. rational is basically the lowest boundary here, it means possible, it doesn't mean likely.
>There is nothing reasonable about pretending like Elon isn't accomplished because you don't like him.
I guess it depends on what you think accomplished is. I certainly think he's achieved a certain kind of status in society, I'm not sure if it's an accomplishment, but the amount of money that belongs to him is certainly very large and something anyone else would like to have.
So have a lot of companies? Tesla is down 7% in the last year. Up 12% from 2 years ago. Another example of unreasonable hyperbole.
> is facing tremendous regulatory scrutiny, just recently suffered a massive recall,
A massive recall fixed by over the air updates? Be real. Yet another example of hyperbole.
> and is likely never going to deliver on its key promise of achieving practicable self-driving car,
Okay this is speculation. What can I really say about this?
> and by all estimates from anyone else in the industry, is being completely unreasonable in going about it predominantly via computer-vision.
what does this have to do with elon's success? He's not allowed to fail sometimes?
The Model Y is currently the world's best-selling car. I think that counts as Tesla taking advantage.
https://www.motor1.com/news/669135/tesla-model-y-worlds-best...
Although I do think Tesla did take advantage of their head start. But it’s clear that the pandemic and issues with China and supply chains are hampering them globally.
And sure, Tesla launched successful Electric cars and woke the market up when they realised consumers actually really would switch.
But it’s not like other manufacturers couldn’t do it, they just chose not to.
The biggest thing Tesla did was actually making it happen with vehicles that were significantly differentiated and looked like the future!
In a market where companies stopped selling sedans in favour of SUVs, Teslas came along with the model 3 and then model Y, and showed people will choose electric tech over SUV form factor.
People weren’t buying ICE sedans because they were largely garbage!
> The biggest thing Tesla did was actually making it happen with vehicles that were significantly differentiated and looked like the future!
If you disappeared Tesla, SpaceX, Boring, Twitter and even Mr.Musk overnight, the world would look exactly the same the following morning.
Try and disappear Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Boeing, JPMorgan, BankofAmerica, Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell overnight.
You'll have chaos and civil unrest within a week. That's where your quality of life comes from, sure it's not as exciting aas drinking the kool-aid of future Mars colonies and self driving cars and 100% domination in the EV cars sector, but at least it's real
The important bit for Ukrainian is Starlink is subsidized by other countries and it reduces the incentives for Russia to destroy communication infrastructure. Unfortunately because Russia is focusing less on communication infrastructure they get to focus more on other targets.
People say same seriously crazy shit about the Ukraine war, but the ground truth is fairly pedestrian as far as recent wars go.
No it won't. Where would the Twitter trolls go? They'd flood the streets. If Twitter had disappeared no 1 can announce for president anymore!
Compare this argumentation with typical argumentation about violenceful computer games players which are also going to flood the streets for some different reasons but with similar unwanted outcomes.
Thanks for understanding.
Solar city actually failed as an independent company.
Boring company is floundering.
Twitter is having massive issues.
I think he’s done more harm to Tesla after taking it over from the original founders than been a benefit. It’s unclear but he definitely took massive risks which were unnecessary and has many serious failures such as how long their truck has slipped.
All together not a bad track record, but also not nearly as impressive as many people seem to think. I don’t want to suggest it’s luck, but many companies that might have been successful which came that close to failure simply failed. We look back on people who happened to have passed those thresholds because they go past them not necessarily because they had a better approach.
i wouldn't call the cybertruck a true failure, since it's effectively free marketing, and they don't have a real obligation to make a sale.
Tesla's massive competitive moat is their battery making capacity. I do not believe the incumbent car manufacturers are able to catch up any time soon.
It would be the chinese manufacturers of electric cars that pose the biggest threat to tesla, not the US/western incumbents.
A significant part of that is they lack of a truck option considering how popular the Ford Lightning, Rivian, etc are. Alongside that is the general perception of stagnation among car buyers, the yoke was seen as a gimmick not the refresh the model S is in serious need of.
They just keep fumbling. Consider the amount of bad press they got around the undersized breaks on the Plaid or their 1 foot rollout numbers. What could have been a real halo product did almost as much harm as it helped.
Tesla's share of the overall Automotive market is growing and that is what matters.
The Model S is a tiny and irrelevant portion of Tesla's sales.
The perception of the plaid being unsafe unconditionally extends to people viewing all their cars as unsafe irrespective of actual crash statistics etc. The same thing happened with self diving car fatalities it’s a trivial number of accidents but still impacted people’s perception of the brand.
> Tesla's share of the overall Automotive market is growing and that is what matters.
The company’s stock price is based on the assumption they can ride the wave of exponentially increasing EV sales and take a large share of the global car market. Having largely squandered that opportunity the company’s prospects are far less favorable.
Didn't every single product launch happen after the takeover? We probably would have never heard of the company otherwise, why would we assume a similar trajectory with different leadership? It's like saying Jobs did more harm than good after returning to Apple.
Tesla was founded in 2003, Musk invested in 2004, Roadster unveiled in 2006 and entered production in 2008. October 2008, Musk took over as CEO of the 5 year old company which then went public in 2010. The model S entered production in 2012 and they discontinued the roadster.
So Tesla went public selling a product developed under the original CEO, and he took 5 years to get the next model our even after having a working EV. That said the Model S was a hit, but it was also the original founders goal to work down to more mainstream products.
TBMs are just slightly too expensive right now. At 1/2 the price per mile a huge number of projects suddenly become very attractive. Which then opens the door for more economies of scale, further efficiencies, and in theory a very valuable company.
Trains i.e. proper mass transit, require wide bore tunnels and cost increases with the diameter of the bore
A lot of the costs with tunnels isn’t the tunnel but things like the portals that need to dissipate pressure waves as trains enter and leave at high speed
The boring company produced a smallish bore TBM and then ‘oh look it’s cheaper than a large one’, there is no innovation there
Um what? He has a rocket company where he basically has absolutely no involvement at all...
We definitely now live in a world that needs this word. I am now adopting it myself. Thanks!
This is actually false. Automation of vehicle controls has a surprisingly large overlap between air/space and land.
The main difference is the amount of traffic and lack of vibration dampening.
Not to be pedantic, but lots of people "realized" (or predicted) this, myself included.
He promised something, charged for it, and had little to show for. To me that's a big mistake, not little "ooopsie shit happens".
And it's not clear this will be fixed 10 years from now. Experimental research often fails in some stage between research and production.
Unsupervised self-driving in an unconstrained environment is a completely different game. The reason humans can drive is that they have millions of years of evolution in both low-level image processing, reasoning, etc, diverse knowledge of the world that an individual obtains during the course of their life which can be blended in various ways to make driving-related decisions, as well as a sense of self-preservation that generally forces them to err on the side of caution. Short of a major AGI breakthrough, safe self-driving on existing road infrastructure is impossible.
This is not true. The only thing that enabled the reusability of SpaceX rockets was the convexification of the soft landing problem, a novelty by Lars Blackmore.
Sure, you could argue the the model predictive control scaffolding was pre-existing, but so was linear algebra for self driving.
If you look at just CLIP, Dino, GPT-4, given the current pace of progress, it's pretty obvious that it's going to happen.
I personally don't think Tesla will ever develop the FSD architecture that ends up used by everyone else.
Whilst I agree with Elon that _technically_ FSD could be done only with cameras, because that's how humans do it, humans only drive "fine" and not "perfectly". We need cameras, LIDAR and whatever other sensors we can fuse in.
The software that runs the thing will not be developed by a car company, because car companies (yes, even Tesla) are absolute dogshit at software. All of them. Every single one. They can't even make a proper entertainment system that isn't laggy, let alone all of the legwork & research required to piece together enough models in the right way for FSD that meets the lofty standards of the public (ie a perfect 0 fatalities, vs angry evolution-driven hormonal monkeys in multi-tonne hunks of steel powered by explosions whose fatality count grows every day at 3700 deaths/day, 8th leading cause of death globally).
Unrelated but GameStop should combine combine games plus what RadioShack used to be for 'us', for modern times / tech / electronics
I don’t know that I would connote “meme stock” and “Tesla”
What's your evidence of this?
I’m not saying you’re completely wrong on the general concept, but the relationship between value increase and drivable time per week (or whatever unit of time) is not 1:1. There’s going to be some loss in there.
Also not all cars would see drive time increases. Those used as Ubers or similar certainly will, but that won’t displace the vast majority of car owners who will continue to own a car and drive it at similar rates for the convenience of having it immediately on hand, at all times, ready to go. If it self drives too then that’s great, the claw back some personal time during a commute etc.
That might be different with an LFP Tesla, which have what should be 750,000 mile batteries.
They’re not delayed by a few years. The problem is intractable, unless you can limit the journey to a controlled scope.
I drive over multiple pathways and grassy lanes a week that aren’t mapped and have no markings. A self-driving car can’t arbitrarily account for something like that any time soon.
Waymo is able to operate a limited route in Phoenix because they restrict to best-case routes.
For any Tesla price estimate, you've got to pick a number, how many million vehicles the company will ship in say 2025.
Then pick an Average Selling Price, profit margin, and P/E multiple.
Divide by 3 billion to get the price per share of your estimate.
Considering Tesla is on track to deliver 1.8M vehicles this year and the delivery growth trajectory it's been on, 4M is a good target goal for 2025, $45k ASP, 10% profit margin, 30 P/E . . . from that I get $180, so today's price is fair as a base case for 2025.
$400 was a nice top in 2022 and I think we'll see it before 2025 as Tesla Energy starts contributing to the bottom line, each $1B of profit from energy is worth $10 on the share price (30 P/E, 3B shares).
If you think $180 for Tesla is way too high you have to account for that in the model...either 2025 deliveries will be a lot less than 4 million, or 10% profit margin will come way down, or P/E will come way down below 30 (it's currently 51).
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslainvestorsclub/comments/13obftu...
Edit: I see that you actually addressed the PE roll down. Missed that on the first read.
If wealth made people smart or gave them taste, we'd know. Dumbasses do tend to have a lot of cash, that's why they can happen to be dumbasses repeatedly.
That's a lot of assumptions. Why not wait 3 years till all those projections materialize, and buy it then for $180 (if the price is still there)? Currently, if you buy at $180, you're discounting all the uncertainty and risk included in your calculations. Not to mention, even if you're right, the stock will be worth $180 in 3 years from now, which means your money will be idling for 3 years if you buy now.
That week of driving is worth what an Uber driver’s take-home pay would be for the same week after finance (or equivalent lost interest if you buy with cash), insurance, on-road costs, charging, maintenance, depreciation, and whatever intangible value you put on not having hundreds of strangers farting in your car every week.
Multiply that by the number of weeks that you expect the car to be nice enough to do this, and that’s your return on investment.
At least when there's a human driver in a car, they can tell misbehaving people to knock it off. Not so when the car is unattended and robotic.
Look at it this way, assume humans drive, or need to be driven/travel, X miles per year.
Today, assuming a car drives Y miles per year, the market needs X/Y cars.
Given your argument, with self driving, a car runs nY miles per year, the demand for car will drop to X/nY, basically 1/n of before or maybe a little more, since after all the humans won't suddenly need to drive/travel nX miles per year.
So, if a car were to become worth 5x more, but we need 1/5x cars, the total market would remain the same.
Even if we need 1/5 cars (and EVs do last longer, so without self driving, this will happen anyways), as long as the lost cars come from your competitors, it’s fine.
It’s a rather arrogant, and unrealistic assumption, (on Tesla’s part if they are making it) that they will capture the entire market. It’s not going to happen.
This does not require self driving btw, but a more important question is: would you really? Would you let strangers in your private car? Would you want to clean it afterwards? Would you accept damages other people do to you car? Would it still be your car if strangers use it far more than you do? And at this point we have arrived at car sharing, which already exists today...
Why make a medium-distance flight, when you can just sleep in the back of your EV as it cruises down the highway overnight? (This will pare well with lay flat front seats what would allow turning the car into something like one of those airline sleep pods).
Are you sure? How many people right now own a car that they use mostly a few times per week? Car ownership right now is the only way to guarantee personal long-range transport. But if self-driving cars can replace taxis and even some form of public transport, car usage might go up but it's not clear to me that car ownership will go up along with it.
A lot fewer than the average SF/NYC bubbler probably thinks. It is the only viable means of transportation for probably 90% of americans.
Cars depreciate based on distance driven, not on age. A car will need to be serviced every X miles and replaced every Y miles, and these numbers are independent of whether the car is driven one hour a week or forty. In no universe does driving more hours per week increase the value of a car.
The only thing I can think of is maybe it would make some trips not need my presence at all. Like I could see placing a Wal-mart grocery order, and sending my car to go to Wal-mart without me in it, they load it up, and then it comes back, and I can unload it.
Which is nice, but I'm not paying 5x the already expensive car prices in order to save a few minutes here and there.
You can already lend out your car for other people to drive, and there are numerous companies that do exactly that as their entire business model.
So this is a serious question, in what way does self driving cars mean your personal car is going to be used more?
The only people for whom self-driving cars represent an actual real world monetary win are people and companies that transport people and things. So public transport, trucking companies, uber, etc - for them self driving would mean no longer having to pay for drivers.
For every other group self driving has no financial impact on the value of the car (except possibly tremendously devaluing any existing cars where a component of their value is current generation "self driving").
From ridesharing company PoV right now they are only taking 30%-50% of the revenue, and they have gaps in meeting demand due to resourcing challenges.
The business model is pretty solid if self driving taxis work even if its only in urban and suburbs
Why would then Tesla even sell such cars if they can just compete and outcompete Uber?
Google self driving car division has an agreement with Uber now.
People really do not understand that the Companies like Uber, Airbnb and Deliveroo make a huge amount of money from offloading liability - it's suddenly not Deliveroo's fault that the guy delivering your pizza in London does this on illegal, unroadworthy e-bikewith no insurance, and in case of a crash he is liable. Airbnb routinely rents out apartments in blocks that have this forbidden in the leave / rental agreement.
If the human is gone, then liability offloading is impossible. You have noone to blame. That liability off-load is worth more to deliveroo than is the pittance they pay him.
The pitch Tesla (if you believe them) keeps making is we could rent out our cars when we don't use it to the rental networks. We still own the car ( and the liability ) and unlock RoI.
Both Uber and Lyft[2] run rental businesses already, the model works where you can rent a car on a weekly basis just to drive on their apps, they cover maintenance and other services.
Uber will have to find a way to maintain their growth, and Lyft probably will be acquired by a rental network. The result is the same vertical integration.
[1] Uber's equity investment so far. SaaS startups can be valued lot more even $100s of billions, but pure tech companies do not raise that kind of cash. Stripe for example despite its delayed IPOs and ESOP issues has only raised $8B.
[2] They own some of the inventory and rest are from partners I believe.
Cars driven commercially like that are worth less money.
Take a hybrid Toyota Camry that’s driven as Taxi almost 25 hours a day.
Are they worth more? Do they command a premium?
No, they do not. And at the end of they short useful lives their value goes to zero.
You could argue that self driving cars don’t need drivers, and so can be driven 24/7 at less cost of labour.
Even that eventuates, and we get a world where car ownership is significantly on the decline, it just means they sell less cars.
As we’ve seen with most technology commodity products, price tends to be forced downwards.
So maybe Elon is right, and a self driving car is worth 5x. But it’s not obvious to me, and I’m wary of people like Elon talking up his own book. He is a proven loser and fantasist, but also a very successful billionaire. :-/