TheAlchemist

One must love the projections of >50% YOY growth for 5 straight years.

Why not continue for the next 5 ? Maybe they will find customers on Mars.

This while situation is very strange - there are some big companies pouring tens of billions into it (Alphabet, Meta) - since they don't have anything better to do with the money printers they have, but there are several others whose valuations are based on completely unrealistic projections where their expected revenues in 5-10 years represent 99% of their current 'value'.

It's mentionned in the article later:

"If you are old enough, or possessed of a certain kind of disposition, you may be thinking, Wait a minute, aren’t you describing Enron? And uh, in some sense, yes! Enron’s whole thing was special purpose vehicles with extremely speculative valuations that were used to take on debt, Luria notes. But Enron lied about what it was doing, and that’s fraud and illegal. (It also got up to other illegal stuff besides.) Nvidia’s relationship with CoreWeave is all happening in plain sight. So are all the relationships with the other neocloud companies. It kind of seems like the tech company version of the GameStop open pump-and-dump."

To answer your question - not unique to AI spending boom - this kind of things was right there for recent major bubbles.

"core AI players are profitable and funding capex from real earnings"

What ? Who's profitable except NVidia who is selling shovels (increasingly to itself) ?

Edit. Profitable on AI, if by profitable you mean from other sources then yes.

There was, at least towards the end. FED chair at the time described it as 'irrational exuberance'. Warren Buffett made an excellent speech in front of most Silicon Valley titans at the time - telling them that their wealth is about to be blown up.

This isn't rocket science - do anybody sane believe that OpenAI will spend what, 1.5 Trillion $ they project ? Quite a big chunck of Oracle, Nvidia and others projections are based on this 1.5 Trillion $. They are loosing money and their revenue is 1% of this figure.

Frankly, I would be happy if riots in the streets happen (if there is a bailout of Big Tech in the first place). What's going on recently with OpenAI publicly, and probably most of the 'AI' players not publicly, is disgusting - it's a bubble, everyone and their mother knows it, and these guys try to save their asses by asking for governement backing before the bubble even pops. Privatize gains, socialize losses...

It's a shame that no more bankers went to jail after 2008, although I find the situation was much more complicated than here.

Warren Buffett is buying Alphabet out of neceessity - he already sold most of what he could sell and has way too much cash on hand - he just need to buy 'something' - Alphabet seems like the least overvalued big stock out there.

Oh, wasn't aware that Amazon is launching something to space - what are they launching ?

Most of which was for Starlink. Not saying it's not an achievement - it is. But if you exclude their own payload, the picture is somewhat different.

They will start loosing money this quarter. That way it fixes the high P/E aspect of things.

Now they will be a 'pure play' in Robotics & AI !

I love this scene from Silicon Valley:

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

This show was really ahead of its time. "If you show revenue people will ask how much and it will never be enough" /s Imaginary trillions of revenues from Optimus are definitely much more appealing.

I truly don't understand US politics I think. MAGA movement cares very much (or is it just optics ?) about family etc, and this Epstein scandal seems to be extremly important to them.

But the problem, and a pretty big one, is that their guy, Trump, was best friend with Esptein for decades and it's very well documented everywhere.

So on one hand they want to release all the files, but on the other one they can't be that stupid and think Trump is not in there ? Or are they so brainwashed by Fox News and influencers propaganda that they don't bother look up some articles from that period ?

The list of key people that left Tesla in the past 24 months is veeeery long.

Quite strange for a company that's on the brink of becoming by far the most important on earth (and Mars !). Oh, for those thinking it's because it's not longer a car company but an AI / Robot company, mind you the head of Optimus program and head of Software also left this year.

Same vibes as when Karpathy left in 2022, when Tesla was supposedly on the verge of attaining Full Self Driving. Well, fast forward 3 years, they are still on the verge...

Berkshire is a money making machine with or without Buffett. Its market cap is 30% lower than Tesla, while it brings ~100B / year in net income - most of which is from very stable, boring businesses.

As Warren liked to say: "I try to invest in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will".

That's his portfolio now - he won't promise robots or AI, but he can guarantee solid profits for 10 years to come, regardless of his presence.

It was a sarcastic comment. Just trying to encourage people to listen and see for themselves.

As for me, I'm 100% convinced it's a house of cards and a fraud which will make Enron look nice. If somebody thinks a guy lying like that has sound business practices when no one is looking, then think again.

I recommend to listen to Elon speaking at the meeting today and judge for yourself what the man says.

Sustainable abundance for everybody, universal healthcare thanks to Optimus, 100M Optimuses per year production, already announcing Optimus 5 (2027 apparently), etc etc.

EDIT: Adding some other 'intersting topics' - distributed computing network from Tesla sitting in the garage - in order to prevent AI from getting bored, I kid you not ! Really people, listen to this stuff. Easy to dismiss as a cult. This guy was in the White House not so long ago, and is still the richest guy on earth.

EDIT 2: For those listening - if you think the guys asking questions are random shareholders, you're wrong. These are mostly Tesla influencers, that are part of the show.

That's incredible. Especially the swim ...

PS. If you're inspired by this story, this video might be a great watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J07O6dViHo

Not demand limited ? Yeah sure, CEO once said that they have infinite demand (at the right price /s).

If they are not demand limited, can you explain why they slashed prices, are offering countless promotions which evaporated their margins, and are running the factories at 50% capacity ?

Well, if you follow his adventures a bit, it's quite obvious that there is absolutely nothing preventing him from that.

2 years ago, while claiming that Tesla is the leader in AI, he launched a private ... AI company (xAI), for which he took Tesla GPU chips, and now he tries to make Tesla ... invest in said company, at a valuation (>B100$) that could only be compared to something like Dogecoin.

All of this, with your and my retirement money, since the stock is in the S&P.

It's not only politics, although it certainly didn't help.

Tesla did not release new cars, except for Cybertruck, for how long ? 5 years ? 10 years ?

Their lineup was great initially, and there was 0 competition. Now there is a lot of competition and their lineup did not change at all.

Their car business is dying. That's why they try to be an AI & Robotics company.

Edit: Here is a good link to follow the sales data - for many countries, it's reported daily. https://eu-evs.com/brandCharts/TESLA/ALL_DAILY/QoQ-Chart

Isn't it much more related to the distance between the countries ? When Iran sent hundreds (thousands?) of drones towards Israel they all take several hours to arrive - all were shot down outside of Israel (again by allies).

Would you have some numbers on how much was shot down by Israel and how much by allies ? I didn't find anything

While it's probably true, most drones and quite a lot of missiles too were intercepted not by Israel itself, but it's allies (mostly US, UK and EU countries).

Of course, and probably a lot of shady stuff going on - Musk got full access to government data... How crazy is that ?

The fact that these atrocities happened is not surprising at all - war is war and it happens all the time.

The fact that people in Israel took it to the streets *in support* of the guys perpertrating these atrocities is stunning. They may have won the current war, but they've lost the support of the West in the long term. Won't happen immediately, but the change in public opinion is quite apparent. And rightfully so.

America First ? Spending cuts ? Looks like people already forgot about DOGE !

Edit: Wow - I've just checked DOGE website - no updates since mid-August. Amazing

Trump thrives in mediatic chaos and a lot of things going on around. His worst fear is ... a calm boring period, be it in domestic or international politics. Because then, people may start asking real questions.

As long as can flood the headlines with whatever he wants, people will be busy with those. And not ask for example why he pardoned a guy who pretty much gave him 2 Billons $ ? Or what's up with that Epstein list ?

He needs however bigger and bigger things to keep the show on.

"Just finished a long AI5 design review with the Tesla California and Texas chip engineers. It’s going to be great. And AI6 and AI7 will follow in fast succession. AI8 will be out of this world."

At this point, we can assume he's just trolling, but looking at the stock price some doubts would be warranted.

In any case, they know perfectly well that real FSD is impossible on their current (V4) hardware, and already admitted that the version they sold millions of (V3) will never be capable to run even their current models. So much for 'every Tesla produced from now on have all the hardware needed for FSD' - since 2016. A quick reminder from almost 10 YEARS AGO:

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/all-tesla-vehicles-be...

"It's only when the tide goes out that you know who's been swimming naked." - Warren Buffett

This bubble is one for the history books !

My field is data science in a highly specialized technical environment. I use AI quite a bit now - mostly as autocomplete while coding, but more and more also for other use cases - help with naming, validating some approaches.

My opinion is that it's great for senior guys, horrible for younger ones. If you know what can go wrong, you can use it the right way. As a junior, you usually don't and in the long term you will loose a lot of time and develop much less skills with AI.

I don't see it replacing people in my field anytime soon, if ever. I do see it replacing a lot of people in say web programming, in the same way that most people don't need to do their website now because they can just use a service like Wix. For anything non-trivial, there is 0 chance that AI will work within the next 5 years.

In the end, it's just a tool. You still need people to know what to do, the how is usually easier.

The important quote:

"As we’ve noted previously, Tesla has tellingly not even applied for this autonomous vehicle permit, which would likely require it to disclose critical disengagement and safety data it is unwilling to make public."

Move fast and break ... kids ?

Its' getting more crazy by the day. Today NVidia added >300B USD in market cap. That's enough more than the valuation of Intel for example. Or more than Toyota. That 1B USD investement was money well spent !