compcoffee

>I've heard at least 1 other story where a Tesla was being serviced

Follow some the Elon Musk mentions on Twitter. There are many cases of people not being able to contact their service centre, or people being told it will be months for basic repairs (like a new windshield) that are resorting to pleading to him on Twitter. I've never seen anything like it.

>I believe that he only wants the best for Cryptocurrency

What does this even mean?

Do you honestly believe that he's interested in anything but money?

>Can you expand on that?

Are you seroius? Someone says the market cap of Tesla is "somewhat" bounded, and you ask how? Is it totally unbounded? Is what they are doing unprecedented beyond comparison?

Do you think the market cap of Tesla is infinity? It's already multiples of companies that produce a magnitude more cars and infinite more profit. Not good enough for you? What is it that you think Tesla does so well that justifies an unlimited market cap?

This is insane. Wish HackerNews existed during the DotCom bubble. It was bad enough being accused of sexism during the Theranos bubble.

>Tesla is the stock with the highest amount of short interest at the moment.

Why? Because it's an off the charts volatile basket case.

You can't talk about shorts without talking about hedging, both stocks and (convertible) bonds. This is a complicated financial play. Unfortunately, as happens, retail chumps will get roasted either way.

>Musk says

I often hear how Hackernews is such a bastion of objectivity and critical thinking.

So why does "Elon says..." hold so much sway? We would laugh if it was "Zuckerberg says..."

Elon has "said" many things for many years which have not come to fruition.

>This is a desperation move by Musk. Nothing in the complaint alleges interference with Tesla production.

It seems pretty obvious to me: this ex-employee stole (which is scummy) data from Tesla and leaked it to journalists (Business Insider). BI asked Tesla to comment on the data, they refused, then released an "email" that described the sabotage and data breach.

Is he a whistle-blower or a saboteur? That's the question.

>It would be interesting to know if this employee was also shorting Tesla stock at the same time he was leaking these allegations.

I'm skeptical that some individual blue-collar worker would risk his financial well-being and possibly freedom to make a few thousand dollars from possibly causing financial harm to Tesla and causing the stock to drop some. Seems like a stretch to me. If the suit is as alleged (passing false information to journalists) he's an attention seeking low-life.

What is with the obsession with "shorts"? I've never seen so much over-reaction to short selling in my life.

>a number of the publicly traded cannabis companies will be able to actually start selling the product they’ve been stockpiling over the last year

Can you link to anything that says Canada is going to allow uninhibited access to the market from these companies? Currently they are licensed for medicinal use only.

I'm skeptical. The government is not going to mint pot billionaires. It will be tightly controlled.

Is it safe to assume that if this story is true, there will be a very public investigation and arrest? Hard to imagine a story involving corporate sabotage against a prominent American company would start and end with a leaked email to employees.

>There was a defect, they recalled the cars to fix them, the fixed cars go back to customers and the issue they were recalled for can still happen.

Right, it has been acknowledged that the fix did not work. Waste of time and money for everyone involved. How would you like a recall process like this to work? Not everything is a scandal.

>The continued decline of standards at a major manufacturer of automobiles

Do you have any data to support this? I would argue that standards are increasing, and that cars are safer and better today than at any other point in history.

There was an defect, they tried to fix it, fix was approved by a regulatory body, it didn't work, so they recalled the cars.

Hanlon's razor: what is the story here that puts it on the front page?

>If those company think it’s about content libraries they’re going to lose.

As long as your platform meets some bare minimum standard of reliability (and every service I use seems to be able to) then content is the only thing that matters.

>And I think they’re way underestimating how hard it is to build the technology stack and processes that Netflix has.

I think you are way overestimating the complexity. Sure, it's not something two guys are going to produce in their bedroom, but video delivery is a solved problem.

Do you need a mechanic's license to work on your car (and be good at it)? No.

Does it help? Sure.

That's the beauty of hacking.

>Every time I mention it it's dismissed as a conspiracy theory.

Being as how myself and other people I know have been those accused of "astroturfing" for expressing any skepticism towards Musk's projects, I know it's a conspiracy theory.

>Yeah I don’t understand people who short

You know who the biggest short sellers are of Tesla? People hedging their long bets.

That said, the stock is still down ~20% from highs, so I don't understand the hubris of rooting against daily price changes.

>In fact, they've been strenuously stating, over and over again, that these aren't self-driving cars.

The Tesla fans keep repeating this, but it flies in the face of the description of Autopilot on Tesla's website. I can't tell if they are being deliberately ignorant, or what. But the fact that Tesla claims you can press a button and summon your car, at least in my mind, says "cars that drive themselves".

>The problem is there is a common misconception among the general public that it's beyond assistance and is partial automation.

Again, where do you get that this is a "misconception among the general public"? Read the marketing. Watch the demos. Listen to the claims.

"Tap your phone and the car will return to you". Where does being vigilant behind the wheel fit with that?

>They just really shouldn't have called this autopilot. It creates all the wrong expectations.

Have you read the marketing on the website?

All you will need to do is get in and tell your car where to go. If you don’t say anything, the car will look at your calendar and take you there as the assumed destination or just home if nothing is on the calendar. Your Tesla will figure out the optimal route, navigate urban streets (even without lane markings), manage complex intersections with traffic lights, stop signs and roundabouts, and handle densely packed freeways with cars moving at high speed. When you arrive at your destination, simply step out at the entrance and your car will enter park seek mode, automatically search for a spot and park itself. A tap on your phone summons it back to you.

So it's not like this is a case of "it's called something that it isn't really", or mismanaged expectations. Tesla is explicitly stating the car drives itself. They still claim it's "Autopilot". Is what they are selling anything close to what is described there?

>Our debts are their assets. Inflation reduces the value of their assets.

And our assets are their debts.

>Do people take the 'fake news' claims seriously?

"Fake news" is now an argument against anything you disagree with. Trump pioneered the strategy, but now even Elon Musk is doing it.

>There are strategic situations where carrying the debt load is good for you -- you are not so attractive a buy for an outsider who wants to acquire you.

When you are a public company you've made the choice that you are always for sale.

>I can't speak for Apple et al but for some companies it has been a tool to raise their share price. With shrinking outstanding number of shares financial ratios like EPS etc start to look big even when the company isn't actually growing

Another oft-repeated trope that doesn't follow in the data. In fact, most of the companies doing the biggest buybacks recently have had underperforming share prices.

Buybacks can be good or bad, smart or stupid, just like any other "investment". Read Damodaran.

>And yet they haven’t updated their pro line since 2012. And the quality of OSX is slipping badly.

But these are subjective measures (to which I happen to agree with you). It's not as if they aren't investing in their products.

>So yeah, what data are you basing this on?

Judging by the "productivity is lower now than 5 years ago", this person is not looking at data.

Often the first people to decry Economics as "not a science" take the least scientific approach.

>You can find Tesla's' advertising spend easily in their quarterly findings.

Musk played Trump's "fake news" card. If you now try to say anything negative about this company, the fans will brush it off as "fake news" and ignore it.

Remember when the HackerNews crowd told us they were too smart to fall for such things?

>Beware astroturfing.

It also has an obscene valuation. Beware stock pumpers.

>Activist investors are an annoyance of public companies.

Silicon Valley mentality, right there.

>You completely excluded (sg&a) operational and (r&d) research costs.

For some reason people think that R&D will go down to nothing, even though the other major players spend multiples on R&D than does Tesla.

We've been hearing for years that as Tesla "scales up", these costs will diminish. We're now at, what, 150,000 cars annually? And costs are increasing at an increasing rate. Still waiting to see those economies of scale.

>Few are profitable. It's all about growth of revenue. The profits are way down the line.

We are officially well on our way to 1999 bubble territory! Nothing matters but revenue growth, even if you're selling dollars for 50 cents.