Going by its P/E, its still overpriced compared to every other car manufacture, but its getting back down to a rational level. Its only 6x Ford and GM and about 4x Toyota.
I always used to laugh when people would bring up battery tech and solar when talking about TSLA's absurd valuation, but I think it's starting to become more relevant as it approaches a more realistic market cap. It's still too high though.
I listened into the Twitter Space with Elon and some of his more bullish investors. There were three main pints that had them making Tesla more than a common car company.
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.
Yeah, if it was 2x or 3x Ford, I'd consider it a stronger buy. I think the real test will not be its P/E, but how the other big car companies debut their EV and driver-assist (or driverless) tech. It just feels like Tesla is still the market leader in that tech. If someone else beats them at that game, it would not be good for their stock price.
But, conversely, if they stay on top, maybe that high valuation will stick around.
The self driving stuff is (in my view) all a red herring. There is no mass market call for it, it's not going to drive further growth. The only thing it may do is help maintain their position in the higher end of the market.
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.
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.
> It would dramatically change where people live, where they work, and how they take vacation.
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.
> The self driving stuff is (in my view) all a red herring.
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.
Real actual full self-driving would transform the auto industry and society. There is no "call" for it in the same way there was no call for air travel before the Wright brothers.
Like someone else has already mentioned Porsche and Mercedes actually offer very compelling options at the Model S/X price range that actually feel like luxury and when you paying over $100K you deserve some luxury and Hyundai, Kia, Genesis and even WV offer very compelling alternatives to the Model 3 and Y and they often are cheaper and overall provide better experience for an every-day car.
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.
Their solar is shrinking/stagnating for years and it’s not a high margin business for a start - competition is brutal. It’s utility at the core - they always operate on razor thin margins.
For batteries, they still mostly just buy from suppliers.
Keep in mind that their PE is driven by heavily gutted R&D spending and inflated car prices. It’s not sustainable in the same way as their stock price wasn’t.
Could be another dotcom era Cisco, which still hasn’t regained it’s peak [1]. Cisco had the biggest market cap in the world for a while. Tesla could be an even worse investment if it ends up being just an overvalued car company. It also has the biggest ‘bus factor’ of any company in SP500 ie. if Musk quits/falls ill the price will likely dive severely.
> if Musk quits/falls ill the price will likely dive severely.
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.
Maybe I missed it, but what I don’t see mentioned in the comments is the biggest change from four years ago: light at the end of the tunnel.
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.
The next step should be an affordable car (colloquially dubbed model 2). Also TM3 can go much lower with the price. Tesla has the highest margins of all automakers by far.
I didn't read the article, but please bear in mind that poor reputation of the primary luxury goods brand ambassador does not, usually, help the brand.
I find myself confused about the purpose of stock markets. How can we arrange our society around a system that is so massively irrational? A few years ago Tesla was worth as much as the rest of the car industry put together. Even if you believed Tesla was going to become a perfect monopoly, its valuation still would not have been justified. Now people are acting like the sky is falling when this pipsqueak manufacturer is still (supposedly) worth twice as much as Toyota.
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?
Vouched for the comment. Not sure why it was flagged.
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.
Tesla isn't only a car company. They also have a lot of technology related to clean energy, along with the self driving technology they are creating.
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.
Yeah the bull case would be something close to considering TSLA to be AMZN in 2006 or so launching AWS and taking advantage of first-mover advantage in the cloud space--only with clean energy and FSD.
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.
Because there was the specter of a protracted legal battle to close the Twitter acquisition and that risk (of both time and result) was priced into a 25% discount on the acquisition price. That’s why the stock bumped to 50 on the acquisition news and fell off as the deal became imperiled.
> 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 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.
> > I find myself confused about the purpose of stock markets. How can we arrange our society around a system that is so massively irrational?
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
>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.
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.
> > Its berfectly rational to trade speed for accuracy depending on the situation.
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.
>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?
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 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.
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.
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.
Actually a lottery system would be way more representative. The chances of a wealthy politician being chosen by random lottery are pretty small.
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.
Leadership is challenging, and a very small percentage of the population have good leadership skills. A random person almost certainly won’t, and would be unable to do the job, whereas virtually every candidate in an election has already had a long career as an effective leader.
There are certainly merits to a lottery system. There are also merits to an electoral system. The larger point I'm making is that choosing a leader is perfectly rational, unlike the original comment implied.
Markets are irrational in the short term for sure, but very good allocators of capital long term.
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)
> A few years ago Tesla was worth as much as the rest of the car industry put together. Even if you believed Tesla was going to become a perfect monopoly, its valuation still would not have been justified.
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.
To an extent, it’s the worst system except for all the others; most people don’t think it’s a particularly good system, but, well, what’s your alternative?
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.
He could, but then the board could be replaced and the shareholders could fire the CEO.
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).
> 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.
Funny enough I think it's actually undervalued now. Tesla has bought up all the mining rights for the minerals required to ramp up battery production and will likely be the only EV manufacturer that's not supply constrained for the next decade.
I'm still not bought in yet, probably a lot more room for it to crater.
I don't really believe this narrative. Mineral rights are so easily effected by geopolitics the "rights" they have brought could easily be worthless in two years time.
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?
Lithium is widely known about, the real challenge is getting it.
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.
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.
Might be actually, I didn't actually look at the DCF. Just eyeballing their PE and their growth didn't make it attractive enough to me. I feel like it should be abundantly clear.
Same. but not for the reason of mining rights. They definitely have long term contracts for their own production secured but are a long ways from cornering that market.
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.
I have to say, I didn't realize how strong Hydrogen powered vehicles are right now in development. That could be a legit competitor soon if they work out some of the smaller kinks and develop a fueling network. Literally zero fueling time, much less lithium in the manufacturing process and a closer feel to traditional ICE.
The latest news seems to suggest that companies like CATL are, and will continue to be, the battery leaders. I imagine that CATL will gladly sell to anyone who wants to buy.
Remember, narrative follows the price. I've never touched the stock because it's been a very, very, very overpriced stock for a while. If it came down to a reasonable multiple, only then would I consider buying it.
Who needs shortsellers when you’re tripping on ambien.
“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."
Eh, they're not in freefall any more. Very strong is probably an overstatement since they're still down over 65% YTD and even more from ATHs. I'm a big Meta (stock) fan though. I think they're insanely undervalued at the moment (says the guy holding a bunch of their stock that's down close to 50% all together lol)
#1 reason is because they're running WhatsApp, a 2 billion+ MAU service, and not monetizing it at all right now. Hypothetically a single text ad on the home screen would add billions to their bottom line overnight. #2 reason is because their core products have staying power. They've lived through twitter, snapchat, pintrest, a ton of other smaller social networks, and are still wildly profitable. I fully anticipate they'll outlive (or at least co-exist with) tiktok in the long run and do fine. #3 is "the metaverse" has like a 0.1% chance to make trillions of dollars if it works out like they think. Worst (and most likely) case is that it fails, but it isn't like they bet on something that destroyed their core business. They can just stop investing at any time really and add another $10B in profit. Even after their investments in "the metaverse" they're still pulling in nearly $30B in profit on $120B in revenue.
Obviously if I knew the future I'd be rich already, but that's my 2 cents. shrug
If WhatsApp had ads, people would quickly move to an alternative without… it has historical inertia but don’ does not really offer anything unique. Fb is in the same situation, meta has almost zero intrinsic value and is just coasting on having been the first mover, which will dissipate over time.
Because their advertising business is still wildly profitable even with the ad tracking changes. If they continue to reduce costs and stop investing in the metaverse they’re a great company.
Now, add in TikTok potentially being banned in the US and you can see their social media apps being even stronger positioned.
Any other company that missed this many release dates / promises / targets would have crashed faster and stronger. There was always the mystique of the genius knows what he's doing, which has unraveled a bit in the past couple of months
That is a valid question. I wished it wasn't. But here we are. I think that unless someone in the know spills the beans (with proof) this is going to be extremely difficult to determine.
I think parent is implying that Musk is using Twitter as a misinformation tool. Misinformation about government agencies such as health, SEC, FBI, etc.
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.
> otherwise the club will follow the manager on his descending arc down to 3rd Division again.
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.
“ 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.”
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
But Elon has already moved on mentally and is currently on track to get Twitter relegated as well so I'm not sure we need to worry about what he could do with TSLA if it received unlimited funding from Saudi Arabia
(hmm... more overlap in the analogy than I thought!)
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.
> > 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 believe "Full self drive" is going to be seen as a historical mistake for Tesla, it's a distraction from their core mission.
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.
If you're currently making $200 a share, why would you risk your $200 profits to chase another $30 to $40 bucks/share?
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.
P/E is still 33 as we head into a recession, and Musk continues to anger the traditional customer base that cares about environmental issues. He might make up with Maga republicans, but many of them want a Ford Pickup.
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.
I'm pretty sure the stock will continue to decline.
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?
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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.
> How much further do you think it really can fall?
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.
> Well that's a great question. If you think Tesla is close to bankruptcy than the answer is: all the way down.
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?
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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.
Competition is fierce now for EVs and I think they miss deliveries and Musk’s shenanigans have dried up his backlog. Even at $68 it’s still $250B valuation which is too high for a car company like Tesla. It won’t take a lot of lost sales for Tesla to go red.
Other than tax differences (minor and mostly not applicable on the short side), I think that’s the wrong way to think about trades.
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.
Thanks but I really don’t need advice, I’ve been doing this for a while now. I scale in and out of all my trades, I’ve booked a lot of my profits at this point.
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 appeared to many observers that Musk was mocking the Russian propaganda, he then made the mockery explicit later.
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.
Elon doesn't exactly tweet like a rational logical being at the moment. It seemed to me he was praising the tweet because it mentioned him and said he was going to be president of the US (or something like that) so he thought it was cool. Then he just snuck back in and denounced it later when he remembered he has a security clearance.
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.)
Someone who's dependant on us goverment contracts defense/nasa really shouldn't be interacting with high ranking russian officals.. even if it's for the lulz
espcially since the us has sanctions targeted at medvedev by name, it's no joke
To be fair that's one of the good(?) parts of Twitter.
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.
I don't have a security clearance but one day in the middle of the night I accidentally ended up at the Belarus/Polish border due to a faulty bit of navigation software (Thanks, TomTom). I'm pretty sure that that had absolutely no effect whatsoever (I had no visum anyway and it's not like you just waltz across that border, nor did I want to) but at the same time if I would have a security clearance I'm fairly sure that there would have been some effect. When you are operating at that level you should be a lot more careful about who you are buddies with and where you visit lest someone decides that maybe it is time that you lost that clearance.
Reasonably politely pushing back on these has got my post not only downvoted to oblivion (after upvotes) but then flagged (!!) while of course the guy who was abusive in return, no problems.
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... :)
>(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.)
the way he tweets is pretty much distilled 2012-ish reddit
He mocked the Twitter staff he fired. Sorry but a CEO of Twitter a social network. Elon not having emotional intelligence is the most absurd joke. Only problem is that it is reality now.
It all feels very Trumpian; once he’s outside his comfort zone (very visible with the software engineering and politics in particular, in Musk’s case) he tends to just take his lead from whoever flatters him most, and promote/repeat this complete nonsense.
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 agree - Musk's behaviour is harmful to his personal reputation, his businesses, his investors, and sometimes beyond. Also utterly unbecoming a CEO of companies which routinely have human life at risk, serve critical national security interests, etc.
(Yet I would not bet against him making a success of Twitter, as he has Tesla and SpaceX.)
Musk’s provocative nonsense was a major reason why I didn’t consider leasing a Tesla earlier this year when I was in the market for an EV. I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this way.
What EV did you choose instead? They are all so terrible by comparison when it comes to range and charging infra that it’s hard to go elsewhere. I don’t like Tesla because of the lack of CarPlay, etc and the tight attachment to their central servers but can’t find a reasonable alternative yet.
>They are all so terrible by comparison when it comes to range and charging infra
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 can attest to this. My wife and I took a road trip from Seattle to the redwoods in California and back this summer in the aforementioned Kia, and I didn't have any issue with charging infrastructure at any point along the trip.
Ten models or ten cars? And are they actually capable of hitting that?
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?
>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.
> And after all of it, here we are still talking about Elon, Tesla, and Twitter.
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)
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.
"EPIC THREAD" is 269 characters short of the limit... so yeah, 280 might not be enough to make nuanced arguments, but he was not even trying (and he is not known for making nuanced arguments, just for being a tantrum-prone narcissist)
> I don't understand the thesis that Musk is somehow pro-Russia.
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.
> It appeared to many observers that Musk was mocking the Russian propaganda, he then made the mockery explicit later.
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.
I don't think he even cares about Ukraine one way or another. He's just trolling the U.S. gov to "own the libs" as part of his "engagement strategy" for Twitter, as ridiculous as that is. Yes, alienate the entire user base for the company you're completely leveraged on (Tesla), in exchange for people who make on average less per year than your average Tesla costs.
I suspect it's both. Dude stays up late reading Twitter, gets a bit maudlin because he's alone and does the stoner "just thinking about the big questions maaan" thing.
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.
He pushed for Ukrainian territory to be formally ceded to Russia after they occupied it by force and violence. His "peace plan" was then enthusiastically praised by Kremlin 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.
For some reasons many westerns believe that Russia will nuke the world before losing Crimea. I disagree but don’t see Musk being unique in believing this. Also and unfortunately, I do not see Ukraine taking back Crimea any time soon.
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.
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.
Only if you're correct about them being a Mongol horde and not a rational actor, but their actions were predictable and were in fact predicted by professors years ago who understand the geopolitcal landscape and history of NATO.
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.
"Pushing for peace" doesn't mean anything. It could mean to push for an unconditional surrender of Ukraine, or for an unconditional withdrawal of Russian troops, or anything in between. The fact that you use this phrase along with the term "regime" tells me that you're a either a Russian propagandist or a someone who has been misled by Russian propaganda.
It means that you're working to find a peaceful solution. It's no different from people who opposed the Afghanistan and Vietnam wars and pushed for peace.
People who oppose war were discredited by the regime then and they are being discreted today. News at 11.
I would agree on this one, but his pro-Putin / anti-American policy towards Ukraine is the context here. Plus he loves to troll the U.S. Gov (particularly the Dems) who literally made his life as a billionaire possible by funding him with billion to create Tesla when he was still basically "poor". He would be nothing without liberals who created the electric car incentive programs and EV loan programs, yet he trashes them left and right.
That was a reasonable strategy a while ago - if conservatives hate electric cars for tribal reasons, you've got to make an electric car they're allowed to like.
At this point it just seems like he doesn't have any friends though.
> He said they should negotiate an end to the war, that’s not “pro-putin”.
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.
> 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.
I'm not defending him - repeating an earlier comment: Musk's behaviour is harmful to his personal reputation, his businesses, his investors, and sometimes beyond. Also utterly unbecoming a CEO of companies which routinely have human life at risk, serve critical national security interests, etc.
But I stand by the analysis that Musk's ventures are (so far) opposed to Russian interests. Who knows though? He's pretty erratic over the last couple years. Maybe next year's Tesla model will switch to gas, with a preference for Russia-supplied gas? Am I joking? Mostly, but not 100%.
> At the very least making 'ambiguous' comments as he has done in the past AND WHICH HAS BEEN USED IN RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA is the absolute HEIGHT of irresponsibility.
He's a dude posting on twitter, he has no responsibility for anything.
It's not that easy when (1) you're the richest man (or rather, were) in the world, (2) you operate a business that has the ability to deliver payloads anywhere in orbit or on earth, (3) you have a business that operates a fleet of satellites, some of which are involved in the war and (4) you have a security clearance.
With great power comes great responsibility. To judge Elon by the same standards as a 12 year old is a bit too simple.
I just finished reading the Twitter files.. can you politely, if that's possible for you, show me specific examples of what you claimed violations of 1st and 4th amendments??
FBI warned Twitter about Russian adversarial actions, which is known and documented by anyone not blinded by their made in China maga hats
If Russia can hack SpaceX's systems and divert them to ensure they do not provide service over Ukraine, why wouldn't they? Or brick all terminals by sending a malicious update? Similarly, dealing with electromagnetic interference.
Thinking Russia is completely benign would be an incredibly naive take. Or simply blinded by Musk hate.
This experience has allowed them to launch "Starshield", but it definitely has not been cheap.
> If Russia can hack SpaceX's systems and divert them to ensure they do not provide service over Ukraine, why wouldn't they?
That didn't happen as far as I know.
> Or brick all terminals by sending a malicious update?
That didn't happen either.
> Similarly, dealing with electromagnetic interference.
For which there is no evidence at all, in fact the only reason Starlink ever suffered an outage was for reasons which had nothing to do with the Russians.
> Thinking Russia is completely benign would be an incredibly naive take. Or simply blinded by Musk hate.
No, I'm totally not thinking that Russia is 'completely benign', and I'm sure they'd love to do all of those things and more. But without any evidence that it is actually happening it is as far as I'm concerned fantasy.
> This experience has allowed them to launch "Starshield", but it definitely has not been cheap.
So what?
Really, I can't make heads or tails of your comment, that's probably on me though.
Are you in the denial phase or the ignorance one? If the former, why would the government take part in a conspiracy to pretend that Starlink didn’t require special support to work in that environment? If the latter, why would you even boldly claim “there is no evidence at all” without even doing a cursory search?
Operating a receiver in a warzone is always going to be tricky, and operating a transmitter even more so because it might give your opponent targeting information (and that includes jammers, which you really don't want to leave sitting around for too long or artillery will find them for sure).
The fact is: the Russians have to date been unsuccessful in suppressing Starlink signals, for a variety of reasons including some countermeasures.
But let's not pretend that the main cost is in that aspect of operating the service. The main cost is in making and launching the satellites and once those costs have been sunk further use of the system assuming the terminals are bought and paid for.
As time goes on and parties are getting more inventive likely there will be some more defenses against countermeasures. But a LEO based satellite system has a number of advantages over a GEO based one and those operate in war zones all the time. Hacks of Starlink satellites and terminals have - afaik - not happened.
GGGP claimed: "The expensive part is not the terminals, it is providing continuous reliable service in a hostile environment with a determined adversary." -> I see no evidence for that. It is a cost, but not the cost.
Note that Elon has a vested interest in making it appear as though he is spending a lot of money on keeping Starlink online in Ukraine, personally I would not put it past him to inflate those costs.
> see no evidence for that. It is a cost, but not the cost.
Because you are not looking. The fact that spacex is having to spend engineering time at all making improvements to operate in an actively jammed environment means software and possibly hardware engineering resources not being spent on scaling the network, working on their next gen constellation, etc. For a company that runs as lean as SpaceX on engineering headcount (based on reading Blind and Glassdoor reviews), that opportunity cost is easily tens of millions of dollars.
You’re also drastically misunderstanding the lifetime and duty cycles of LEO sats. Those things have to have time to dump heat and charge their batteries. Serving in Ukraine means worse coverage in America 90 mins later. It’s not just a magic mirror in the sky that costs nothing to cover the ground.
Ehhhh..... Naive? My point was hypotheticals that Russia would like to achieve disconnected from the physical terminals.
This is the first result when searching for it.
> But Musk says it's been a difficult environment. "Starlink has resisted Russian cyberwar jamming & hacking attempts so far, but they're ramping up their efforts," he wrote(opens in new tab) on Twitter Tuesday (May 10).
> According to a Reuters report(opens in new tab), which Musk also shared, a coalition of countries have said that Russia backed a cyberattack against satellite internet systems that ultimately pulled tens of thousands of modems offline shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine Feb. 24.
> British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said the attack against Viasat's KA-SAT network was "deliberate and malicious," Reuters stated(opens in new tab), and the Council of the European Union said the hack caused "indiscriminate communication outages" in Ukraine and several member states. The attacks were confirmed by the United States, Canada and Estonia, Reuters added.
None of that is news. What would be news would be a success but afaik they haven't managed to do so to date. All satellite operators face these challenges and none of them see that as an extra burden but basically the kind of thing that you should expect if and when you start operating this kind of service. Inmarsat terminals have a ton of tricks up their sleeve to deal with signal jamming and other attempts to interfere with the downlink/uplink.
If anything, SpaceX/Starlink has an easier time of it because their signal levels are much higher and the satellites can use phased arrays to pinpoint the receivers (in fact, they have to because they aren't geostationary and very low).
Each of these points are false in my opinion but I genuinely do not understand why you think I'd continue to engage with you after you condescend with that ludicrious 'garbage in garbage out' comment?
The fact this was upvoted despite that makes me feel like returning to commenting very infrequently is the right choice.
Maybe if this were 2016, but how Russian propaganda works and the role prominent/influential Westerners play in reinforcing Russia's narratives is (or should be) well known to highly connected and influential people like Musk.
When you say "X", and then "X" is used by a genocidal regime to support their war of choice, maybe it's time to stop saying "X".
> 2) He said they should negotiate a peace and end the war, which is correct. This was in the context of preventing the escalation to nuclear weapons which would be a disaster unseen since WWII.
The geopolitical stalemate that has staved off nuclear war since the Cold War era has been MAD - mutually assured destruction. The idea that anyone should cede territory to an invading nuclear power at the mere threat of using nukes is to abandon MAD entirely. In this new framework, any country with nuclear capabilities will be emboldened to wage conventional war, and they can be comfortable knowing that if they disrupt western life enough and threaten the end of the planet with nuclear Armageddon, they don't risk any retaliation by the West whatsoever. In fact, quite the opposite, the West will be happy to capitulate under the guise of "peace". But really all that has happened is that bullies are empowered to bully.
If Putin gets what he wants in Ukraine by threatening nuclear war, what happens when Putin turns toward Moldova and starts threatening them? If Putin is appeased, what stops him from demanding more? Does Putin just get whatever he wants now, as long as he threatens to use his nukes?
Putin doesn't need to be placated to deter him from using nukes. It needs to be made clear to him (and all Russians) that Russia will be vaporized in the case Putin uses nukes against Ukraine. That is the deterrence.
> 3) Twitter was extremely corrupt at pretty much every level, and his “Twitter files” only showed what we all knew was happening
The Twitter Files show you what Musk wants you to see. Case in point: Musk released the tweets that Biden wanted taken down (actually although he had them, Musk didn't release theml we had to track them down using the Internet Archive) but won't release the tweets the Trump admin wanted taken down. It's no wonder you conclude corruption, when you're being sold half the story. Selective disclosure and narrative building have been the hallmark of the Twitter Files. Ask yourself: if the point is transparency and exposure, why isn't all the data available for anyone to peruse?
Usual measure when you go verbally over the top: "It wasn't all meant that way, I was misunderstood," "It was meant ironically, and you didn't get it."
In both cases, it's the "stupid" audience, but not the author. I disagree.
Why I won't buy a Tesla (as of today) even though they are amazing.
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.
I've had a Model 3 since 2018. You can see earlier in the thread that I am not a raging Musk fan, in particular of his public behaviour over the last few years.
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.
No idea why; one guess is that it didn't occur to Tesla to worry about test-drivability and rentability yet. Probably hasn't harmed them so far because the brand has a fan following, of people happy to spend a few hours learning these details up front. Could become more of an obstacle for Tesla when there are five brands of really good electric cars, designed to test-drive well, available for immediate purchase at dealers.
Because tons of people buy cars without renting them. I can think of maybe one acquaintance that did that. Renting is nearly as superficial as a test drive and pales in comparison to reading reviews from professional reviews and owners.
I think B only matters as a signal of leadership instability. And I think it tells us nothing new about Mr. Musk that we didn't already know. So I think B is probably not really a factor. A is plenty enough to explain the market behaviour.
No, because Jonathan Swift wasn't actually eating people in the service of satire. "Goat fuckers" actually fuck goats even when they do so "ironically." If you spread Russian propaganda for the lulz you're still spreading Russian propaganda.
Are people who quote-tweet Musk tweets to dunk on them spreading Musk propaganda? “Satire is bad because it spreads the thing being satired” is a fun take, but no one in the media seriously believes it enough to be consistent about it.
Except we're talking about Twitter, which is designed to do exactly that, and Elon Musk, who should know by now that any thread he replies to will go viral. In this case, "satire" is bad because is spreads the thing being satirized, yes.
It's pretty clearly an attempt at humor, but there's still room for troubling conclusions within that framing.
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.
The “Epic thread” post could easily be used as Russian propaganda as an endorsement. I tend to think someone with as much power as Elon has some duty to be serious when engaging in potentially dangerous geopolitical issues.
The price-earning ratio for Volkswagen is 4.4 on the 22nd of Dec, Tesla still has a ratio of 38.05. That is partially based on the hype of a full self driving Tesla. That promise looks like it won't materialise anytime soon. Other car manufacturers are also catching up on the EV market. The Tesla share price will likely been going downhill for a while.
Musk "praised" that insane Russian tweet by saying:
> 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.
Are you familiar with the term 'pre-market' sales? Tesla opened a full $6 lower than the last close because of the pre-market sentiment, and in part this was due to the tweet. How big a fraction is impossible to say but I'm pretty sure that Musk is well aware of the effect of his tweets by now. I don't have access to a terminal but I can look back as far as 4 am on public sources and by then it was clear the stock was going to open much lower.
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.
> 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.
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.
Brianna wu is a nobody whose opinion of Tesla is equal to that of every other nobody. How is this person qualified to predict stock prices? Why does their extremely one sided take matter to anyone?
They're not a good source of information even when they're right.
I'd bet against that. Tesla is flush with cash, zero debt, and growing revenue annually more that most Fortune 100 companies. They are very profitable without any subsidies and still have a 28% profit margin on the cars they sell
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 are really good cars actually (FSD Bulls* excluded)
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).
They extended a week long Covid shutdown at the Shanghai by 8 days because of higher rates of covid among workers in China. It got spun into "shutting down factories because of lack of demand" by someone that's neither qualified in finance, nor in the car industry. Because they have an axe to grind.
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.
well, it'll be a cold day in hell before I ever buy a Tesla, but on the other hand I drive an '04 Corolla and like the fact that I never have to worry about my car doors opening or not.
If anything, I'm mostly ambivalent about Musk. So not all of us :)
Yea, the predictions of someone driven by passion (in this case, a passionate dislike of Musk it appears) probably aren't great in general. But, below $100 seems reasonable - the stock could still be considered 'overpriced' in the current market (at least by P/E).
There's really not much to drive sales for 2023 either. Was watching a summary of new EVs for the year and I'll give him credit on the "jet powered" roadster as very cool, but all the new exciting EVs for the average consumer are coming from GM, Ford, BMW, Toyota (with a very interesting Hydrogen powered offering which is technology I had no idea was even this developed) and a few other smaller startups.
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.
> Toyota is taking on a lot of risk with their bet on Hydrogen
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.
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).
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.
I honestly don't get it. They can't be that stupid, and with the hybrid era pretty much over they have lost what was once a pretty good lead. They already had the drive train pretty much all they need to do at this point is to replace the mass of the ICE with a much larger battery pack and they're set to compete. That would still require a redesign of the vehicle but they have done that so many times I don't see that as an obstacle.
> all the new exciting EVs for the average consumer are coming from GM, Ford, BMW, Toyota (with a very interesting Hydrogen powered offering which is technology I had no idea was even this developed)
Toyota has a new FCEV? The only thing thet seem to be pumping new on the EV front is their new BEV, the bZ4X.
> I think Ford really is going to get traction with the F150 Lightning
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.
The F150 Lightning has been terrible so far as a truck replacement. If you treat it as an oversized car it works (and many Americans do), but put any load on it and the range plummets to useless outside of small city runs.
I'd go all in under $100 based on the the fact they are environmentally sound, selling everything they produce, have a waiting list of buyers and have some big potential future products such as teslabot if they get them right. Musk is only 1 out of tens of thousands of (Mostly American) workers that make up Tesla, this would mostly go away if they change the CEO or Musk stopped trying to be Jesus.
One of the more embarrassing things about the popular tech podcaster ATP/relayfm people is, aside from their wives, Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian seem to be the only women they're friends with.
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.
It's ridiculous to state that Elon praised Medvedev. Medvedev made some insane and absurd predictions for 2023 and Elon replied with "Epic thread!!". It was epic because how insane it was.
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 think it is entirely reasonable to not give Musk the benefit of the doubt here. He has previously made some comments that were very friendly to Russia, and calling something "epic" is reasonable to interpret as a positive endorsement. It's entirely possible that Musk is just trolling here, but that is not an excuse and should not shield him from criticism for this comment.
If B is referring to this tweet https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1607494455720022018, I feel the need to point out that this was obviously trolling/sarcasm. People can criticize Musk all they want — hell, they can even argue the trolling/sarcasm is inappropriate — but pretending that Musk was "praising" that batshit thread is beyond silly.
Maybe this is a good lesson that when you’re the CEO of major companies and publicly speaking with a member of a government engaging a genocidal war of aggression, it’s just not smart to make any of these “le epic trolling” style jokes
It is when life isn't serious to you, the rest of the world are NPCs in your personal video game and no matter how bad you fuck up you're set for life.
I never claimed Musk is a Russian asset - the market is signalling how it feels about Musk. I’m just suggesting that the kind of edgy ambiguity that lands with teens doesn’t tend to land with portfolio managers, as we are seeing. Obviously anyone who reads his 4 hour later follow up tweet knows he meant for the original tweets to be read as sarcastic. But it doesn’t change that it signals immaturity and instability in the c suite. You can disagree, but this is just not a motte and bailey situation, since I never made the original grand claim. And, for what it’s worth, I don’t think Musk is an asset at the heart of a big conspiracy. I think the truth is so much more banal than that - he’s just an impulsive guy surrounded by sycophants.
It's also an interesting take on how the 'end of the road' should look like according to different sets of people.
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.
Musk was very clearly mocking the propaganda tweet, not praising it. I wouldn't put much confidence in the predictions of someone who didn't realise that.
She's aware that Musk walked back the "Epic thread!" comment 4.5 hours later, after he realized how badly he fucked up (and probably got a talking to by investors). The point it not what Wu thinks, but how the marketing is reacting to the initial tweet.
Only because of his follow-up tweet -- his first tweet ("Epic thread") was fully ambiguous. He knows better (after all, he owns the platform) so he's also willingly trolling by not being clearer.
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.
It wasn't ambiguous to anyone with a functional sense of humour. Have you read the predictions in the tweet he was replying to? They're utterly insane. The EU will collapse, Germany will form a Fourth Reich, France will go to war with the Fourth Reich!
In fact surely that's a parody account? How could anyone possibly think Musk genuinely agreed with it?
It reads to me more like jesting between pals...this isn't the first time he's retweeted and conversed with Medvedev in a light-hearted fashion like this. There is a reason the Kremlin and their propaganda is supportive of Musk.
Meanwhile Twitter is banned for ordinary Russians by the Russian government, why isn't he questioning Medvedev over that?
1. Chinese government is also pressuring Tesla because Elon has started work on militarizing space with StarShield and other preparation for Strategic Defense Initiative style capabilities in Low Earth Orbit.
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.
I really wonder how Tesla breaks out of this tailspin. For a long time the Tesla name carried a lot of cachet but it's so inextricably linked with Musk's public persona - which is growing more radioactive with every tweet.
I was not interested in the stock at the highs. I am buying as much as I can currently at this level. Musk has always been a wild card but he can deliver. I wish he had not bought Twitter but it doesn't really change my outlook on Tesla, SpaceX or long-term the boring company. Most of the freak out over Musk is just the left's anger over his views. I just ignore it. Dude is eccentric.
Yeah, obviously alienating the target market for your company will destroy your deliveries and your stock price. Shanghai factory is currently shut down and it will continue the shutdown also in January. The cars are currently sold with a 7500$ discount in US and in other countries.
If you think that the carbon-loving maga hats are going to buy EVs you will be nicely surprised in the next months.
Tesla Shanghai is partially shut down for maintenance, other factories do this as well. In the past months it produced the record number of cars.
>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.
I'm not betting on a massive resurgence until the fed pivots, perhaps 2024? A timeline measured in months is not realistic.
Longer term hold. If the price goes down more, then I'll just keep buying (to a point). Seems like a pretty good risk / reward setup for me. Politically I don't divide people into Maga Hats and not Maga hats. I divide them into MAGA hats, the far left and then normal people. The MAGA are on the far right, and there is the far left currently panicking over Musk. I'm betting on the normal people in the middle.
Side note, so far the deliveries have been fine. Will have to wait and see on how Q4 went.
If you think it's going to be a few years until it recovers (I don't disagree) then why are you catching the falling knife right now. Follow your own analysis lol, the time to buy is when its been sideways for a while.
Everyone in the industry has always known Tesla wasn't close. And current AI seems to be good enough for what Waymo and Cruise are aiming for.
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
It was immediately obvious when Tesla was far behind traditional approaches for auto headlights, wipers, and self-parking and refused to deviate from their AI-only approach.
People invested in Tesla because Musk openly lied countless times about state of their technology. Everyone who had any serous experience with AI knew he was lying.
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.
Because without the remnants of the Musk-hype it'll be worth even less than the current amount, maybe 2x Ford. Investing in Tesla was, for many people, investing in Musk and his vision.
Because actual shareholders read the financial statements, and therefore know how impressive Musk's performance has been so far, unlike people that literally haven't read further than the P/E.
Of course maybe Q4 and future quarters may change that, but there's no reason yet for shareholders to want another CEO.
I’d be worried he start pulling in the Twitter management style and do poorly considered large scale changes on a whim.
Basically: if he’s an obvious liability at Twitter, can he be the safe bet at Tesla? And can a man really be expected to be CEO of two large companies (not to mention three or more)? I’d not go anywhere near an instrument whose value depends on someone who has suddenly become extremely erratic. I think that’s the reason for the drop more than anything else. Shareholders are doubting Musk already.
They are doubting him (including myself). But nobody's going to ask for a new CEO as long as Tesla continues to grow like it has been. Only if Tesla misses a few quarters, people would actually consider replacing him.
That's just the stock market, I wouldn't read too much into it. Wait for Q4 earnings to draw any real conclusion based on actual performance and not stock market price.
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
It's also interesting that Rivian (RIVN) and Lucid (LCID) stock have been falling in-sync with Tesla -- although maybe at 2/3 the rate. Due to institutional investors?
Last week, Ford and GM were also falling, although today they are flat.
"Tesla has plummeted 56.5% over the past three months through Friday, while the S&P 500 has gained 5.4%"
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.
Some of this can be blamed on the production issues in China and maybe Musk's tweets courting far-right provocateurs, but Tesla was always massively over-valued and this is just things coming back down to reality. Probably still a ways to go as the Cyber Truck and the Semi are likely to disappoint and/or be further delayed.
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 not worth the valuation. Just speculation it may be in the future which is bad, stocks are bought on what its worth today.
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.
Tesla stocks have always been overvalued. The reason why is that people believe in him, his vision and the future sales of Tesla based on him and his vision. It is a luxury brand. A lifestyle. I am proposing the theory that maybe he's lost a little bit of that magic in people believing in him. I could have it all wrong since it is anecdotal evidence of the worst kind - my own.
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.
Could you please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments? You've been doing this repeatedly, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I am always willing to correct an error or omission. Could you share more?
I was curious if my statement was bias (on my part) or fact so I did a little research and came across the Edmunds quote below. They are basically the consumer reports for vehicle shopping.
"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."
I'm always willing to correct my world-view though so I would love to learn more. I do recognize there are super-luxury cars which a Tesla S is not. Say a Rolls Royce or a Bentley but the little amount I drive there was diminishing returns on that next level of spend on a vehicle.
First, the giant money-losers - WeWork, Uber, etc.
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 (and still is IMHO) overvalued. It is sold as a tech company when really it's just a car company. You compare it to any other car company and it looks horribly overvalued. Last year (at a higher share price) it's valuation was about $800,000 per car they produced that year. That just doesn't make sense.
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.
Musk confronted Bill Gates for shorting Tesla [1] then proceeded to sell tons of TSLA himself. What a hypocrite! He is still selling TSLA, most recent sale was 12 days ago for $3.6 billion.
There is a difference in betting against Elon Musk and betting against Tesla. Tesla's stock price has been hyped up for a long time now. It all depends on FSD and that isn't going too well so far.
I kinda hate that I'm "forced" to buy stupid TSLA stock just because, as a responsible adult, I put most of my investments in the SP500, and any alternative I could find that excludes firms I hate (FB, TSLA) has infinitely higher expense ratios :/
I read this helpless attitude on a similar thread recently and it boggles my mind.
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.
The world is much much bigger than you think. It might be shocking but Twitter, Tesla, SpaceX, and even PayPal are irrelevant to the daily lives of the vast population of the planet, and they will be for a long time.
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.
> Twitter
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.
The ignorant and condescending sentences you pointed out are true and I only added them because you still seem to be looking at this from an upper class American/European perspective.
The fact you think something entirely subjective and ill-defined is 1) objectively true and 2) something you can know without being in my head is ridiculous.
What I find interesting is nobody complained about Musk's social media antics when he proclaimed himself to be Technoking of Tesla or when he hyped dogecoins with diamond hands. Both evidence of bizarre behavior for a CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation. But only now - after the stock took the proverbial Acapulco cliff-dive - are investors condemning his 'erratic tweets hurting the stock'.
That doesn't seem surprising. When it was still at a "quirky" level, it didn't bother investors or much of the tech community, because it was all excusable as someone blowing off steam in a way that wasn't directly interfering with his work. Some people didn't like it because he was an asshole, but mostly just in a "ugh, that guy" kind of way that didn't interfere with them later deciding to buy a Tesla.
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.
> What I find interesting is nobody complained about Musk’s social media antics when he proclaimed himself to be Technoking of Tesla or when he hyped dogecoins with diamond hands.
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.
But people did complain. And Musk did not change his behavior. And I suspect that as long as he isn't smacked down really hard he won't change it in the future either.
People complained. You just didn't hear it, for whatever reason. Musk has been a known idiot for years and years, but most people only heard the narrative he pushed and approved.
