lol poty

Saudis aren't spending high 11 figures to slow the electric car market down marginally

New Saudi King, "You get a tesla, you get a tesla, everyone getsa tesla!"

so saying we get to 30b eventually, why should they get ~5.5x the revenue multiple that daimler (who are highly profitable and have 5x of tsla capex) gets? picking daimler because as of today they have about the same marketcap.

where does the growth beyond 200k & 80k come from? how do they pay for that capex? when do they start selling their new products? all in all: what's your timeline, what are your numbers? what's your outstanding share count 5 years from now? have you thought all of that through and actually looked at one of their reports?

traditional auto companies have a historically low P/E for the same reason Tesla is/seems so overvalued. Electric cars are perceived as a growth industry while gas powered cars are perceived as a shrinking industry.

Tesla has a 920m convertible bond due in mar 2019
Strike is at $360


Can’t make it up.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bar...ney-1533667505

Supporting a 50+ billion junk bond raise with junk bond ratings and negative cash flow would be absolutely amazing and I can't see Musk giving anyone (Saudis included) control.

If he really does have funding lined up, it would be a startup like structure with different classes of de-facto equity shares.

Why do you say this as if you actually understand the implications of what you're saying

yeah i was thinking and reading about possibilities...

i heard expectation somewhere around 35-40b$. musk, his relaves and other insiders control around 30% and some smaller and retail investors will stick along for the ride.
many of the big funds aren't allowed to hold that much in private equity, so they will sell.

they already pledged everything they own against their other debt, i don't see how you can sell bonds here.
so who buys 40b of this garbage (and gives musk control)?

Dont be a jealous or vindictive person. It'll cloud any remaining ability you have left from making money

right so explain in a little more detail what you mean here. Why are you so incredulous?

It would fall apart if they couldn't come up with the money to pay off everyone that wanted to sell.

Here are some reasons why they might get a better multiplier. They may or may not be valid.

1. Closer and easier path to autonomy than any car manufacturer. Their competition here is Apple and Google.
2. Energy business
3. Better battery economics for the next few years
4. Demand for Tesla sedans is growing while traditional mid-size sedan demand shrinks
5. Tesla seems to be able to build products that people absolutely love and want - I'd argue it goes beyond the drive train.
6. What is Daimler's path for growth besides copying Tesla's playbook with autonomy, car sharing, and electric? If Tesla executes on a Model Y and pickup, 800k a year feels doable.
7. Vertical integration in manufacturing may create a sustainable advantage like what Amazon did with fulfillment centers where every other retailer had optimized their distribution centers for waves of product instead of custom orders.

I've read all their annual reports, listened to all the conference calls. Steady state 5k a week M3, I think the business generates a fair amount of cash and future growth can be funded organically + debt. Haven't modeled any of this out, but my guess is 400k cars end of 2020 and 800k by 2022.

I also may be completely off base and smart folks like Benedict Evans, Einhorn and folks here obviously disagree. I find it super valuable to understand the other side and then think it through and make my own decisions and it has worked well for a few positions folks here have deeply disagreed with.

By the way, Daimler seems really cheap to me....would love to be enlightened on why they're priced so low.

Elon isn't that green to just unknowingly dive into a hotbed of possible securities fraud with a tweet.

ok, good luck

Hence "if Elon isn't full of it"

I honestly dont know if im getting trolled here. If not, this ought to be reexamined.


$360 share price is the trigger for them to have to repay the bond in shares or cash in march


for a company that has $2.2b in cash in the bank today, with a 2018 projected cash burn of 2.5b, you dont need to register an iq level above 10 to figure out they cannot afford to repay $920m in cash without borrowing more or creating an unlikley structural change to their business model in 2 quarters.

So if you want to believe that Elon is blowing smoke, this is your narrative.

You say all this as if paying a 920M tab would be some sort of armageddon event for a company with a market cap 50x that. I get that you want to seem smart and stuff with your "can't make this stuff up" nonsense but lol

I have been holding a large number of shares.

Thanks! =)

It would have been sweet if they stayed public and the profitable Tesla or not question could have been answered so the debate would have been settled in either direction. There sure has been a lot of disagreement on the stock. But winning a debate is less important than winning at life to me. That is why I left this thread, it seemed that some people here were more interested in winning the debate than winning at life.

I think the deal is good for Tesla. It complicates things for me, given that I am not American and keeping and trading my private shares might become tricky. Waiting for some clarity on this.

I welcome the option to sell at 420. Not sure if I will or how much. Maybe it's time to diversify 10-50% ish.

If something major unexpected happens, something happens indicating that Tesla will not be profitable or I guesstimate that TSLA is overvalued at current price. I have done plenty of own calculations and I have read so many bears posts and still I was convinced that Tesla was gonna be super profitable moving forward.

If the deal fails now after Elon has invested so much PR into it, that would be a blow to the perceived confidence in Tesla. I expect like 10-20% drop on news of that.


Imo the biggest question we should be discussing right now is what is gonna happen to the shorts. Will they have to buy back before the company goes private? With 30% of float being short that might be tricky, given that a lot of shares will be voting and a lot the float might want to convert to TSLAP. Are enough people gonna be willing to sell to them in a short period of time? If I was short I would insta-sell right now to not have to risk buying back a much much higher price before the price crashes back to $420.

I hold shares, am not a Tesla owner nor would I act just out of brand loyalty if I had one. Mainly buying because it is a growth stock and people don't understand exponential S curves meaning they will undervalue at the start and overvalue when ramping down. Obviously going private prevents me from trading with the public and makes it less interesting for me. Also don't have the satisfaction of hurting shorts, which I do enjoy tremendously.

Will bail at ~$420 (or during a squeeze if it happens to be higher but I don't plan on it), so basically as soon as this plan is solidified and market prices adjust accordingly. Shorts obviously will still spread FUD to keep their exit prices low but they will eventually cave.

By the way I do not think that $420 is a bad deal if you're going for the long run. Tesla is going to be a great return no matter what.

Please. You left the thread because you got completely owned on both autonomous driving and Musk's manufacturing incompetence, and you were too embarrassed to post. Despite autonomous driving being your actual profession and specialty, you got everything dead wrong on where Tesla was on autonomous driving, which is an amazing feat of stupidity.


As for my take on all this, this is transparently a pump. If there was genuinely a 10s of billions go-private in the works from a consortium:

- Someone on Wall Street would know about it. No one does.
- You wouldn't tweet it out with the price, thus hurting your actual chances of going private as more shareholders are likely to vote against it when it's a small rather than a large premium from the current price
- You wouldn't do it just as Tesla is about to become permanently profitable, which, if you are telling the truth, is sufficient to burn the shorts

And given that Tesla needs many 10s of billions in outside capital in order to get to scale even the Model 3 (they've bizarrely scaled back capex and stopped ramping - why if they can raise???), public markets are by far the best way, if not the only way, to do that.

We'll see what happens but this is a huge gift to the shorts. Musk is either not lying and your downside is capped at 10% loss, or he's lying and this is the end game and you've got 100% profit coming. 10:1 payout on Musk being a liar/fraud is pretty amazing, given that he provably is for major material facts.

Why would I be foaming at the mouth? I'm both amused and enjoying the trading opportunities.
I barely post here any more since a month ago.

Musk is a fraud. That's proven at this point. As for being a joke, he's a joke in the sense that Madoff or Sam Antar were "jokes". Are accomplished conmen a joke? I dunno.

Sam Antar actually pulled the same stunt - as the walls were closing in, he lined up private buyers to take the company private to try to both pump the stock price and get them to hold the bag before the company collapsed and the SEC sent them to prison. He succeeded, but also ended up in prison. It's impressive if Musk has managed to do this for 10s of billions.

Without being a laywer, it seems Musk's ass is covered if he has a letter of interest from say the Saudis, even though they have no intention to buy. He pumps it (carefully leaked story in FT followed by his tweet) for them in return so they can exit.

He certainly is feeling the walls closing in. Hence all the bizarre behavior and his crazy focus on shorts as his persecutor.

Such behavior is typical in end-stage companies run by narcissistic frauds. Enron/Valeant were the last great frauds (larger market cap/assets than Tesla), and the behavior was similar. It's common at the end of long bulls like 2000 or now. And it's very common in penny stocks.
Every single bull has either something mentally wrong with them or just doesn't grasp the most basic facts of how the world works. This is an extraordinarily dumb opinion. Thanks for sharing it!

So you went mouth foaming on me for using personal attacks, yet calling people "mentally wrong" is totally normal. u furry mad?

Dude I'm not mad at all. I'm actually amused and entertained by all of this. I made 100% profit yesterday on this (got in of the FT story ramp thanks to jb514 noticing it in private chat, and out before Musk sent it soaring again with the second tweet), which while not great given the 20 bagger on offer, was still sweet. I'm a Tesla trader and I love volatility.

And there is something mentally wrong with you on multiple levels if you think the Saudis would spend tens of billions to shut down Tesla. That's insanely stupid on about four different levels:

1. Tesla are a tiny fraction of world EVs, and a tiny tiny fraction of affected oil usage. Non-Tesla car makers will make a million EVs this year, 1.4 million next year, 2 million the year after, 2.8 million the year after that...they're exponentially ramping at 40% off a base of one million and have been for over a decade.

2. There are close to 10 million partial EVs/year produced (cars with a small battery to reduce oil usage). These have a WAY bigger effect than Tesla.

3. The tipping point for mass adoption of electric cars is energy density and cost of batteries being at a sufficient level that they're a better proposition than ICE. Tesla could be shut down tomorrow by an earthquake and it wouldn't make a lick of difference; that point will be hit in 2021-2022 with or without Tesla. The 10s of billions flowing into basic battery research (not from Tesla) guarantees it. The eventual complete domination of EVs is assured purely by basic economics.

4. The Saudis are using their oil wealth in actively seeking to diversify away from oil; they've been doing this for years, buying a diverse range of green economy companies and funding them so they have a finger in every pie. Why would they pay $40 billion to shut something down rather than own it, particularly when shutting it down would have no effect on oil usage?

His post was just ****** level stupid on multiple levels.

Oh I think the Saudi story is nonsense, however that is not what you said.