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TSLA showing cracks? TSLA showing cracks?

08-23-2018 , 01:44 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Spurious
given current valuations + cash requirements, the money will easily be found. SpaceX probably has enough to cover an short term liquidity gaps. But as I said before, I think TSLA should raise money by selling equity. The reason why I don't think they are is because Musk does not want to lose more control.
Never underestimate the potential damage a pathological mentality can do. This man is capable of ruining everything just by literally being him. We know his head gets all ****ed up over vanity and hot chicks. We know he's either been on drugs for a while or let Grimes get him hooked on god knows what, or at the very least introduced him to weed and this clown can't hang.

I have anecdotal evidence of someone I know personally with a similar personality. He is a self made multimillionaire in business and equally so in real estate. However, he is remarkably narcissistic and compulsive. He refuses to delegate properly among other things in a manner that made it impossible to get that second digit in the two comma club. He hit his ceiling and has no clue how to preserve his wealth. He's going to die penniless. Now we obviously do not believe Mush will die penniless, but there's a very real possibility he ruins TSLA out of sheer stubbornness.

TSLA obviously could magically become AMZN. There's always the nonzero chance, and there's always the risk/reward calculation where many gladly put some money into it and won't sweat a loss bc the ROI you hit outweighs it exponentially. But people do not understand irrational behavior, especially when it wields power like Elon Mush does. There is definitely a significant enough percent chance he limits TSLA's ceiling because his brain, as wonderful and intriguing as it can be, has severe defects in other areas.

And we know he's willing to do remarkably stupid **** and deceptively because of the acquisition of SolarCity. Ambition notwithstanding, he's willing to walk his investors into a buzzsaw. You can't just act like chinks in the armor are not there. If you believe he doesn't want to relinquish any control and you simultaneously believe it is the best thing he can do, then you literally are bullish on a CEO and company that you effectively believe is shooting itself in the foot.

Last edited by TeflonDawg; 08-23-2018 at 01:51 PM.
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08-23-2018 , 02:44 PM
So it seems like Goldman and MS will cash in millions in fees b/c a stoned Musk 420'd himself into having to hire someone to attempt to avoid jail. Can't make this up...
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08-23-2018 , 04:31 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by TeflonDawg
Never underestimate the potential damage a pathological mentality can do. This man is capable of ruining everything just by literally being him. We know his head gets all ****ed up over vanity and hot chicks. We know he's either been on drugs for a while or let Grimes get him hooked on god knows what, or at the very least introduced him to weed and this clown can't hang.
I hope you don't actually believe half the bull**** that comes out of this. He has been under a lot of stress and is deprived of sleep. That is the simple reason. Don't believe all that non-sense.

Quote:
Originally Posted by TeflonDawg
I have anecdotal evidence of someone I know personally with a similar personality. He is a self made multimillionaire in business and equally so in real estate. However, he is remarkably narcissistic and compulsive. He refuses to delegate properly among other things in a manner that made it impossible to get that second digit in the two comma club. He hit his ceiling and has no clue how to preserve his wealth. He's going to die penniless. Now we obviously do not believe Mush will die penniless, but there's a very real possibility he ruins TSLA out of sheer stubbornness.
The difference between your friend and Musk is the fact that Musk has been a founder or key-investor in 4 billion dollar companies. I see the point you are trying to make, but I think his positives far outweigh his negatives.

Quote:
Originally Posted by TeflonDawg
TSLA obviously could magically become AMZN. There's always the nonzero chance, and there's always the risk/reward calculation where many gladly put some money into it and won't sweat a loss bc the ROI you hit outweighs it exponentially. But people do not understand irrational behavior, especially when it wields power like Elon Mush does. There is definitely a significant enough percent chance he limits TSLA's ceiling because his brain, as wonderful and intriguing as it can be, has severe defects in other areas.
The next two years will tell how much negative or positive impact he has. TSLA without Musk would survive, but they would be a boring and lifeless company rather quick (in my opinion).

Quote:
Originally Posted by TeflonDawg
And we know he's willing to do remarkably stupid **** and deceptively because of the acquisition of SolarCity. Ambition notwithstanding, he's willing to walk his investors into a buzzsaw. You can't just act like chinks in the armor are not there. If you believe he doesn't want to relinquish any control and you simultaneously believe it is the best thing he can do, then you literally are bullish on a CEO and company that you effectively believe is shooting itself in the foot.
I don't really follow what you are trying to say here. I don't think that him trying to not give up power is a good thing, but it's not going to destroy the company.


Question to the bears: if Tesla raises $5bn in the upcoming 6 months, what would change for your thesis?
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08-23-2018 , 04:47 PM
Spurious, the bulls are such total, blind morons that they actually thought the go-private was real and settled. Should I go back and quote these utter clowns? As someone said:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Spurious
Given your history, you shouldn't be talking anymore.
Sorry, you have no credibility on Musk's honesty or his personality. You have been dead wrong and the bears have been 100% right about him being a liar and a fraud. That's proven; the end.


Been reading more about Elon Musk. He's never interested me must as he's obviously a major loser, but it's interesting to read about him as to why this latest disaster has happened. Basically there's a strong history of fraud and incompetence, as well as terrible inability to plan and manage with even an average competency.

He's basically some idiot child with daddy issues, a big ego and small brain, but risk-taking creativity. He won a couple of tournaments during poker's easy time after being bankrolled by his rich daddy's money and with his (more competent) brother to hold his hand, and is now way out of his league playing at the big boy tables.

The most interesting thing is that he's basically technically incompetent and horrible at organization, but is willing to take big risks and has a family to backstop him. A couple of which have paid off as they happened in the right environments. This is a pretty decent microcosm for his entire life:

https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/bl...-first-company
Quote:
Mohr Davidow Ventures invested $3 million into the company, on the condition that Musk hand over most of his shares and cede operational control to a seasoned tech executive named Rich Sorkin. Musk was demoted to Chief Technology Officer, and not surprisingly, he hated to see someone else run his own business. But he needed the money to take Zip2 to the next level, so he took the deal.

Under Sorkin, Zip2 shifted its focus from local to national. Instead of helping flower shops and auto dealerships stake their claim on World Wide Web, Zip2 began offering a platform service to newspapers across the country, so they could create their own local directory services. The New York Times Company signed up for its first website with Zip2, along with the Chicago Tribune and big media properties like Knight Ridder and Hearst Corporation. Craigslist hadn’t yet robbed the newspapers of their classifieds cash-flow, but the writing was on the wall. Media companies still had money to spend, and they knew they needed to do something to avoid getting rolled under. For a time, Zip2 played the white knight to print publishing, and the company grew quickly as a result.

With all the new money, Zip2 was finally able to hire software engineers and even poach some of the best talent in the Valley. Musk had done most of the initial coding himself, and though he was a gifted programmer, his work clearly showed that he was self-taught. The new programmers found that they needed to rewrite most of the software, to make it more efficient. Musk’s DIY approach to coding didn’t include chunking, so he inadvertently created a “hairball”: a tangled mess of code that’s nearly impossible to unravel if anything goes wrong.

But Musk didn’t always agree with the changes, and he had a bad habit of returning the favor. Often he would re-write his programmers’ code after they left work at the end of the day, without telling them of the changes. He was also prone to micro-managing and rudely criticizing his team. Needless to say, they found him difficult to work with. Musk never stopped himself from bluntly correcting others when he thought they were wrong.
47 year old is Musk is that same ego-ridden loser rich kid who writes crappy code and yells at people - good for a creative startup but way out of his depth when things get tougher than the crazy creative energy stage of a startup.

Easy ZIRP credit and a couple of lucky wins off other people's talent (if they didn't have the rocket not blow up, they were dead, for example) have put him as the (hilariously, insanely) incompetent head of a $50 billion car manufacturing business, where he is so far out of his depth that everything is a disaster. He's reverted to type - being an ego-driven disaster who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room and can't delegate or plan, but is actually messing everything with his dumb micromanaging.

The one talent he does have is PR and self promotion - he's had a lifetime of lying and actually endorses it by his earlier comments - and he has a kind of "aw shucks" creative picked on kid aura that has endeared him to the world's technocucks, who've backed him with money and fawning press coverage that has reached the mainstream.

One thing that stands out is his pricky personality and inability to take criticism. His whole identity is tied up in being the smartest guy in the room (while in reality being an incompetent loser with below average technical intelligence in any area he's entered, which he tries to overcompensate for with raw energy), so he bristles at criticism and can't help lashing out and feeling unfairly persecuted by cave divers, the press for a tiny bit of negative coverage amidst a lifetime of fawning coverage, people at work who dare to disagree with him, and shorts, who treat him like he's not the smartest guy in the room. This enormous personality flaw + drugs have led him to the mess he's in now. The dumb cuck literally rage-tweeted his way into this liability disaster because he was pissed off and paranoid about the shorts.

I don't see how this ends well for him. He's >3 levels above his personal Peter Principle and is coming unravelled with the stress of having to throw vast amounts of energy and time at things to make up for his middling intellect and poor technical intelligence. Age is probably playing a part too - his ability to generate frenetic energy to overcome the manifest things he's incompetent at is gong to decline getting into his late 40s.
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08-23-2018 , 05:03 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Spurious

Question to the bears: if Tesla raises $5bn in the upcoming 6 months, what would change for your thesis?
timeframe.
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08-23-2018 , 05:14 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by BooLoo
timeframe.
Amd structure of short position


But ya agree
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08-23-2018 , 05:19 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Spurious
Question to the bears: if Tesla raises $5bn in the upcoming 6 months, what would change for your thesis?
Three bear theses:

1. Serious liquidity issues where they appear unable to either raise or have anyone finance debt. Musk either has to be brained damaged/a horrible CEO to be destroying the long term future of the business by not paying suppliers, cutting capex, etc. Or they can't raise. If the latter (80%), they go bankrupt soon as the amount due is enormous and they lack the scale for profitability. They have a Quick Ratio of 0.31. That's an objective measure that means imminent bankruptcy. Musk's only out is a capital raise or more long term debt, very soon.

Your only counter to why he hasn't is that Musk isn't raising "because he doesn't want to dilute his equity", which I think shows even you agree that the lack of raising is bizarre and stupid. A billion dollars raised would dilute his equity by a mere 0.4% and give breathing room. He's previously raised for far more. It also doesn't explain why no debt?

2. Structural unprofitability and lack of large scale demand at higher prices. They can't build and sell the $35K car at anywhere near $35K with all costs accounted, according to all teardowns. At least $10K loss per car is certain even at higher volume. Musk himself says Tesla will "die" if they sell the car for $35K even at 5K/week volume. This lack of structural profitability means they will never get the large amounts of money needed to continue, as they have no volume car being pushed out for billions in profit and free cash flow to give then access to the large amounts of future debt needed (10s of billions) to fund capex and R&D and pay off old debt. The equity markets are tapped out; their main funding source (apart from mortgaging everything they own) has been the equity markets which they are now scaled out of.

3. Competition. Tesla manufacturing is uber crap and decades behinds the majors. The only good thing is they have is the battery/electric powertrain and that will soon be commoditized. They suck ass on cost and quality on the top of the car and need >$50 billion in fresh inflowing capital to get to scale where they don't suck and can produce a viable mass market car.

If Tela raises $5 billion, #1 doesn't happen. #2 and #3 remain intact. 2020 $200 puts are still an excellent play even with #1 gone.
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08-23-2018 , 05:46 PM
tooth are you short or just buying puts?

Wouldn't they get bought at a low share price like that?
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08-23-2018 , 05:52 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by JKC
tooth are you short or just buying puts?

Wouldn't they get bought at a low share price like that?
That is the funny part. The liabilities created by this 420, in addition to all their assets being encumbered, makes a buyout at nearly any price almost impossible.


Make no mistake about it, GS and MS are sharks and they are circling to get a piece of the restrucuring pie that is coming.
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08-23-2018 , 05:53 PM
Also MS wants to make sure they get the 400m loaned out to musk back too
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08-23-2018 , 05:59 PM
Quote:
tooth are you short or just buying puts?

Wouldn't they get bought at a low share price like that?
Just puts, and still just short term weekly on news, like I've always traded Tesla. For example the NYT article day was near free money. As was the original Saudi news.

To break the facts down into something very simple:

Tesla's business thus far has been making very high priced luxury electric cars heavily subsidized by the government, debt, and equity markets thanks to ZIRP and a large market cap in a 1999 level tech bull. These cars are fun to buy and drive for rich people and feel like the future because of a performance electric drive, which is a wonderful, amazing thing, but has nothing to do with Tesla. They've had a monopoly on this market as no one has been interested in blowing $10 billion dollars (Tesla's cumulative losses) to make 300K cars.

Tesla thus far has shown extreme, company-killing incompetence at all functions of a car company that aren't heavily subsidized low volume ultra high end cars.

Tesla right now has far higher payables than available cash and no path to cash except equity raises. It has *never* had this in the past 5 years. Debt markets appear closed to them now with everything mortgaged to creditors. They are months behind with suppliers and have had to scale back operations.

Musk recently added the backdrop of billions in high probability liability and serious SEC investigations, which now hang over the company.

The near term future depends on them raising capital very soon. Inability to do this means bankruptcy.

The medium term future depends on them becoming a competent volume car manufacturer that can turn a strong profit at $35K on a car that the average of experts say costs $35K to build alone (before SG&A, etc, which are very large for Tesla).

The long term future depends on them getting 10s of billions in inflowing capital and scaling up to being a competent mass manufacturer, which means LEAN processes, delegation and bureacracy - the opposite of the company's current culture.

SolarCity is a debt deadweight around their necks (as bears predicted; bulls thought it would have billions in profits by now) and has been cut in half since buying it and progressively shut down.

Autonomous driving is dead and always was a smoke and mirrors sideshow; Tesla are 4+ years behind with no money for R&D and no talent and a buggy level 2 codebase (as bears predicted; bulls including autonomous driving experts have been dead wrong). Other companies are deploying 10s of thousands of city wide commercial fully autonomous ride hailing services this year.

That's it. I contend there's no path and no culture to get to success. They couldn't achieve success with subsidies, a pure monopoly and no opponents; how will they survive as competition ramps up, subsidies disappear and they're entering the sphere or their own incompetence with a culture and leader that magnifies that incompetence?
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08-23-2018 , 07:18 PM
Can someone explain ARK investment to me? Is she trying to:

-Come up with wild ideas to create status as a forward/contrarian thinker

-Be on TV/pander to prejudices

-Get access/kickbacks/etc from favorable coverage

-Pump and dump

OR

-Simply unable to model reality, yet still in a powerful position?
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08-24-2018 , 01:18 PM
https://mobile.twitter.com/atomicthu...39617404645376

Former Tesla firmware engineer posting about stuff thats... interesting.
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08-24-2018 , 01:35 PM
Hilarious read. Toxic culture dripping down from the guy who calls strangers pedos.

It's going to be hilarious when someone disables every single Model 3 on the road with a hack. A recent update did a full disable/tow truck required on some Model 3s when it failed. If the updating code in the car is so incompetently written as to not recover from failed updates, it's only a matter of time before an actual saboteur makes 200K Tesla cars need towing and servicing all at the same time.
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08-24-2018 , 01:55 PM
I am no engineer and I know almost nothing about this, but if what this guy says is true - in particular that the firmware in the car is not encrypted - wouldn't it be possible for people to steal teslas easily with the right hack?
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08-24-2018 , 02:46 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by ToothSayer
It's going to be hilarious when someone disables every single Model 3 on the road with a hack. A recent update did a full disable/tow truck required on some Model 3s when it failed. If the updating code in the car is so incompetently written as to not recover from failed updates, it's only a matter of time before an actual saboteur makes 200K Tesla cars need towing and servicing all at the same time.
Disabling is one thing, but I've been saying for a while that self-driving, internet connected self-updating cars are easily the scariest imminent threat in the AI debate. It's hard for top security experts to design a legitimately secure system, but throw in a few incompetent employees or someone sabotaging things on the inside and you instantly have a massive fleet of seriously destructive autonomous weapons. It's scary to think that someone as mentally unstable and delusional as Elon is even allowed to lead such a project.
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08-24-2018 , 04:50 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by wikibg
I am no engineer and I know almost nothing about this, but if what this guy says is true - in particular that the firmware in the car is not encrypted - wouldn't it be possible for people to steal teslas easily with the right hack?
It depends on just how things have been implemented. I would like to think the answer is no but anything's possible. When this guy says the firmware is not encrypted that just means someone with physical access to the car, the proper equipment, and the right know-how would be able to see exactly what the code that controls the car is and does. It does not necessarily mean that they could change the code, but that's a possibility. I didn't read through the whole thread but I have to think that the process of actually updating the code on the vehicle does require valid encryption keys.

I really don't know anything about how the car communicates with the backend so I can't say anything intelligent about the likelihood of a successful hack, but if you knew how the firmware worked (because it's unencrypted and you were able to disassemble it) and you were able to spoof the communications between the car and the backend then in theory you might be able to send it the commands for "unlock the doors" and "start the engine". I think that's a stretch though.

Far more likely that their own system causes something disastrous to happen.
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08-24-2018 , 05:23 PM
chortttttt
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08-25-2018 , 12:01 AM
Rip $420: Nice late Friday press release tho, just lol: https://www.tesla.com/blog/staying-public
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08-25-2018 , 12:18 AM
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Originally Posted by protonewb
Rip $420: Nice late Friday press release tho, just lol: https://www.tesla.com/blog/staying-public
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08-25-2018 , 12:55 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by protonewb
Rip $420: Nice late Friday press release tho, just lol: https://www.tesla.com/blog/staying-public
Omg. How will the markets react to this now. Omg
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08-25-2018 , 02:52 AM
well they couldn't keep this charade up for too long. having the GS and MS guys go through the motions actually costs money (the thing they don't have).

'Thanks elon, nice tweet. gave us millions in fees just to give you a chance to stay out of jail.' - signed: your friendly neighborhood investment bankers.
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08-25-2018 , 04:14 AM
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08-25-2018 , 04:19 AM
Literally lol-ed in rl... if the SEC does nothing after all this, they are a joke.... also I don't see how Elon doesn't get sued into oblivion...
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08-25-2018 , 07:00 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by wikibg
Literally lol-ed in rl... if the SEC does nothing after all this, they are a joke.... also I don't see how Elon doesn't get sued into oblivion...
He tweeted as a bidder

Also a lot of both longs and shorts think this is good news. Emotional irrationality on both sides.
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