Musk committed this decade's biggest act of securities fraud. The criminal investigation will also help with the civil liability, which is in the billions. Lots of people. Musk is a do-no-wrong hero to lots of the longs, including some of his big investors, and they genuinely believe his insane lies and spin.

I mean, look at heltok's utterly insane view of the $420 tweet. Guy isn't stupid. He claims he works in autonomous driving. His mind is just gone so deep up Elon's ass he doesn't realize he's a liar and fraud:

The clown thought it was real and had no doubt that Musk was telling the truth. He probably believed Elon's lies in his blog and the whole board "considering Musk's proposal" charade. For these people - which includes major Tesla shareholders - a DOJ investigation gives a meaningful counterpoint to their utter insanity. It's a bit of a reality slap.

Not sure what trade you guys are talking about but I would guess it has very little/nothing to do with this story...

Potential criminal charges and the Vern lawsuit = the worst PR ever = Musk must be gone very soon IMO.

Relax, you are getting way too excited over this story. A few percent down on potential criminal charges seems like a nothing move to me.

Gone how? He's a 20% shareholder and has most of the board in his pocket - SpaceX directors, his brother, other people who owe him favors or are deep in the fraud. He has a little unhealthy fiefdom going on at Tesla and is such a nutter/control freak/"can't back down" weirdo that he publicly accuses strangers who criticize him of child rape with zero evidence, and commits stock fraud to burn the shorts who he feels are persecuting him (classic pathological narcissism).

The board's analysis would most likely be that Musk going will tank the stock big time. So they'd try to ride it out imo, unless legal imperatives for them made it necessary for him to go. They're pretty much tied to his fate legally and civilly at this point anyway. They've implicitly endorsed his behavior and failed in their obligations to shareholders.

lol musk is not gone. but a $30 intraday reversal on a day when everything else is making new highs is definitely news.

Everything else making new highs? Tech and/or auto stocks are at highs? Fooled me...

If I had a dollar for everytime I heard "this is it" from both sides in this name, would have a nice fund built up at this point. Very noisy.

Perhaps you'd like to quote actual studies instead of rhetoric? You're conveniently leaving out tax incentives for both consumers and producers in your metric. The basic fact is that if evs were less expensive than gas, the government wouldn't need to subsidize their ownership. They would simply take over the market naturally. The reason they are subsidized at all is for environmental motives, not cost.

You're seriously going to compare the cost effectiveness of a nascent, heavily subsidized industry with a market efficient one that's been streamlined in every way from automation to machine tools for over a century due to market forces? I mean no one is this stupid. The gas industry is far more cost effective at the moment per car, it's not close, and your claim that the ev industry will ever be par with it is dubious at best. What forces beyond subsidization for short term adoption incentive are going to make it so?

Not good, and nowhere near ev in a vacuum, but only you live in a vacuum. When you take into account production, infrastructure, subsidization, and basic market forces the total financial cost per unit of producing and operating a gas vehicle is far far less than an ev. This is why ev requires subsidization.



There you go, totally ignoring the motive power required to move turbines to generate electricity to recharge batteries again. Obviously cutting out the entire upstream electricity generation and you're right. But again, no one but you lives in a vacuum.

This is the most ******ed statement I've ever heard anyone make. Electricity generation plants cost hundreds of millions of dollars. If 90% of cars were ev, we'd need a whole lot more of them. This will undoubtedly increase the cost of electricity, and the amount of hydrocarbon burnt to generate it. There may be a small environmental advantage from switching from gasoline to methane, but there is less energy available in methane so well have to burn many factors more of it to meet the increase in electricity demand. So now because were burning way more gas and way less liquid, we have to reverse refine natural gasoline into methane or burn natural gasoline to generate electricity, since there isnt ab unlimited supply of methane. What does that do to the cost of methane? Oh right it goes up. So guess what happens during high demand times? Price goes up. That price increase, no longer subsidized by taxpayers, gets passed, as it always does, to consumers.

I mean seriously man this is basic basic stuff.

That's cute. You think you've won and you still dont even know why you might be wrong.

Here I'll make it really simple for you. Your claim that evs are long run more cost effective is dubious for the following logic.

What will 90% ev useage do to the overall demand for electricity? Do you have any idea? What will that increase in demand do to the price of electricity? What will that increase in price do to ownership cost?

There's something wrong with your mind. You need to learn to read. Facts to get into your head before we continue:

- EVs require subsidization NOW but won't in 2022 when cost parity is reached with ICE (cost parity, not subsidized). The key cost component is the battery pack. That's come down from $1000/kWh to $200/kWh in a decade and dropping fast. In 2022 the cost of making the battery + electric motors, etc and putting it in a car becomes equal to the cost of all the extra ICE components. Then it gets increasingly cheaper until it's about 15% cheaper than an ICE to make. As to your "hundred years of optimization" comments, that's more than offset by the very large number of components needed for ICE, not needed for battery. I'm kindly explaining that for you since it's not intuitive to you for some reason.

- In your crazy mind, building electricity plants that cost "hundreds of millions" - actually billions (you sure you work in the industry?) - will increase electricity prices. That's not how it works, bro. Increasing capacity alongside demand using lots of capex doesn't increase price. See: oil 2013 to now and the vast shale oil buildout. You are brain-damage-level dumb on this topic.

- The superior profile of EV includes hydrocarbons-in-ground-to-motive-power efficiency for both. EVs are substantially superior without even counting stuff like EVs soaking up baseload waste. Thus your idiotic assertion that the same or more hydrocarbons will be used is...idiotic.

You are too stupid and ignorant to discuss anything with. You're wrong on even the very basics and clearly know nothing. There are interesting discussions to be had about the cost/viability of grid buildout costs to cope with the higher draw, but you're off in fantasy land.

Also, for the people who say this is nothing or can't touch a billionaire, Martha Stewart (a well-connected billionaire) spent four months in prison for a tiny amount (meaningless to her) of insider trading that impacted no one.

Musk has committed the biggest stock fraud of the decade that impacted hundreds of thousands of investors to the tune of billions of dollars.

Martha Stewart did not go to prison for insider trading, she went for lying to the FBI about insider trading.

The coverup is always worse than the crime, people. Why do you think Trump won't talk to Mueller?

You think the drugged up pathological liar who calls people pedos, swears at journalists and thinks he's the smartest guy in the room is going to do better than Martha Stewart in an interview?

Let's just wait and see what the probe reveals/charges are shall we? Way too much baseless speculation... I get how bad some of you want the worst about Musk to be true but what's the likelihood of that?

You had the same view on the $420 go-private tweet. Go back and read your posts from that time. Tesla is $100 lower since then and every bear view of Musk's psychology was correct, while your probabilities were dead wrong.

In this case, possibly yes. For one thing, he probably honestly believes he didn't commit a crime or did anything unethical. It's possible he's that delusional. He can actually look the DOJ in the eye with a straight face and say he did something that most people would consider ****ed up and/or criminal but innocuous in his own mind.

That said, "the cover up is worse than the crime" is just a nonsense phrase that just sounds good, but isn't actually true. He can do exactly what I just said which implies no coverup, but is an implicit admission of guilt. That's going to cost him a pretty penny that I'd imagine jail time at some lame min sec prison for lying to the FBI would be far more worth paying in comparison.

Whatever you say bud, I've said all along I have zero skin in this and I was asking longs the same as bears what their thoughts were on the deal. Can bump those posts if you like. Just trying to learn...

Tesla going to zero or some massive sell off isn't going to happen from this news, Musk going to jail, or Musk stepping down. It's going to happen when they need money to service debt/continue to function and they can't raise capital.

However, if Trump can't get loans from banks the traditional way but gets it from the Russians, then Musk can probably go to the Saudis. I'm not going to pretend I know a rigged game when I see one, but I think I might be watching a rigged game.

Is there anyone else neutral that finds this polarization fascinating? So much emotional investment here...

Def

I feel like i have learned a lot about the human psyche from Tesla. Everything about it is fascinating.

I don't think Do0rDoNot ever claimed to work in the energy sector. It seems extremely unlikely to me, given the content of his posts, that he works in energy. This statement underscores his ignorance of the state of energy production, both in the US and other developed countries:

Only 62% of US electricity comes from fossil fuels; only 30% comes from coal, while 31% comes from nat gas. The fact he acts as though coal and nat gas are not worth distinguishing also shows ignorance. Nat gas has half the CO2 emissions, and much better particulate, SO2 and NOx emission profiles. And saying that we'd have to burn a lot more methane to get the same amount of energy from coal seems like something no one with knowledge in this area would say—we care about cost per MWh. Nat gas is cheaper per MWh than coal.

Canada gets 60% of its electricity from hydro, about 9% from coal and less than 10% from other hydrocarbons.

And again you're leaving out the increased cost of electricity. Think about this for a sec. Roughly speaking, for 90% ev useage you need 90% ev coverage, right? That means charging stations. A LOT of them. Do you understand how much copper costs? Who's gonna foot the bill for literally millions of miles of electricity distribution infrastructure? Right now Teslas backers, investors, and taxpayers are paying for it. In the future, consumers will pay for it. That is a FACT. How much more methane will we need to burn to generate many factors more electricity than we use now? Guess what happens to the price of natural gas when that happens? It goes up. Who's going to pay for it? Again, consumers will.

Your decreased cost predictions are based on fundamentally flawed assumptions: the cost of electricity will remain the same, the supply of methane is unlimited and so its cost, etc.

Evs arent cheaper now, and the claim they will be cheaper in the future is dubious at best.

Yes it does. Because you are so superficially knowitall about absolutely every topic you engage upon, you're missing a lot, yet again. More electricity demand increases transmission requirement. Copper and insulated aluminum is expensive. That's why your transmission and distribution costs make up the biggest part of your power bill. Have a look at it if you dont believe me. More usage, more cost. Hundreds of thousands of miles of new transmission and distribution infrastructure will increase the cost of electricity for EVERYONE, not just ev users, and it will easily suck up any cost saved on higher unit efficiency.

What the hell is baseload waste? Do you understand how electricity is generated and distributed?

the Tesla polarization reminds me of the greater US political polarization - perhaps it's caused by social media + filter bubbles?

It's closer to 70% fossil fuels. https://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/el...roduction.html

Only 17% is generated by renewable sources and 20%+ is nuclear.

I said nothing about coal, and I clearly distinguished between gasoline and methane.

It gets roughly 22% from fossil fuels. Canada is a wide outlier due to their James bay hydroelectric project, which obviously isn't feasible most places in the world.

How can you be neutral on tesla? It's either the greatest stock scam since Enron or the next Apple? No middle ground.

You legitimately fail to understand how capital investment + competition works. It's extraordinary. Let me quote you below and then apply the same logic to oil

It's not dubious, it's a certainty. There is no one I know of who thinks EVs will be more expensive. It's a consequence of EVs being far simpler to build and the rapidly dropping cost of batteries ($1000/kWh to $200/kWh in a decade with no sign of abating).

No, you just have a brain block. It will cost hundreds of billions if not a trillion to build out the extra power supply capacity infrastructure for EVs. We agree there and you'd understand that I know that if you could read.

What you don't understand is best shown by demonstration. Your post, above, modified for oil in 2013 as shale took off:

Using your logic, oil will get far more expensive as people have to build out supply - pipelines, refining, drilling capex in the hundreds of billions.

Car lithium batteries is an even better example, huge increasing demand for a lithium delivery pipeline competing with an existing demand (phones, laptops, etc) yet the price is dropping.

You understand where your mental block is, bro? You're failing at basic economics. The shift to 90% cars will happen a very long time after EV dominate the market. A car has a lifespan of > 10 years and are there are over a billion cars around. 40 million/year globally - which is the point at which the EV market is bigger than the gasoline market - can easily have baseload supply added in plenty of time...the extra incoming money at current market prices pays for all the costs as forward capex, exactly as it does for shale oil or lithium batteries (dropping rapidly in price) or any of 100 other things. The ramp is actually gentle enough that supply capacity forward-capexed can easily meet demand (the pie is getting larger and there are more mouths = same cost per unit of pie).

There is tremendous thermal waste in baseload on off-peak hours, as demand falls right down and they can't be cycled on and off. That's why power is cheap overnight - it's plentiful. If EVs are charging and using that power, stopping the efficiency-killing thermal cycling(or just pure waste), they're essentially getting far higher efficiency. This slow thermal cycle of baseload is one reason why solar is mostly bull**** and a big waste/has little CO2 impact.