Lol

Tesla thread on Reddit:

You mean my car can just go on a little excursion playing taxi around the city?

Wow, your car would literally pay for itself!

Yeah, all in Tesla!

Holy shiiiiiit

lol cordi, just lol. The reason Musk is so desperate to protect his tweeting is because the constant pumping stock fraud it's the sole thing that keeps him from getting a margin call. And so it continues:

This time it's autonomous taxi leasing, fraudulently claimed to be possible using current hardware on current M3, which can't even detect giant trucks across the road (or any stationary objects).

It seems like this stock will always be propped up by retail cultists and Elon/Ellison/Cathy Wood-type institutions until it actually runs out of money and misses payroll or a bond payment. Financial reality has zero factor in their investment. Elon will also go to the ultimate extreme to cover everything up until the collapse. I can't see it just being a slow bleed.

What's the best way to play an overnight collapse from $2xx to double digits or worse? Just buy weekly OTM puts and continue to roll them every week?

I'm rolling all of my 2019 puts into June 2020 and taking the 50% loss. This is clearly over now, but Elon wants to run it until he can't make payroll, and the board is okay with having a suicide pact with Elon and incurring billions in liability. Looks like the $2xx straight to zero overnight scenario is becoming more and more likely.

My Jan 2020 puts are still massively in the green which is of some comfort. I'm interested in seeing how they survive the year.

Thanks for continuing to talk your book and being open Morish, respect that a lot.

I did start to buy 2020 200s when adding on here, price is pretty close and the LTCG rate adds a lot of value. I have always forecast demand as below bear consensus and think that pattern is going to remain. Nobody wants a 37.5k rental car stripper (cloth manual seats), the base M3 then as a demand generator is almost non-existent. S/X even with huge price cuts will continue to fall, you can't simultaneously lease a status car while the *exact same* model is on the lot at East Bay Imports for 32k. All this without competition, which will gut them so badly by fall the S/X as dead platforms will be the standard narrative.

Math on the cash points:

Bricked selling 10k cars for Q1 EOQ, pretty clear they thought these would move given the discounts/threats/etc. That is 500-700m missing.

920m, they paid this, rumored internal debate if they even should have.

S/X margin shortfall, they sold 10k of these in Q1, could be a 200m hit here.

180m SC payment coming up.

Reports are 80k+ deposits refunded in Q1, that is another 80m.


Ability to raise is really my weakest area of understanding. At this point with most of the cash going straight out the door to suppliers, big sales miss, and the SP within 30% of carnage it seems like it just can't happen. If my model here is correct it is down to a white-knight vs cash death by somewhere in Q3.

What do you have for Q1 unrestricted cash and net change in working capital?

No idea personally, here is the best info I have:

This is a pretty good cash analysis:

https://www.perseid-capital.com/blog...burn-analysis/

Thanks. It’s an interesting approach, but I think it’s way off in a lot of places. Just from a back of envelope sanity check perspective, it’s basically impossible for cash to be that low end of Q1 based on how much of their rev they received in March and what it would imply about the March 1 cash balance. I’d be very surprised if they report less than 2 billion, and 2.5 isn’t crazy.

The graph says opening balance of 2.2 billion but Q4 ended with:
What am I missing? I'm no accoutant.

edit: Ahh, unrestricted cash looking at that link from protonewb sourcing the graph. That's a little disingenuous I think of the analyst. Restricted cash is still cash and things can be renegotiated.

Meanwhile, this story gets better and better:

A movie is a certainty once this all implodes.

They ended Q4 w 3.7 billion in unrestricted cash. He is adjusting for a number of things he feels overstate the “true” cash balance.

Yea, he took the customer deposits out of unrestricted when I think it is clear Elon is prepared to burn those down to 0 if needed (interview with Kimbal goes over a past time he dipped into customer deposits). Also includes a window dressing adjustment, which is anyone's guess.

Fight story sounds like Liam O'connor. I think at the time the #2 at logistics (or one of his top lieutenants) also quit, which caused some murmurs that something beyond usual TSLA disaster might have been the cause.

This is a situation where removing restricted cash from cash balance makes a lot of sense actually

Not customer deposits though, zero chance they don’t. Run through those before filing

Removing restricted cash is fine, but the other adjustments are not imo. Cust deposits clearly should not be removed, and the “window dressing” adjustment is a guess and introduces possible double counting errors (for instance adjusting for stretched AP and then having them repay the full AP in the model).

what strikes for June 2020? 100?

Elon Musk pumping autopilot like crazy right now coming into the 22nd autopilot event. He's such a great conman - a casual glance at this makes you think amazing things are happening:



When in actuality it's merely finally doing a somewhat better job of what it always should have and has promised it could do for 4+ years - highway on ramp to highway off ramp.

It's also being dishonestly pumped by superfans/referrers:



A casual glance makes it look like it's navigating well on city streets. But if you look closely he intervenes many many times in this video and if you read it carefully, claims only " Except for increasing my speed once, zero interventions [highway] exit to exit. Unreal."

All that's happened is that lane changes no longer need active confirmation, which was a safety feature. This is a brilliantly pumped nothing burger on autonomous driving leading up the April 22nd big reveal. I actually think it'll be effective and get some excited money in. Only a careful read/look shows that Tesla still has nothing but lane keeping, lane changing, and traffic following on highways, still while slamming at full speed into stationary objects.

Meanwhile, back in reality, this is the actual update from the Tesla blog:

That's all that's changed. Hats off to Elon, this is one of the greatest pumps he's done yet. He even has many excited users talking about the "neural net" starting to work and be turned on. It's comical how stupid these people are. I'm almost starting to like Musk for the skill with which he pulls off these cons and misleading pumps.

I'm mostly repeating myself here but bankruptcy plays with naked puts or short stock just seems like bad strat to me. If it eventually goes bust most of the shorts still on board will be crawling across the finish line with a fraction of the profit they were dreaming of a year or two ago. getting in after a 10% overnight down move isn't good strat either. You were either short before the news or you need to find a better spot. TSLA has traded sideways for years with high vol. Selling vol printed money. Sell the rallies, sell puts on sell offs, and sell vol consistently.

In January bought a sept 19 320 put for $63. Sold a front month put against it and rolled out to a may 245 put to collect another $20 on march 25th. The cost of the sep put is now about $30. If I keep rolling out and up if TSLA rallies, I will still be able to b/e with a large profit potential to the downside still. As this drags on the people naked short are having their profits deteriorate. I'm using 11k in buying power with my TSLA positions and up 7k through the first quarter. If tesla goes bust in a year from now I suspect my ROC will still be higher than many of the bears that have been short for the last couple years even if they're right

I'm not saying people should reverse course now or whatever but I think it's important to distinguish the importance of having a solid strat to implement with your opinion of the stock. Puts aren't priced as if you're shorting sbux

Cant believe they build these cars without some sort of mechanical way to open the doors if there are electrical or software issues.

If short term stock price is your goal, it's probably the rational thing for them to do, ignoring edge case issues and features and taking a bunch of cost saving shortcuts. Their processes are horribly incompetent and their timelines need to fit stock pumps, and they can't come anywhere near the majors on cost, so they take shortcuts on:

- Safety and long term progress to get out a pumpable "more advanced" version of autopilot - which is actually a decade behind mature level 4 code that other automakers have- into the hands of consumers, to pretend they're leading on autonomy, which is a huge pump.
- Normal amenities like a dashboard - everything gets put on an iPad on a bare dash
- Normal backup systems like non-software control of doors, overrides.
- Normal product life cycles and design (which reduces cost and errors and brand destruction from ****ty vehicles)
- Normal beta testing

It works in the short term (with a ****show for workers and consumers) and it keeps the stock pumped. But it's a losing long term strategy. And not even necessary if they had non-cuck leadership. Had the Model 3 been properly designed by people who know how to build cars - they already had a fantastic base with the battery + drivetrains, and the ability to raise capital, they just had to build the top competently! - things would have gone a lot better for them.

Companies that have toxic cultures tend to die and the toxicity of this one comes from the top.

Source on this? (Not disagreeing, the google car looks way more advanced)

Well, there is the Navigant research group yearly ranking of autonomous driving projects, which puts Tesla last behind everyone:



Tesla have a dumb unworkable system (for more than level 2) that's executed poorly.

Then there are the real world results...Tesla cannot even reliably avoid objects on highways, or deal with unclear lane marking, or deal with lens flares, or behave properly around other objects ("truck lust" as Tesla owners put it), and highway driving has been fully solved for 10 years.

Meanwhile, entire fully autonomous taxi fleets in city/suburb traffic are live in several US cities and have been online for employees (i.e. GM) for over 6 months already. Nissan has had a fleet of full autonomy cars driving around Tokyo for years. GM Cruise and Google have similar systems running at full autonomy with completely verifiable disengagement data - they're down to once per 3000 miles (and rapidly dropping) in all traffic conditions. Tesla is once per few miles in favorable non-highway traffic conditions.

It's obvious that Tesla are many years behind. They have no path to level 3/4, and no money to research it. They're basically stone dead in autonomous driving, stuck augmenting and supporting a broken level 2 system with insufficient hardware to ever go to level 4, no viable software base for that can reliably proceed past level 2, and insufficient funds.

I don't consider any of this controversial, this is obvious if you're not a loser.

If this was Trump, you'd be toughting him as a "genius" lol.