Musk is a highly skilled conman/nerd PR guy/cult leader. I've said for years he's nerd Trump. Full credit there.

Meanwhile it looks like my chart is out of date. Navigant put out a 2019 research report on the state of autonomous driving:



Tesla is of course still hopelessly trailing the pack with no strategy and no execution. Bunch of cucks. Won't stop them brilliantly pumping pure fraud though with "Fully Self Driving" "coming by the end of year", autonomous taxi fleets making you money while you sleep, "neural network", hardware 4.5 (10x faster than hardware 3.5!). If they don't already teach the art of the Tesla Fully Self Driving con in marketing school they will one day. It's a spectacular con, although the media made it a lot easier with years of breathless reporting.

Waymo and GM Cruise have pulled further ahead as leaders. Which is to be expected, the leaders tend to pull away at this stage in a tech race like this. Billions are being pumped in; Honda alone committed 2.75 billion mid last year to GM Cruise. Autonomous fleets have been ferrying employees around big cities with no driver as a ride hailing server for over a year now. The end is close - GM's fully autonomous taxi fleet will go online in several cities this year as end-user service for the public like Uber that anyone can use. The future is here. Tesla are dead in this arena and have no hope of catching up or even being in the race really.

So Jaguar resigned? And Google is partnered with GM for autonomous driving? Is Google partnered with anyone else for it?

Google and GM are still competitors and they're both advanced enough it's hard to see them partnering. The dots are just really close

Jaguar has partnered with Google last year and thus both out of and at the forefront of the race: Waymo and Jaguar Land Rover announce long term partnership, beginning with self driving iPace.

I think what will happen in the end is that the industry will coalesce around probably two winners, with stragglers paying large money to get in on partnerships. These 10s of billions of inflowing partnership money will finance the increased cost of building out level 4 autonomy (and centimeter mapping to enable full reliability on this) and also fund the ultra expensive push to level 5. All of the stragglers will give up, finding a partner and paying dearly for access if they didn't get in early, further giving the two winners an untouchable moat. Perhaps another one of two heavily bankrolled alliances (Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi?) will push through far enough to make it worth keeping their own tech.

Tesla, if they still exist in a few years, will have to license Waymo or GM tech to not be killed.

tesla getting a few hundred million from fiat for free?
https://finance.yahoo.com/m/faa70b4c...ain-after.html

It's unclear how much total money that is, but some are saying 500-750m. Sadly, I'm assuming this means the big crash below the trading range is delayed at least a quarter. The uncertainty with the # also means bulls will hold out hope that the number is even higher, since the fine FIAT is avoiding is over 2 bil.

Those numbers seem to be unexpected good news, and I'm far more likely to exit the short in the 250s now. Hopefully it doesn't pop the other way and make life difficult.

That's basically a rose bud sent from god

I can't find anything that explains exactly how the Fiat thing works. How many cars does Tesla need to sell in Europe to make any difference? Is it only on cars in Europe? Does Tesla get paid no matter what? Or do they actually need to sell cars?

Tesla is leasing (not the official term, afaik) part of it's fleet to Fiat so their overall emission levels are at an acceptable level. From what I can tell, Tesla literally does nothing and will make 100s of millions

When I read the news I couldn't believe my eyes. It's about current numbers without any additional sales needed.
Such a stupid loophole

I don't think it's actually any new money for Tesla. From what I understand Fiat is basically just buying GHG credits from Tesla, which Tesla was known to have.

The evidence I see supporting this is the stock didn't make a run today on the news. Though, if we are all misunderstanding then the general investor probably is too.

I haven't seen any mention of it on Reddit. Kinda weird

Tesla isn’t just giving Fiat a gift. Whatever it is, either credits or cars, is allowing fiat to avoid 2b+ in fines. That is worth a lot of money to fiat, a lot more than they are worth to Tesla, so yes it seems it’s millions of free dollars from Tesla’s perspective. Such a deal was mentioned at the end of last year, the only question is how much.

I exited my short at 270.90. Luckily near the lows. My thesis, that the delivery numbers and the market reaction were signs the lows were finally going to give way in the short term, is invalid given this new info. I’ll reenter if I hear something new about the fiat deal or when the SP is significantly higher.

Can’t win em all.

I read this twitter thread about it and I'm not sure how to interpret it but might be worth posting ITT. I think fly4dat is part of $TSLAQ fwiw

Bloomberg breaks news that sales staff across the country were let go last week.

Elon starts tweeting about FSD minutes later.

What CEO of a $50 billion company is supposedly working 12 hour days but is actually monitoring the company's stock price minute by minute in case he needs to pump it?

The Fiat thing is a drop in the bucket.

Tesla was heavily dependent on ZEV credits and GHG credits in US for profitability in the second half of 2018.

Up until now they had no equivalent scheme in the EU. Even if this deal is effective in 2019, which isn't clear since deadline isn't until 2020, it just puts EU on par with US which is necessary for Tesla to continue shipping cars there since they ran through the entire backlog of high ASP M3s in Q1.

Also suspicious that Tesla isn't confirming the deal and trumpeting it from every mountaintop if its been reported accurately.

In Elon's defense, if you have ever had a colossal trade that is moving against you, it really is simply impossible to think about anything else.

That tweet says the only thing clear about the deal is that it is for 2019.
It doesn't affect the long term bear thesis, just the timing IMO. (Although getting such exorbitant amounts every year would help Tesla greatly.)

Agreed it's somewhat weird about Tesla not celebrating it. But after thinking about it, its a way better pump to talk about fully self driving taxis or changing the state of world transportation. Way better than anything Tesla finance related that allows them to have cash for another 6 months and ultimately just reminds people just how horrible their long term finances are.

If the headlines are correct, 500M+ this year, there's no way the stock isn't up huge right now. Despite all the downgrades. Don't see how its a drop in the bucket for a company circling the drain.

That fly guy on twitter was saying cumulative up to $300M across 4 years. Speculates this year is in the tens of millions.

If I'm judging just on stock price action, seems like the fly guy is correct.

Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm doing.

In other news, I've decided to start fading "iamanadultnow". Please start a thread to post your trades.

The Fiat deal is tiny, might be nothing in 2019.

It was signed in February 2019 but no 8k filed by TSLA? So it's not a material event.

Even so, if it was anything significant at all elon would've shouted from the rooftop, even in the middle of his AP/FSD pump. It could be something next year but right now it's minimal impact. They are still bleeding cash.

The MXWL offer being extended again until May (after Q1 earnings) is the bigger news.

So you're saying iamanadult covered when he should have been adding on the fake news story?

"I'm standing behind my thesis: a small ($10-$25M) option fee in Feb and next payments (if any) after delivery in 2020-21-22. Could be $560M, likely max-max $300M, maybe $0."

from flyguy in response to tweet:

"To minimize EU fines for carbon emissions, Fiat will team up, or pool environmentally, with #Tesla, adding roughly $500 million to $TSLA’s free cash flow. $500 million is double the consensus expectation for its free cash flow this year.
"

If it was anything near $500mil, or even $100 mil, Tesla would have to file an 8k for material event. No 8k filed, this deal is a nothingburger.

The MXWL deal is interesting, they keep extending cause not enough shareholders tender their shares. Maybe they think Tesla will up the offer, or maybe they think hitching their wagon to TSLA is a losing bet when compared to their own nearly-bankrupt wagon. Whatever it is, does not look good for TSLA.

MXWL deal keeps getting extended because SEC still hasn't signed off on TSLA's S-4. MXWL was trading at $3 pre-deal, everyone will tender once the S-4 become effective.

Question is, will the SEC find a way to f*ck with TSLA here?