I actually think there is some intrigue to the comparison, both companies (TSLA/UBER) have existed almost entirely during a bull market using the credit/debt markets at their disposal while losing a ton of money. Both have serious questions about future growth and profitability and the path from those on the bearish side seems incredibly steep. Uber supposedly did the grown up thing forcing Kalanick out and Tesla hasn't or doesn't want to with Musk. Will be interesting to see if any correlations develop between the stocks.

I’ve done no research on Uber but network effect is a real thing and makes me think Uber survives, Tesla s best asset is brand and they are destroying that quickly

You are vastly overestimating damages to the brand for their customers.
If you ask random people about teslas the perception is nowhere close to what is described here.
If you go on social media unless you are looking specifically for negatives you ll see much more positives posts and video by far and once you start looking at that kind of stuff you ll get spammed by "how much money your Tesla is saving you " bogus videos and how cool the autopilot is.
This thread is great to counterbalance ultra bullish narrative but most people itt are way too polarized in their views.

Or maybe we're simply informed.

The two premier yearly surveys of US and Norwegian brand opinion from 2018 to 2019 show:

- Tesla went from 3rd to 40th in the US
- Tesla went from 4th to 51st in Norway (dead last among auto makers)

All in one year. I consider these surveys more reliable than anything else. Am I wrong to do so? They have no bias and they test a broad swathe of the population.

Other supporting data points:

- Tesla sales have died, including S/X which have been stable for years, they are more than halved despite massive price cuts
- Model Y had close to zero reservations after 400K reservations for the Model 3 - even though the addressable market for the Y is 3x larger.

This is brand destruction on a grand scale. How else do you explain it?

How do we explain it? Simple: stock pric...uhh, nevermind.

so, when do these margin calls on the musks's that i've heard about kick in?

How big of an impact would you expect?

The best analysis I saw was $136, the real unknown is if he can still pledge shares at 25%, no one knows that answer I don’t think

Panasonic says Model Y production will cause a battery shortage:
https://electrek.co/2019/05/13/tesla...age-panasonic/

I keep seeing Tesla being referred to as a car company. Is that true? Is it not also a software company? And a Solar company? And a battery manufacturer?

Seems like the only evidence used in the thread (by the bears and the bulls) is focused solely on the car output.


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it's none of that, that's the old tesla.
it's an autonomous taxi network provider since about 10 days ago.

Considering nearly all of their revenue comes from cars, yes.
If it's a software company then it's a vaporware/fraud company. What software do they sell apart from "Fully Self Driving"?
SolarCity is a large liability. They all but shut it down recently. Installs are in steep decline and they fired all sales and moved it online while giving huge discounts.
No, Panasonic owns and makes the batteries.
No, solar and battery has been discussed extensively by the bulls and called "total bull****" by the bears. The bulls have since shut up since they've looked like total idiots on this topic. For example, here is heltok quoting someone else's 2017 projections:

How entertaining is this? Have a read through that and you begin to understand why Tesla bought up so much on Musk's fraud. Apparently Tesla are making $7 billion profit this year and are worth $736 per share. Including 500K Model 3s (lol), $10 billion revenue from Tesla energy (lol), $10 billion revenue from fictional solar roofs (LOL!). Musk mind ****ed these guys like a champion with his frauds and lies.

Musk has basically mind-cucked people like heltok. Seriously, click heltok's post link and go back and read the comments around this time about battery, solar, autonomous driving from Cuban, heltok, Spurious. They mention batteries and solar and soon-to-come full autonomy frequently. With the benefit of three years hindsight, we can see that Musk basically mind-cucked them by promising pure bull****:
The reason they don't mention these things now is because these things are dead, and Musk's new carrot-painted turd in front of the donkey is "1 million autonomous robotaxis in 2020" which these credulous cucks still believe could happen although it is completely impossible in any way.

I like that Heltok has Tesla network at zero, so even the biggest bulls think it’s a joke

I'm going on record: I am buying as much as I can stomach of TSLA (low 6 fig). Though I admit in the short term it could crash well below what it is now (hell, even 0 is possible), and obviously Elon is gonna say whatever he can say to get capital in, I still think its one of the best value plays over the next few years.

First, I think Elon is far ahead on the AI front, and no one else is that close. This is a hard topic to unpack but yes, I'm saying this knowing about the recent accidents. (Also, an if/then model is not the way to go at all.) Also, other self driving demos currently out there are incredibly weak/unimpressive in my view. I think if someone else gets ahead, it will be Google or another primarily tech/AI company, which is then licensing their technology to a car company.

If you are the clear winner in AI (only entity offering FSD that passes regulations) then you pick up all the automated trucking/taxi stuff, plus the cars have more value to consumers [at least, you get all the value of this you can soak until everyone catches up]. This is an enormous value and only requires you to be the outright winner a small % of the time.

There are many bad scenarios and I am skipping over most of my reasoning, but this is the crux of the reason I am betting on TSLA - I expect them to be a 'clear winner' a decent % of the time. The reason I say stomach is because TSLA has a lot of reasons to stay out (many of which already mentioned here), however I do believe it is a very high EV bet if you hold over a period of years.

Damn, I really liked you. This is the first totally obviously stupid and wrong thing you've said. I'm curious as to your reasons for this statement for which there is zero evidence and powerful diverse evidence against.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is why Musk commits fraud with knowingly false "10,000/week M3s by 2018" and "FSD by 2016" and "Solar roofs" and "machine that builds the machine air friction limited robots you need strobe to see" and "2020 robotaxis" which have absolutely zero chance of happening. Zero. Because cucks out of their wheelhouse get fooled by moonshot thesis proposed by a conman. The real "decent% of the time" is Musk spewing pure bull**** and catching "even a small percentage of minds" - yours being the one caught this time.

Ironically your play might turn out ok in the short term because Tesla is on deep lows and retail fish are still piling on their latest moonshot fraud (previous ones detailed above). There is also a very high short interest now which has the potential to fuel a buyup off lows. On a longer timeframe however it is very stupid and your thesis has zero chance of coming true.

This is you:

Knowing nothing else about the companies and assuming all else is equal which will be the "clear winner in AI."

Company A:
-Internet/tech focused company with multiple massively successful products
-Existed for over 20 years
-Generated $136 billion in revenues in 2018 (over $30 billion in earnings)
-Spent over $20 billion on R&D in 2018
-Over $75 billion in cash
-Over 10 years working on self driving
-Promote culture of shooting for the moon and failing

Company B:
-Car manufacturer that also dabbles in solar, energy, and software
-Existed for 15 years and never made an annual profit
-Generated $21 billion in revenues in 2018 (lost over a billion)
-Stuck with three factories that are under capacity and commitments to build a new factory in China and all kinds of other cap ex needs
-Over $10 billion in debt and somewhere between $2-$4 billion in cash
-Spent less than $1.5 billion on R&D in 2018- and falling ($340 million Q119)
-Started working on self-driving only 5 years ago and may have had to start completely over in 2016 when split with partner MobilEye
-Culture of nobody can question the CEO or you are fired

Yeah but have you driven Company B's EV? Also, stock price bro.

and company B has a name-recognizable search engine

It just blows my mind that anyone can think Tesla is anything but dead last in autonomous driving. Apart from mountains of hard evidence against them, their strategy is literally to send camera feeds to a simplistic machine learning model and hope and pray that it will solve all problems including complex driving decisions. That is some crazy ****.

The sane way to develop this is:

- Machine learn object recognition such as lights, pedestrians, etc
- Map 3D space and predict movement reliably with multiple layers of safety built in (NOT machine learned). This is quite easy with Lidar and near impossible with vision without a trained human level intelligence analyzing the feed.
- Code around difficult spots like needing aggressive driving with lane blocking using if/then logic. For example, if your lane is blocked by a single car double parked:

1. Look ahead to see if it's a car lineup (say at a light or stop sign) or a single local blocker
2. Determine if there's free space to move around and no oncoming traffic or pedestrians
3. Wait a few seconds to see if the situation resolves
4. If not and all clear, attempt a move around into the wrong lane.
5. If the car unexpectedly moves as you're overtaking, slow down and move back in behind it

You can't machine learn this ****. This MUST hard coded until we have human level AI. Yet their strategy is just to throw machine learning at everything, proving they're insane and are nowhere in their development because they haven't figured this out yet as smarter more experienced people have by banging their head against the wall on this.

Multiple this by thousands of scenarios you can't machine learn that Google/GM Cruise have already solved for or that LIDAR can solve (which vision can't until we have near full AI that can contextualize and think ahead) or that precise maps can solve. There's a reason the smartest computer programmers in the business by far (Google) are using Lidar and not machine learning it all.

And this is all coming from a strong believer that most human talents will be more simply and quickly machine learned than most believe.

"-Car manufacturer that also dabbles in solar, energy, and software and hardware"

they're also designing the chips themselves, remember? the claim is pretty much they build better cars than the best car companies, better chips than the best chip companies, better software than the best software companies, all while spending a tiny fraction of what those other companies spend

your post is a nice high level comparison and yeah i subscribe to the high level argument 100%. i feel like a lot of the tesla bulls who really believe that tesla has superior software think of themselves as smart engineering-types who have learned the very basics of machine learning and think they understand it much better than everyone else. their argument almost always boils down to "i don't think u understand, the neural net will LEARN"

Another way of looking at this:

Alex Wice is saying that the guy was so completely incompetent he thought he could robotize his entire factory at incredible speeds [something that anyone in the industry knew to be impossible with current robotic vision], then ended up building cars by hand in a 1980s style line in a tent when that schoolboy stupidity failed, is going to solve autonomous driving with machine learning before Google or GM Cruise or nVidia or Intel, who are already running autonomous taxi fleets in multiple cities? The same guy who's missed every deadline and committed securities fraud. Who also has near zero spare R&D funds and whose car sales have tanked after he destroyed his brand because he lacked the competence to organize proper servicing and parts.

Who wakes up in the morning and comes to the idea that there's a greater than zero chance, let alone a decent enough chance to bet on, that this guy might win the autonomous driving race? It's weird.

Once in I while I drop by here to check the bear case. It feels like it’s a lot the same as when I left last time, same old ”cucks” ”insane” ”drawing dead” etc.

Just to clarify a little since a few posts here were about me...

The numbers quoted were not mine, I quoted some else. Someone asked for numbers of a bull case, I gave an example of a bull case, hoping that this would provide value to the person asking. Not specifically to argue their merit, maybe to argue the existance of them and to see if something useful would come from discussing them.

Usually people split their cases into:
Bear case: a lot goes wrong for the company
Base case: what they think is likely
Bull case: a lot goes right for the company

Then they assign some kind of value and probablity of those and the expected value will lie somewhere between the bear and the bull case.

That the bull case didn’t happen was to be expected, if it did the bulls where not bullish enough. I don’t expect my bull cases to happen either, but I am some degree of disappointed if my base case doesn’t happen.

———

Imo read the first few pages of this thread and see how much more civilized the debate here used to be. There was still disagreement but posters focused on arguments rather than posters and there were a lot fewer loaded negative posts.

See you guys in a few years maybe! Let’s rail the stock and the company and see what happens and then we can see who was less wrong.

Yes and I said that. The interesting thing to me is not someone else's bull case you quoted, but your comments on autonomous driving at the same time, given that:

- You claim to work in the field and thus are an expert on autonomous driving
- You were DEAD WRONG about the state of Tesla's autonomous driving development (against a layman who knows nothing of the field who calls people 'cucks' no less) even after the evidence was laid out for you in compelling detail

I'm curious how you got it so incredibly wrong in your subject matter expertise. Did Musk **** your mind up? Are you incapable of evaluating evidence (there was reams of it that exactly the outcome/failure we see today would happen)? Both?

I'm leaning toward the latter given that you thought $420 "funding secured" was real also, when anyone remotely reasonable and rational - let alone being given extensive evidence in this thread of Musk's lies and fraud prior - would have put the odds at >50% that it was fraud.

Neither of these are stock prediction or anything else uncertain. This is basic evaluation of hard evidence with a clear correct answer for the first and clear minimum probabilities for the second.

If anything I would argue opposite of Google being a competent tech company outside of advertising. Ads account for >80% of revenue and >90% of earnings last I looked.

If you're 20 billion R&D budget is correct that's even more of an indictment. What does Google have to show (profit) for all their billions spent on 'other bets'?

And before anyone rushes to say Android, Waymo, etc....show me the money!

We saw how their Motorola acquisition went.....like a 10 billion dollar write down on a 13 billion dollar investment in two years. Doesn't inspire confidence in Google/Alphabet's ability to allocate capital.

Further, if they are a tech giant with legions of top shelf engineering talent why are they sitting on 75 billion dollars in cash? Are there no technologies left to be discovered?

What's cash paying these days? It's probably a negative real return....So Google, tech giant, would rather their capital slowly erode away than invest in emerging technologies....I think that says they don't know how/what to invest in.

Contrast that with say Amazon. How much cash does Bezos hold?

While I think the evidence points to Waymo being 'further' ahead of Tesla in the SDC space I think paradoxically you have a much, much better shot of Tesla/Elon coming out with the next big thing than Google despite all of the Borg's so called advantages.

Yes it seems contradictory....I think TS is basically right about Tesla; but, Elon has shown that he is not afraid to take bold paradigm changing bets and he has a track record of being successful with them.

My personal lay opinion is Elon has bitten off more than he can chew and I think it's more likely than not that Tesla ends up bankrupt or something like that and Musk's vaunted track record is about to get a big fat goose egg.

Moreover, Tesla is bust (or at least nearly dead) without some sort of moonshot like SDC imo. Musk has clearly demonstrated he can't profitably run an automobile manufacturer.

The point is not to get into analysing the businesses' specific advantages and disadvantages but just to take a bird's eye view. From which we realize that Google and Tesla aren't playing in the same league let alone the same ballpark.

If you want to get into actually analysing each company's specific strengths and weaknesses we can go over how Elon's "vaunted track record" is media hype driven BS and the only thing he has been successful at is raising money. Then we can look at the talent drain and insider sales and see that Tesla is rotting from the head.

You do have a point though that Elon is more likely to release a product that isn't safe since he needs to hit the moonshot to survive. How will that work out for Tesla in the long run?