"R&D" is accounted for differently in car companies. It's part of the cost of doing business as a carmarker.

Here's Volkswagen's R&D while pulling in $13 billion in profit/year:



$13 billion profit while spending $14 billion in R&D last year. Oh and it has a lower market cap than Tesla.

Was looking at VW figures when you posted this. Their R&D ratio is similar to Tesla's (comparing 2019 to 2018), but they have punted R&D on the wrong things until recently, and are clearly not achieving comparable results to Tesla per R&D dollar spent.

** Musk's response on the 2019 Q4 earnings call re: FSD was disappointing and inappropriate, but it would be a mistake to extrapolate too much from that about state/timeline of Tesla FSD imo.

Just want to highlight my previous post.

No, the main reason is because of the toxicity in this thread.

I went long for a pretty large position. I prefer to play with real money rather than forum status.

I could have taken victory laps at 420, 500, 640 etc. I didn’t because I don’t care to. I came back because earnings was out and I was bored between a layover in Singapore.

Mostly nostalgic reasons. But thanks for reminding me why I left.

I quoted another poster and it was a discussion with a hypothetical scenario of making 5M cars/year. This is the third time in like 3 visits here that posters are saying that my quotes of other peoples theses are my own. Not sure what the value in this is for anyone other than to try to make me look bad. I guess that is how some people roll.

Ok, I am done here for now. This thread keeps getting more and more toxic and less and less productive. I miss this thread from the first 500 posts. See you guys in a year maybe! Good luck with you bets all!

Not naming names but hypothetically if someone were to short TSLA and BTC on 1 Jan 2020 (-50.25%) and (-31%) respectively, would now be a good time for them to:

a) claim they are the ****ing GOAT
b) call out others on their trading record
c) all of the above?

Pretty sure there were some dumbasses in this thread that shorted TSLA.

No, you left after you claimed your victory lap on $420 funding secured fraud (you had no doubt it was real, enough to take a victory) and it turned to be a fraud, and the stock tanked and you slunk away.
So you admit you sold out on the way down? And now you claim to have picked the exact bottom (something which you declined to share with anyone despite now coming back for a narcissistic crow)? Why are you here, exactly? Certainly not to share your insight, of which none is in evidence.
Um those were 2019 projections made in 2017. It's there in black and white. And I'm not trying to make you look bad. You straight up asked above to be called out and learn from your mistakes.
I obliged (showing exactly how past quoted projections were comically wrong on every level, hoping you could learn something) and now you cry foul? Seems that the above was as disingenuous as your claim that you bought at the exact bottom for a large position.

People were too stupid and confirmation biased to let go of excellent highly profitable shorts at $190 or $280 when they were clear let-gos. People are too stupid and confirmation biased to let go of excellent highly profitable longs in an absurd bubble to $650. Peas in a pod as far as that's concerned.

Well, that is just your opinion man. Fact is shorts at all levels up to now have lost money unless they swing traded. Fact is also every single long up till now has made money if they held on.

I'm short again from $642 just in case the tesla fan boys with no stake want to rub it in in a few months

Yeah, swing and a miss.

I did not claim any victory, I said thanks to someone who was congratulating longs to the profit they had made at that certain time and asked to discuss how going private would effect shorts. It didn’t happen fortunately as I would have less money if it did. But yes, I thought they would go private, they didn’t. My prediction was wrong there!

Why are we even discussing that now? I am bringing up the 576MPix camera claim over and over.

FWIW I have sold ~10% of my TSLA shares over the last two years to pay for taxes, that was around $360 level last year. Think I increased my position somewhat around $220 but not a lot.

They were not my projections, I quoted someone on TMC. I just thought the calculations in it could be useful to highlight that IF they made 5M cars making a profit was plausible, which was the question being asked.

I never claimed this. This is so tiring, you are just trying to find something to make me look bad and you are not even good at this. You are a toxic person.

You see cucks, frauds and cracks everywhere. And you were always right. But I doubt that you in 2017 were projecting that in 2020Q1 Tesla would have $6B in the bank, make 10k cars/week while building two new factories in China and in Europe each with 500k+ capacity. You have claimed that demand is dead and the growth story is over almost every quarter, parking lots, boats, SEC, battery fires, CFOs leaving, panel gaps, battery fires, autopilot accidents etc, proved that Tesla was dying. But they are still here and in 2022 when they make 1M cars in a year you will still claim that you were always right.

Ok, now it’s time to get to the airport! See you in a year maybe! =)

These are examples of posts that provide negative value.

The next time you do this, you'll start the incremental banning process.

Posting "stock price bro" and purely insulting others based on emotional history is terrible posting and is not gonna be tolerated.

If you dislike Tooth then put him on ignore and dont respond to his posts, it's that simple. A lot of what he says is him attempting to be purely rational about the situation, and hes done a better job recently of not insulting others than Musk himself.

TSLA is at an all-time high in a ridiculous market in an election year in the most advanced society we've had, and things might just be getting started (or maybe the world is gonna end who tf knows). There is going to be a lot of really interesting thing to come with this stock.

Let's try and avoid posting just for the sake of taking out our emotions at other people.

Tooth calls people ******s, idiots, morons, intellectually bankrupt, frauds, etc etc. He is purely toxic and you don't do a thing about it. He just asserts things and expects everyone to suck it up, that is how he rolls. If you're going to call me out on my (admittedly low content and trolly) posts, you have to put a stop to that guy.

If you are going to hold me accountable I will stop posting trash (which is a reaction to pure trash) and go back to lurking and occasionally make a comment that contains value to the discussion if I feel it won't just be met with "BUT FWAAAAUDDDD", but I am going to report every single insult that guy makes and I expect something to be done about it. You've let him get out of hand, he is not a net benefit to this forum. Do something about it.

The difference is he explains why they are ******s, idiots, morons, intellectually bankrupt, and frauds, and he's correct most of the time. You just provide negative value with literally every single post.

He just asserts he is correct, and then insults people that say he isn't.

Most things I post are based on evidence and sourcing and reasoning, which I provide for free. I want to discuss evidence to come to a more intelligent view of the company. I would like to see bull evidence and sourcing and reasoning so we can have a more robust discussion. But there is none of it. Instead there's irrational emotive low content from bulls at highs and crickets/tumbleweeds at lows.

The bull theses have been comically wrong - Tesla has missed every target and continued losing large sums of money. Musk's projections about things like autonomous driving which the bulls believed were always a dead zero possibility, yet the bulls argued for and bought on them. Their energy and solar roofs business have been a failure/irrelevant to the company despite lofty projections. Model 3 has been a money loser. They've survived because of a confidence game/Musk's celebrity providing a huge flow of money (many billions a year), large government subsidies (including an unxpected 2 billion euro from FCAU) and pure fraud on the part of Musk. And a large number of irrational fans in a bull market willing to bid up the stock helped make the rest possible. Infinite money burning covers all manner of incompetence and unviable businesses. Madoff kept a confidence game going with no product at all for 20+ years.

There have only been two correct bull theses - everything else has been completely wrong.

1. Musk will continue to fail badly, but get endless amounts of money (both loans and equity raises) regardless of performance or mistakes or business viability, because he is an amazing conman who can leverage celebrity to create fake donkey-carrots. I don't believe any bull put this thesis forward, but it was the main viable bull argument.

2. The only thing that can sink the company is deliveries dropping off, all of Musk's company-sinking frauds (at any other company) will not come home to roost until the company goes under when the money dries up - probably next recession. Spurious put forward this view, to his credit.

The (sane) bears have been right about nearly everything. Dismal failure to meet projections, massive continuing losses, autonomous driving being a fraud/joke, demand limited, Musk's deliberate frauds, side businesses like solar roofs a failure/lie, etc. The only things they've been wrong about is the idea that competent competition would come in sooner (by last year). We're still awaiting sexy mainstream EVs, which look like 6 months to a year off (the big ones being Mustang EV and BMW offerings, VW ID range on the low end, Taycan on the high end)



The Jaguar iPace destroyed S&X sales and profitability for Tesla, handily proving the thesis that other car companies could make Tesla superior EVs and cut hard into sales, but no competitor for Model 3 came out in time so they've limped along by cornering first adopters in the cheaper sexy electric car market.

If you disagree with any of the above feel free to say so, but I think it's a pretty reasonable analysis.

I'm not sure you can give all the credit to the iPace. The S and X were mostly just cool toys for the rich and the novelty is now gone. If you buy one today, there's nobody left to impress; literally nobody cares. If you follow relatively new S/X owners on social media it's obvious they're still trying to milk it, but it doesn't impress anyone.

This is why CyberTruck is actually quite brilliant. People just want to show off and attract attention and be "different", and doing that while maintaining the ability to virtue signal and pretend you're doing it for the environment blah blah is a huge winning combo. A plain looking truck wouldn't have done that in the same way. They'll be able to sell the first 100k trucks for a yuge gross profit, just like with the Model 3 release. Then they'll drop prices, and nobody will want to be the douche driving yet another impractical CyberTruck unless they sell it at 90c on the dollar like all other Tesla products.

Model Y (aka Model 3 Extra Tall) is boring af and will bomb (relative to the insane expectations). Competition *is* finally arriving and Tesla's awful exterior design will finally begin to matter.

I think you're thinking about this at the wrong level of analysis.

There is certain market demand for premium electric SUVs. Let's say it's of size D. If there is only one offering, it captures all of D. If there is more than one offering, D is split between the offerings based on desirability. Let's have a look at what happened in Norway for example. Total demand in the premium electric SUV segment in Norway has remained quite steady and strong if you look at total sales of all models which fit this category. But when new compelling competition came in, the X went to **** as the other Models (the ETron and iPace) ate their lunch:



Note that there is a 40K euro overnight price cut in there by Tesla as the competition arrived. It didn't make any difference for more than a few months because the segment is only so large and the non-Tesla offerings were equal or superior to the X.

This isn't like the iPhone where a new product can create its own demand because it's a week of disposable wages. Segment sizes are fairly fixed and once competent competition comes in, it's cutthroat.

Tesla has lived in a monopoly world funded by vast sums of goverment subsidies and investor capital and the willingness to lose $25K/car. The monopoly was created by massive losses funded by secondaries and government subsidies.

When Tesla had a monopoly on the S/X they sold as many as it could make. As soon as sexy competition came, demand dived even with massive price cuts.

Tesla now has a monopoly on the 3 (sexy $40Kish electric sports car). It sold a lot (but not as many as it could make). What happens when sexy competition arrives? It will go exactly the way of the S/X, because the market size is only so large. Similarly for the Y - by the time that reaches volume, very sexy BMW and Mustang offerings in the same price range are out.

I agree 100% on the heavily subsidized markets where you get a much better electric car for the same money, but in the US and similar markets a lot of the potential market for S/X is buying luxury ICE cars. Tesla just isn't that cool anymore, and the iPace doesn't have the same status as Tesla once did, so people would rather buy an $80k+ luxury ICE

Some % of bulls have had ~this thesis imo:
Tesla as a company is a steaming pile of ****. But.
The market is irrationally enamored by the stock.
And it is going hard North.

The Jaguard iPace is selling at cancellation-worthy numbers in the US. Maybe in Euroville it sells better, but Tata Motors isn't going to keep producing it past its first generation if its still in that sales figures range.

"Tesla owners love their cars"

^^ permanently open frunk will be a non-issue when FSD is feature complete

You still believe that people will believe you that you make money on this. Everyone knows you are lying, so just stop it. You have been comically wrong on Tesla and have been owned all the way.

You still don't understand the difference between Tesla and Enron, it's only been like six years.

Those questions are nonsensical. Tesla will have a significant portion of the market in ten years and that's what's going to matter. This 2D thinking will not get you to understand that the current carmakers are a million years behind.

There is no car company in the world that offers a better user experience to occupants than Tesla. Their current ICE cars already suck, especially the software they use. I am not sure where you get your confidence from, but you severely overestimate their software and product design knowledge & skills.

I agree that the Model Y is overhyped.

The I-Pace nonsense is ridiculous at this point. The Model X is still the most selling eletric SUV and there is a bunch of competition out there. Tooth doesn't understand business though and as such will not understand why things happen. The sales for the Model S and X declined primarily because Tesla offered the Model 3.

Lying about what? Considering I absolutely crushed the meticulously evidenced calls for demand death at $300 and the slide to $190, of course. And I was arguing with bears for long/cover short at $190 in this very thread and I've posted literal proof of me screaming at bears to cover/get long when it was a free money long post earnings at $280.

You never posted at $180 that the longs had been "comically wrong on Tesla" and "owned all the way", yet they had been when demand death bit. Why not?
This from the guy who spent multiple posts saying it was a "lie" that Tesla dropped prices 40K euro overnight, even though it was a hard fact easily verified in two seconds by googling. Amazing stuff.

Here's a fact: demand for high end luxury electric SUVs has remained steady (actually grown a little) while Model X sales have dived. Why? The answer cannot be Model 3 (again, demand in this sector has grown!). The only answer is competition.

The numbers is Norway are pretty straightforward. Demand for luxury electric SUVs has stayed steady in that country, yet the Model X dropped like a rock and has stayed depressed ever since the E-Tron and iPace came out. You either have to believe that there's a sudden non-Tesla desire in electric SUV buyers because the 3 came out (a Sprurious-level non sequitur) or you can see what's obvious - sexy competition entering this space crowded out Tesla's inferior offerings.

The E-Tron is actually soaring and eating all of Tesla's lunch. That's how much people think of Teslas once sexy competition arrives:



That is the future. It took longer than I thought for the majors to get there (I guess they don't like losing money on massive subsidies before batteries are cheap enough?) but things like the Mustang electric are pure sex and with a much better build quality. 3/Y will run face first into both sexy same-priced competition ($7500 cheaper with credits!) and sexy enough much cheaper competition this year and next.