Are you arguing with my stance or supporting it? The reason that it was unnecessarily complex was due to the fact that they ****ed up. Mislabeling boxes is not a reason why you need to outsource.

The thing is, he has been absolutely brilliant on trade entry and completely wrong on the business. Short-term he will make money, long-term he will cost you a ****load.

Same has been said about Amazon. Your comparison was made between Apple and Nokia/Blackberry.


It is flabbergasting that people are so convinced that Tesla is **** when literally nothing points in that direction.

How is Tesla going to match Amazon's moat?

Apple is an unreal success story but they have been trading +/- 20% of the S&P multiple for years

Autonomous driving as well as the vertically integrated supply chain will be the moat. The competition is already years behind. They don't collect the data that Tesla is collecting with a small fleet today. Once the Model 3 hits the market and they deliver a few hundred thousand cars a year, Tesla will have data points on every street on the planet while other car manufacturers are busy getting their sensors properly adjusted.

Also, multiples and all this BS is not what makes a company successful, fail or innovative. It's the actual business behind it.

To me the interesting thing about investing in Tesla is that it is not clear to me that the goals of the company and the goals of the shareholders are aligned. Clearly the shareholders hope the company makes tons of money and they get paid. But if you believe Musk's statements, his primary goal is "Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy"

This might make some more sense of Musk's moves. Instead of trying to make more profits, he spends more and more money and raises more and more funds to build superchargers, build a huge battery factory, invest in battery technology, put out a bunch of self driving cars and collect data, etc. I think it is possible that Tesla will do well for 5-10 years but after that they will get swallowed up by the competition when battery companies start to mass produce great car batteries and other big car companies mass produce great electric cars.

If that happens, and 10 years from now there are many great electric cars and trucks, and strong infrastructure for charging, electric cars would take off. But Tesla might gradually lose market share and eventually go bankrupt. And I think Musk would be OK with that and count it as a success. Obviously the shareholders would be a little less excited.
I would be very hesitant to go long on Tesla for the long term because I'm not sure Tesla's goal is to make a lot of money in the long term.

If you listen to his SpaceX talk he says the only reason he works so hard on accumulating cash is to afford colonizing Mars. A mission statement is seldom about making the shareholders rich but more to sell a nice story to customers. A list of examples...

Wow, that is a big list! I agree with your point that most mission statements are meaningless BS.

In the case of Tesla, I actually believe that Musk would be satisfied if 15 years from now his company went bankrupt but had catalyzed the change to electric cars and clean energy production. I am basing this more on interviews and videos I have seen of him speaking, and not really just on the mission statement.

I don't believe for a second that, for example, adidas would be happy if passion in sports increased but it led to them going bankrupt.

Impossible to know Musk's true motives, but I think the long investor at least has to consider the possibility that Musk isn't trying to build a car company that will become a dominant market player. He may be trying to build a car company that will get all the other companies to make electric cars, and somehow get electric car infrastructure built. Even if he knows there is a high risk that his own company will eventually fail.

On the whole idea of him catalyzing the adoption of electric cars, there are only really two options here:

- Musk is a total dickhead when it comes to big-picture thinking (I'd give this a 40% chance or so given some of his idiotic statements)
- Musk is charlatan.

I'll explain.
Here's the thing that his fanboys don't get it. It's incredibly simple but they are so stupid they cannot process this concept, which is this:

Nothing Musk does is going to make any meaningful difference to the timing or rate of mass adoption of electric cars.

That statement is a fact. Given that, he's one of the two options above. I truly don't know which. He makes enough idiotic statements that the first is fairly likely.

I see Musk as a lot like Trump - not a very bright guy in many ways, but a solid businessman, a very talented rent-seeker, a genius self promoter, and good at putting talent to work.

Apparently we have a different idea of what constitutes a fact. The only way the italicized statement could be a fact is if we let the next 15 years play out with Tesla existing, then rewound time, then replayed the next 15 years removing Tesla. Then compared how quickly electric cars were adopted.

Maybe it isn't Musk, but someone else in this conversation that is similar to Trump?

Oh no, another Musk fanboy.

Of course it's a fact. Unless you want to get philosophical and say that the statement "the sun will rise in the east in 15 years" is not a fact, in which case I'll grant you that.

Here's why it's a fact:

- Mass adoption of electric requires the average case car (<$30,000, far far lower if you include the world) to be at least the same price to produce as an ICE car. It in fact requires an even lower price, but that's another issue.

- The cost ultimately depends on battery chemistry. Electric motors are commodities. The rest of the car costs what it costs. Thus the only important component for mass adoption is battery energy density - something that has nothing to do with Musk. The first production electric car was built over 130 years ago. They never took off because the battery chemistry available meant they couldn't compete with ICE.

- Battery chemistry again has nothing do with Musk. Tens of billions flow into research in this area, because of the enormous potential profits for breakthroughs. Battery chemistry will be decided by smart quiet people working in labs, not your boisterous, self-promoting, fake greenie nerd-Trump.

Nothing Musk is doing is going to change mass adoption of electric cars. It was a certainty once the price/range (purely flowing from battery energy density) is sufficient to drop below ICE.

You can claim things like charging networks will help, but Musk's supercharger network is a rounding error for the big car makers. It's kind of a clown show as well, and not something people would use. This is the kind of thing that will help, however - open standards rather than Musk's system, and far faster than Musk's system:

http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/11/...ork-in-europe/

How the behavior of consumers will change in the future can be estimated, but it cannot be a fact. There is quite a big difference in predicting when people will choose to buy electric cars and predicting whether the sun will rise.

You make it sound like there is some magic line in battery efficiency where electric cars go from being drastically worse than ICE, to drastically better.

My opinion is that there is a large range of battery efficiency where it is a grey area. Where electric cars could be more popular with the right taxes and government policies, investment, promotion, production, infrastructure and incentives. Or they could be much less popular than ICE with all those things being different but batteries staying the same. I think the current state of battery efficiency is in that grey area.

If cannot agree on what is fact vs opinion, and you state that your opinions are facts, then it is not possible for us to have a discussion about this topic. Have a good day.

You don't get it.

Do you have any idea how much money is spent on cars every year? How many cars are made? It's a two trillion dollar industry making 100 million cars/year.



Musk's contribution in five years time if everything goes to plan is going to be a tiny chunk of the yearly output. Right now it's well below subpixel.

Are you beginning to get it?

As far as the environment is concerned, many tens of millions cars a year will need to be replaced every year for many years to make any kind of meaningful difference. We basically need a full switch. Most consumer choices in the mainstream will be on price and purely on price - that's because most of the world is poor and a car is their major asset. People switching en masse just isn't going to happen until many of the majors are in the game and battery cars are pricing below ICE cars, no matter what Musk does, and the majors aren't getting in on a mass scale until the battery chemistry equation makes the pricing in the sub 30K tier (and much lower tiers elsewhere) viable.

Musk could be world's greatest supergenius with pure sunshine coming out his ass (as most of you seem to think) and he wouldn't make a lick of difference to the environment doing what he's doing. Or make a meaningful difference to the time at which mass adoption happens.

You've got a critical point before mass adoption happens, which depends on basic laws of cost, which depends (for electric cars) on battery energy density - which doesn't depend on Musk.

So he's a charlatan or an idiot - posturing but not achieving (in fact, what he's done so far constitutes massive waste and environmental damage). I'm being generous and putting decent odds on the "idiot" column.

You do a clever job mixing facts and opinions and vague terms to make it seem like your predictions for the future are facts. I don't believe the future is quite so predictable.

It is not possible to have a discussion when you present opinions and predictions as facts.

Of course it's predictable.

"Cars priced at $50K will not make up the majority of the car market in the next 10 years" is a fact. It is not an opinion.

"Battery cars will not take global mass market majority share in the next 10 years unless they are comparably priced or cheaper than ICE" is also a fact.

Yeah, I'd be retreating into this narrow logically sound but nonsense foxhole as well if I was getting owned so badly.

TS,

I honestly believe MBAs are the biggest waste of money but I think you might be amongst the 3 people on this planet that would benefit.

This is comically wrong. You sure see how this is absolutely idiotic.

On which planet do you live where a car is everyone's major asset?


Both of those statements are so fundamentally wrong.

To help you out:
- No, price is not the deciding factor otherwise Tata or Fiat or whatever company that sells cars below $10'000 would make a killing. It is - and always will be - decided by value for money, i.e. how much utility do I get out of every dollar spend.

- Most poor people will never own a car and as a matter of fact (the only non-alternative true presented here), most of the people today don't own a car. In a world where you have a car manufacturer that builds semi-autonomous cars with features that are head and shoulders above the market standard, the price people are willing to pay for the car is going to go up. Maybe not on an individual level but the second you'll be able to rent an autonomous Tesla whenever you want, no one will care that is costs more than $30'000.

Also, politics matter. No one cares about oil anymore, not even Saudi Arabia wants to plan for a future where they depend solely on oil. If electricity from Solar is getting cheaper and cheaper (as the current trend suggests), people will want to own an electric car.

See, I'm going to show you my playbook. What I'm doing here is classic Henry17. It's also how Trump got elected. Make an "essentially" true, non-obvious statement of fact. The idiots and literalists come and nitpick the fact that your statement isn't literally true ("purely" makes the statement nit-picking false), but its meaning is correct.

The idiots come in and nitpick and overreach badly and show their hand

The peanut gallery sides with the guy who's mostly calm and correct over the literalist nitpickers.

You have to be correct and understand non-obvious things to get away with this. But when you have those talents, it's hilarious.
A new car is an enormous outlay of money. Everyone would own BMWs or similar if money wasn't the single most important factor in their purchasing decisions.

Well obviously noone is buying a $20,000 screw and calling it a car. Your point is trivially true. But money decides car buying decisions, and it's not close. If you're not making a profit on a sub $20K car, it's impossible to convert the majority of car sales to electric.

lol? This isn't even true in America, let alone where most of the cars are sold, and particularly where they will be sold in future with an ascendant (but not yet wealthy) middle class in the second world.

For mass adoption of electric cars, they must be comparable price to ICE on the low end, which means that batteries must be far cheaper than they are now. The end.
Electricity will never be cheaper than what it is now. Solar will increase the price of electricity, averaged over society, not decrease it.

You don't understand that most people don't own a car. So it's impossible to be the major asset if they don't have it on their balance sheet.

You don't have a playbook. You make incorrect statements and backtrack whenever you are wrong. Whenever I discussed something with you, it turned out that you were wrong and you have a very bad understanding of larger context. You think everything can be boiled down to the greeks.

https://qz.com/871907/2016-was-the-y...wait-for-2017/

Energy will be more and more accessible with decentralized techniques. Most of the world will never live close to an oil pipeline so ICEs are not even an option.
Plus, countries will just outlaw ICEs, it's as simple as that. Most emerging countries are not married to either a car manufacturer or the oil & gas industry. The economics will decide and given that it's way more economical (even today !) to upkeep an electric car, most people in the future will choose to get one as well.

How does context always go right over people's head?

We're talking about people buying new cars, and how much they're willing to pay for them, and how much cost factors in. We're talking about that in the context of batteries needing to be cheaper than ICE for mass adoption.

You come back with:
....?

What? I ignore the greeks in most of my trading.

More accessible, sure. Cheaper? No, and it's not close. The only reason panels seem cheaper is because of subsidies and the relatively small amount of panel-produced electricity in the system. People with solar receive externalities from the grid, paid for by people without solar. They're a net cost burden.
None of those people matter as car buyers. You think people without access to gas stations have electric charging units? I really don't get your point here.
Why would they outlaw ICEs in the next 10 years (the time it will take for battery cars to be cheaper than ICE and hence mass adopted without Musk or the government)? Cars are a small fraction of the CO2 output in the world.
The bold is exactly what I'm saying!!!
Total cost of ownership of BEVs relative to usefulness/features isn't less, yet. Only greenies claim it is. It will be at some point, however.

https://electrek.co/2017/01/24/tesla...ays-elon-musk/
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/824010489449431040

This is great. Let's see if the Musk fanboys think he's a charlatan and a liar as well.

How much money do you guys want to bet that he will have a "fully self-driving" car in 6 months?

he did promise that autopilot would be able to go from cali -> new york before the year ends.

in 15 years someone will be able to write an interesting book about how retail investors get scammed out of their money by story stocks just from the contents of this thread.
calling it now.

Just read the article that heltok linked. Looks like he's doing his Musk Charlatan Act once again:

1. Make a mistake (like decapitating your customer because your autopilot was so ****ty it couldn't notice a massive truck across the highway, and didn't even stop as the driver was decapitated and it went off the road and started plowing through fields at high speed) or miss a deadline

2. Promise something even grander in the future with huge sounding words that's Grand and Exciting (make sure you Capitalize It so that you can't be held liable)

3. When you miss that deadline/**** up yet again, return to step 1 and do it all over again

Meanwhile, in the real world:

Ahahaha. So when he decapitated that poor customer with his incompetence and negligence, he shut down "autopilot" in new cars in a panic, promising it would be back onlline in December. And now we have:
Ahahaha
So they're still ironing out the decapitation-bugs in the first generation. Oh and attempting to finally successfully avoid/take off ramps rather than fail at both those simple tasks:
They're almost navigating highway off-ramps, guys! These guys are years ahead of the competition, according to the self-driving brains trust in this thread.

So why all this bull**** about ‘Full Self-Driving Capability’ from Musk? Because he can sell it. For money. You pay less if you unlock it now. An ability that will "first become noticable" "sometime in 2017".
Meanwhile, cucks just read the "Full Self Driving in 3 to 6 months" headline and buy more Tesla stock...

C'mon. Some of you possess some brains. You're being Madoffed by nerd-Trump.

TS, dont be so dramatic.

That dude died because he was a moron that was using AP on a highway that has intersections without lights. I mean, coudl you be a bigger dumbass to use AP on rural highways that have intersections?

just to give some numbers on how important the sub 30k$ market is and where tesla stands:
just read excerpts of a report on electric mobility. biggest market for pure electric vehicles in 2016 was china with about 407.000 vehicles sold.
teslas own forecast for 2016 in china was 5000.