Can you or TS point me to a few other 1B+ investments Tencent has made in other US companies. Should be easy if this kind of backing is so common for them.

You're insane. In 2011, the death rate for late model cars was 28 deaths per million registered vehicle years. Car safety has improved far more since then (for example, it was 98 in 2002 - over 3x more).

Late model cars are extremely safe. Even at the 2011 death rate, to save thousands of lives, Tesla would need sell 10 million cars for four years to save merely 1000 lives, even if drive assist wiped out all driving deaths. They are a decade away from selling that many, by which time self driving will be everywhere (and not from Tesla tech).

There is no scenario where 1000 lives, let alone "1000s" of lives, would be saved by Musk's reckless actions with releasing an AP2 that swerves toward oncoming traffic, accelerates into cars entering their lanes, completely ignores some bends, and all the other crazy stuff it does.

This and heltok's fantasy 2019 projections are the kind nutty fanboi hyperbole that we have to put up with.

There are 8 models in the 2011 database that have zero driver deaths, with sale rates similar to Tesla. We know for a fact that multiple people have died in Tesla vehicles despite similar run rates. Apart from the faulty AP1-caused decapitation, we have a Tesla running of a cliff, a death in China, another one killed by a dump truck, etc. This from a tiny number of cars sold.

And all of this despite Tesla's huge safety advantages (low center of gravity, normal engine area a big crumple zone, emergency braking).

As for autonomous driving, I'd argue that Tesla is in fact killing people by taking autonomous driving talent out of automakers/suppliers like nVidia or MobileEye/research labs/consortiums, and in-housing it. Tesla won't have the run rate to make millions of cars in the next few years, so they are in fact delaying wide autonomous deployment.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tencent#/entity

These are known holdings they had to file for. Even if there are fewer than 10 1B+ I am sure it's more than 10 500m plus. Most likely what's on that page is less than 10% of Tencents investment activity.

If there is something worth talking about with 5% stake in Tesla, we should be talking about why Tencent decided to do 5% instead of 4.9% like other institutional investors that want to avoid repoerting to sec

Something interesting is that the ten cent purchase was just enough to qualify for 5% ownership requiring a13g filing which obviously bumped the price

BUT their avg price was like 217, meaning they bought for awhile on the open market, which in turn makes you wonder what the real plan is now


The 1000s of lives saved is pure insanity too, search for how TSLA autopilot did in independent tests vs Google and gm, they are wasting money even trying to compete

Those seem to be listing total investment "rounds" not the actual amount Tencent invested. And it suggests the scope and scale of Tencent's investment in US based Tesla is pretty unique even for them.


Nothing suggests they are stopping at 5%, in fact it is far more likely that they plan to keep adding more and just tripped the 5% disclosure requirements with participation in the march 17 cap raise. If they plan on adding more than 5%, at some point they will trip the 5% disclosure, right?

This isn't rocket science, Tencent has been accumulating for a while, if you plan on adding more than 5%, at some point you will trip the 5% disclosure requirement. Tencent tripped it during most recent cap raise participation.

Tesla's aggressive approach to pushing forward the top production driver assist system onto the market rather than slowly doing over the next 10 years the way big auto would have, is forcing big auto to go faster as well. This more aggressive driver assist approach lead by Elon/Tesla will over the next 5-10 years easily save 1000s of lives. Aside from that you seem to be conflating driver assist systems with self driving R&D.

Investments mean nothing. Looks at all the cucks piling into Valeant at $200 - some of the most respected investment firms in the world were piling in like losers. Some even bought more at $100 when even yours truly said they were finished with absolute certainty.

Even beyond the fact that the actions of investment firms are worthless as a guide to anything (Enron is another one the idiots piled into), there are lots of reasons for investing that have nothing to do with Tesla as a viable investment - a backdoor deal to help Tesla's secondary (Tesla is in bed with lots of Wall Street investment firms thanks to the fees for all their offerings and their huge personal loans to Musk secured with Tesla stock), a Chinese firm getting access to Tesla's IP/knowhow, a scatter shot in the electric investment space (for example, Tencent put money into NextEV, a Chinese electric car startup), etc etc

It means nothing. Excited fools get excited though. The shorts get squeezed. Etc. I love Tesla stock.
WTF, dude? The car makers have been throwing money at this for over a decade. GM has technology far, far ahead of Tesla. MobileEye has technology far, far ahead of Tesla. Nissan has 20 cars that have autonomously navigating inner city Japan for over a year. nVidia's multi-camera deep learning processing units are what will finally enable autonomous driving, and they would have exactly the same schedule regardless of whether Tesla existed or not. It's a matter of capability, which depends on the large industry around pushing FLOPS and gaming/big data processing architecture, which has nothing to do with Tesla.

You couldn't be more wrong. Like I said, Tesla is net killing people by removing some of the talent pool from universities, other automakers who are far ahead, component suppliers, etc.

Cuban, are you familiar with the concept of confirmation bias?

This is just handwaving. Having a the top market cap Chinese firm Tencent take a unusually large stake, even for them, in US based Tesla, means quite a lot. But feel free to keep handwaving it away.
Is that why they are flailing around desperatly buying out start ups with only months of research for absurd amounts of money like GM did with 1B acquision of Cruise? That only had months of R&D behind it at the time George Hotz commented that he heard from industry sources that Cruise's demoware tech was garbage and is in the process of being completely rewritten but GM was both dumb enough and desperate enough to pay 1B for it.

Based on what exactly, the most advanced thing mobileye has in actual production is basic TACC.

Appreciate a citation here.

George Hotz is in the self driving R&D field with comma.ai backed by top VC firm andreessen horowitz. And from his vantage point he said his money would be on Tesla or Google as having the best engineering teams / being most likely to succeed on the self driving front.

Tencent got to 5% very deliberately and is more than 50% to stay there short term. If they wanted more, they had a 30 day (I think) window to acquire more before announcing.

Tencent wanted people to know they put money down on Tesla but the why isn't really clear. It could be something as simple as vanity or they may be looking for a strategic partnership between Tesla and one of Tencent's Chinese EV investments.

I thin EVs, PV, storage etc will be really hot in China given their problem with smog, their investment into PV, their own BEV companies, their battery companies etc. I think their likely will be some joint projects and Tencent likely want to be able to have some influence and exposure to them.

25k deliveries in Q1, pretty solid and ahead of guidance, kind of

13.5k model s, compared to 12.5k previous Q1, also chewed through 2k in transit, so solid but not amazing

Pretty sure I have no idea how the market will react though, surprised they released this on a sunday

https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/thre...tention.88483/

The new AP2, that the cucks/liars in this thread assure is now AP1 equivalent. And ahead of all other competitors.

Oh yeah except for the fact that it still can't take a bend on a HIGHWAY. But Full Self Driving (note the capitals so they don't get sued for Elon's baldfaced lying), coming the second half of this year. Buy now!

This is wonderful. Tesla is going to remain a money printer for the smart shorts for several months at least yet.

Please, enough with the cucks garbage in every post. Try engaging in civil discourse and work to avoid coming across like a total tool?

Even assuming you are intelligent and maybe even right about everything you post...good grief you come across terribly. That then encourages other people to engage with you the same way. Please knock it off.

Ya I mean I'm not a Tesla fan and hold a current losing short position, but anyone who thinks tesla is ahead of the competition on self driving is uninformed or ignorant, they literally can't take a simple turn yet, which is kind of crazy. There are countless videos out there of it, kind of surprised there aren't any lawsuits yet.

Not to come to TS defense, but cucks is pretty tame for internet mudslinging

Somewhat funny and fitting even, given the actual topic at hand

It was funny the first few times. :P

I'm not responsible for the awful quality of discourse in this thread. You think people who think Elon is some of God, who are as bat**** as the people who seriously call others "cucks", are capable of reasonable discourse? Have you read this thread?? We have people like Cuban flat out lying (or nuts) and claiming that AP2 8.1 is now AP1 equivalent - it's been out for two days to a very limited audience, and he is merely reporting the desperate company PR. Early reports indicate that it is still dangerous and deeply flawed and not even close to AP1 equivalent.

So yeah, I'll stop calling people cucks and make this thread a little more boring. But it will make zero difference to the quality of the discourse.

As an example, watch this video of 8.1, put out a few days ago:



From the narration:

"It always drives off the road"
"It can't handle anything more than a slight bend"
"It's as bad as AP2 8.0"

This is on a very very clearly marked road. Then compare the claims (aka lies) made by Cuban and other Musk fans:

- 8.1 is AP1 equivalent
- The problems have been fixed
- Tesla is ahead of all other car makers on autonomous driving (compare the above video with GM):



You want me to be polite to these esteemed gentlemen, who are either completely insane or flat out lying or both, and who are actively misleading 2p2 investors because they have some bizarre techie fetish for a weird billionaire?

And I'm the problem with the discourse in this thread??

More goodness from the Tesla Motor Forums since 8.1:

Lots and lots of issues, particularly with bends. Tesla is still comically dangerous around exits, dividers, merging traffic (it will accelerate into merging cars that are well into the current lane). Most hilarious of all (and quite common) "truck lust" - Tesla will swerve into trucks randomly on the highway. You think I'm kidding? From the forums:

Tesla are far ahead of the competition, folks. Never mind that it's making dangerous errors that were solved problems in autonomous driving 6 years ago.

Truck lust is a fantastic term

wasn't that the same mistake that led to the guy being beheaded like a year ago?
the car registers the side of the truck as empty space and just keeps going?

the video above is nice...
"... but it drives nice on straight roads."
yeah, no ****. you know what drives nice on straight roads too? a brick on the gas pedal.