drive a tesla then drive a competitor's car (if you can find one), and then you will understand.
tesla is the iphone of cars. minimalist, performant, fun to drive. not to mention the no other car company is building or has a supercharging network. GM and Ford are the blackberry of EVs
It's not an apples to apples comparison, mass producing cars is very hard (your man Elon has said this). So scaling out to the level where they outcompete other manufacturers is going to take enough time that I believe their USP is long gone, therefore I think the stock is overpriced.
Their battery tech isn't unique (and not theirs entirely either). Everything except the infotainment system is "simple" (in relative terms).
I'm not saying they're not great, but that the stock is expensive
Ya, at some point, technical superiority has diminishing returns. Tesla may very well beat out all rivals for performance and miles per charge. But when your competitor can get 300 miles to a charge and 0 to 60 in 3 seconds, there just isn't that much difference to your 350 miles per charge and 0 to 60 in 2 seconds. There are a lot of other factors to compete on.
Lol, this has been disproven time and time again across all markets including autos. People pay for brands and status. If your reasoning were true why would BMW’s be so much more desirable than a Honda Civic? A product does not have to superior to command a higher price, marketing and branding can be terrifyingly powerful things.
I sort of agree, but it's also true that BMWs drive better in a lot of people's opinions (including mine), and a lot of the knowledge needed to make all the thousands of mechanical interactions work well in an ICE is not necessary in an electric car, which has a much simpler time moving torque to wheels. So the amount of finesse that can be applied to an electric car may be less than what can be applied to an ICE car.
There's also usually the thing where a more expensive car is of better "quality" than cheaper ones. If you're a road warrior you'll own a BMW or a Mercedes because of the QOL improvement when you're killing your billionth mile.
You seem to agree with My point. A civic and a BMW are not the same class of car. Once the other makers start making similar electrics, they will have an offering in the same class.
My point was that people don't buy BMW over Mercedes because they have 20 more horsepower. And if it does come down to brand, as you said, there are a lot of very powerful brands, like BMW or Mercedes that have been playing the brand game longer than the founder of Tesla has been alive. I don't think I would put my money on Tesla if winning will come down to brand.
> Their battery tech isn't unique (and not theirs entirely either). Everything except the infotainment system is "simple" (in relative terms).
The differentiating factor for Tesla has never been their battery tech or physical car quality. It's somewhat like Apple in that the combination of decent (but not the best) hardware and software brought together in a cohesive way creates something better than the individual parts. You're buying an "experience", which people often make fun of but ultimately I feel is more representative of what customers are looking for than looking at pure specs of the car. And a lot of the "experience" is powered by software or by custom silicon or other non-car things.
Android still can't compete with Apple in terms of the polish and cohesiveness of the product despite Google and Samsung being juggernauts, and I think Tesla vs. Ford/GM/etc. is much the same. Just pick up a Galaxy S22 and use it for a bit. The apps feel like a patchwork of different UX's, different ways of using the phone, and different modules that don't talk to each other.
I'm not saying your experience isn't true, but is this experience so unique people will only buy Teslas in the future? If you think 50% of cars will be Tesla badged in 20 years then I'd say the stock price is justified, I doubt it. Apple is selling a device designed to scale, they just yell louder at Foxconn and they poop out more iPhones ready for consumption, with cars there are more constrains that, as mentioned makes me think the stock is overpriced. I'm not saying the apple experience isn't great, if I wasn't a nerd who likes to customize things I'd be on Apple gear, I'm forced to drive an apple at work where I'd like to drive Linux, so I get the thing. I guess with electric cars the customization part is less significant, but being able to put cars in people's hands is a problem on a completely different level to devices that weigh less than 200g.
Why mention Apple and then pull a 50% figure out of thin air? Apple market share for global smartphones is 23.4%. Tesla is 13.8% of global EVs. Not as dominant but still respectable.
So that'd make Tesla account for 13.8% of ~9% of global vehicle sales. The 50% number comes from Tesla being worth as much as every other car manufacturer combined. Definitely respectable, but 0.13*0.09 = 0.012. If my numbers are correct that'd mean 1.2% of worldwide cars are Tesla but they're valued as if 50% of all cars were Teslas.
Correct me if I'm wrong somewhere, but having 20% of a market vs 1% is a significant difference.
It's also quite more approachable for people to spend on a premium phone than a premium car, since a premium car costs more than what many "westerners" make in a year while an iPhone is less than a "westerners" monthly salary.
I think the the giga press technology gives them an advantage of 5 years at least (a lot less moving parts, less mistakes made, etc). I have a lot of friends that work for ICE manufacturers (GM) in a variety of positions and every one of the claims there is zero chance GM will convert their fleet from ICE to EV in this decade.
Time will tell, I have a lot more faith in Tesla that the legacy automakers at this point, if that changes, I will sell. If my 5 year lead is correct, I think we will see level-5 FSD by then anyways.
According to Musk, for Tesla, batteries will be bigger than autos. Full Safe Driving will be bigger than autos (because of driverless taxis), and the robot will be bigger than autos. So if you buy into this then the stock is justified.
I personally expect Tesla to continue to be a fabulous car company but these other segments seem unlikely for various reasons.
> So if you buy into this then the stock is justified.
Tesla was not incorporated yesterday, they are a 20 years old company, still they are in the making promises phase.
In the same timeframe Amazon completely disrupted the way we buy things, Microsoft put a PC on every desk, Google became the way the world searches for information and Facebook revolutionized the way we communicate.
I think it's time to admit to ourselves that this guy is just a wannabe influencer/politician.
Among the 500 companies in the S&P500 if Tesla disappeared tomorrow it would be the one whose demise would be felt the least by the American consumer, that shouldn't come as a surprise because frankly speaking the target demographic of Tesla and its CEO aren't consumers who buy products to improve the quality of their own lives.
It's a weird mix of financial speculators, cryptobros, people who feel the need to be part of something bigger than themselves, and virtue signalers.
It's a pity that such experiment cannot be performed, Walmart sold 600B worth of products last year, Amazon 400B, Berkshire has 800B worth of insurance premiums AUM. Diappear those companies and then let's see if people are still so eager to pay attention to mr. Musk and his absurd claims and social media trolling/bullying.
Sure in Bel Air is really important to own a Tesla, just like (if not more) than the car brands mentioned in my handle...
> substantial real revenues
How much of that is credits?
> growing at a remarkable rate
A company incorporated 20 years ago growing at a remarkable rate either implies incompetence in its administration up to now, or a dishonest scheme put in place to artificially simulate "a remarkable rate of growth" right now.
Companies with similar access to talent and capital simply came to dominate their industry in the same timeframe (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Salesforce, Intel, HP...)
Globally speaking what % of cars sold are Teslas? 1 or 2 % ? Tesla and Musk dominate the newscycle of the financial press, the tabloids and the blogsphere but out there, in the real world they are essentially nonexistent. It seems like the dictionary definition of an influencer to me.
Tesla is shipping 1.2m cars / year and just finished two ginormous state of the art factories in Giga Berlin and Austin, that will end up doubling that. There is so much demand for these autos, outside of Bel Air, that it currently takes 8 months for a Model Y order today to arrive, even though the current factories are producing full capacity. Why are you so hung up about credits from last year?
You are confusing the past for what the future is going to be. We are heading into an EV sales only future in most developed economies by 2040. Already, Tesla Model 3 is the best selling luxury car in the US, Model Y production has just been ramping up to soon overtake crossover/SUV, and these are making money hand over fist so they are only focusing on this upper market while they’re production constrained. As soon as production ramps up they’ll start cutting into economy car markets just like they did luxury, and you’ll see 10m out of those 78m TAM. Meanwhile, they no longer have any debt while most other car mfgs are servicing massive 10-100b ish debt piles.
> You are confusing the past for what the future is going to be
Musk sued to gain control of Tesla in 2002.
He's been talking and rambling about the future™ for 20 years now. 20 years, all while pocketing billions of government money.
Now you are saying 2040, next year you'll say 2050, the year after that 2060.
In the meantime he's getting paid hundreds of billions of dollars right now, not in the future™. It's typical of cults to extract money from believers right now in order to compensate the cult leader for work that he will complete 30 or 40 years into the future™.
It's a scam. Amazon was built in 20 years and it also needed to deal with building factories in the real world, unions, logistics etc. Did so without govt. money and without constant pumps and equity raises. It's there selling 400B dollars worth of products every year.
The guy who built it stepped down and the company is still there because its so solid that it can stand alone now. You know as well as I that if Musk OD's on one of his drugs of choice the whole scheme would collapse because the cult only has a reason to exist as long as the cult leader is there to show the way forward ....into the future™
Also known as the difference between accomplishing something and talking about it.
Amazon has total domination in the enterprise cloud business and is the largest player in online retail.
But you know in the world of contraries , winning is a huge liability because it means you arrived at the end of the road, whereas failing to achieve more than 1.5% of market share in 20 years is a huge success because it allows people to daydream of infinite curves which go up & to the right forever after slouching for 20 years /s
I'm just baffled you live in a world where Amazon with $400b sales is an example of achievement, but Tesla at $54b is an example of failure and cult. So does that make Nvidia ($27b), Visa and Mastercard (combined $43b), and Coca Cola ($39b) failures too?
I measure companies success/failure like I measure humans' :
How many lives are gonna be disrupted if a company/human disappeared overnight? And how much the quality of life of the population is gonna go down the sink?
In each and every case as the companies you mentioned the answer is a lot on both counts.
Tesla, Porsche (35B) , the brands I have in my handle (Ferrari , McLaren) , Lamborghini, Gulfstream, Bombardier, Gucci, Sea-Ray....the answer is: not a much on both counts for all of them.
Nobody cries for the toys of the rich, not even the rich because they can easily pivot towards other toys
The stock doesn't need to trade on market share. Look at profits. Real $$ and growth of those real $$.
$17B in Q1. With 80% YoY growth, and new factories able to supply the growing demand, it is within reason to expect $30B profit in Q4 (or Q1 2022 if you'd prefer). They are trading at 10x multiple on annual PROFIT.
Toyota's profit last quarter was $6.8B with a market cap of $280B, and not growing. So they have annual profit of $28B, also trading at 10x multiple on annual profit.
Lol, the regulatory credit thing again. Here are the Q1 numbers [0]:
- Total revenue: $18,756M
- Gross profit: $5,460M
- Total regulatory credits: $679M
So to answer your question, about 4% of their revenue is credits. It’s been tiny compared to automotive revenue for at least a year. So we can stop perpetuating that little myth.
Exactly, Elon keeps coming up with these crazy new markets for Tesla because you at least need some semblance of possibility that it could grow forever. The recent robot portrayed with a person in a robot costume seems like a desperate last minute grasping at straws to keep stock prices climbing.
The difference in design and potential between an EV and ICE is an order of magnitude less than between a smartphone and feature phone. The likelihood some traditional carmaker will beat Tesla at EVs eventually is fairly high. Meanwhile, Tesla can never hope for a serious lead on margins there.
> The likelihood some traditional carmaker will beat Tesla at EVs eventually is fairly high.
This feels a lot like the statements people made about Apple at the start of the smartphone revolution. Plus they’ve had a long time already to beat Teslas at EVs - if they haven’t by now why should they in future?
Tesla was trading at a split adjusted $70 per share back then. It's trading over $1000 today. Little larry could have made a killing if he invested then. But then again, he is worth over $100 billion so I doubt he's losing any sleep over it.
Must be more on this thread (and what led up to the 'Just called btw this is Elon'. So someone texts Larry Page and claims they are Elon Musk and they are believed to be that person? (By Larry Page I mean)
Well with the recent information that Elon Musk was apparently blackmailed to settle with the SEC, it's now unclear now if "funding secured" was actually false or not.
> Well with the recent information that Elon Musk was apparently blackmailed to settle with the SEC ...
I wouldn't call "hey, you broke the law and will receive the legal punishment" blackmailing. When a DA makes a plead deal with criminals, that's also blackmail in your world?
GP is referring to Elon’s allegations that he did in fact have funding secured, but the SEC and banking sectors for some reason blackmailed him into falsely “admitting” he didn’t. It’s in that TED interview he did on the day of the TWTR takeover offer.
I get that, and my reading of it was Elon didn't have everything covered legally and the SEC had leverage. He did the equivalent of pleading to a lesser charge vs. fighting it. If the SEC really had nothing, Elon with his army of lawyers, would have been happy to tell them to take a hike.
Like a lot of people in these situations, he may have thought he could beat this in court but due to circumstance (like Tesla's shaky financial situation at the time) accepted the deal to make it go away. That's still not blackmailing.
> If the SEC really had nothing, Elon with his army of lawyers, would have been happy to tell them to take a hike.
I think you should listen to the full quote. Musk said that bankers were withholding funding to Tesla when they were having a funding crunch so if Musk had pursued the defense in the lawsuit rather than settling then it would have bankrupted Tesla. Musk WANTED to not settle, but wasn't able to. That's what he's saying. BTW if you note, Musk in general has never settled basically any lawsuit he's ever been engaged in besides this one. He always fights until the end win or lose.
It’s fun to think that even the highest emir still just has a stock iPhone, no more, with the same movies as us, the same games as us, and iMessage as a means of communication.
No golden keyboard and no CEO-specific encrypted message board, apparently.
Fun little Google/SpaceX trivia. For a long time, Google was the biggest SpaceX investor. Elon used to sleep in Larry's Palo Alto guest room for years... may still do so when visiting Tesla's Palo Alto office.
Larry has a Merlin engine in his office in building 1900 (Googleplex).
...and since you brought up Merlin engines.
Search YouTube for Jay Leno's Garage. He has one episode of firing up a Merlin on a test stand, and another of a Merlin powered custom automobile he bought and restored. He takes it out for a drive pointing out the engine is never running above idle.
Me on twitter these days… oh interesting… scrolling… fascinating… scrollling… it’s about to hit… yes, almost… SLAP black screen, no scrolling back… internal curse. I need a twitter to nitter add-on.
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadPrice at closing yesterday: $1,005.05
That would have been a 14x gain, in roughly 4 years. Not bad at all.
It's not adding value as at that time it would have been a gamble and not a obvious thing.
I also still don't understand Tesla share price. Sure they are more than a EV company but they still struggle with there Tesla roofs.
So why would Tesla be more worth than all car companies combined? Tesla doesn't just create a new market. They still need to replace others.
tesla is the iphone of cars. minimalist, performant, fun to drive. not to mention the no other car company is building or has a supercharging network. GM and Ford are the blackberry of EVs
Their battery tech isn't unique (and not theirs entirely either). Everything except the infotainment system is "simple" (in relative terms).
I'm not saying they're not great, but that the stock is expensive
My point was that people don't buy BMW over Mercedes because they have 20 more horsepower. And if it does come down to brand, as you said, there are a lot of very powerful brands, like BMW or Mercedes that have been playing the brand game longer than the founder of Tesla has been alive. I don't think I would put my money on Tesla if winning will come down to brand.
The differentiating factor for Tesla has never been their battery tech or physical car quality. It's somewhat like Apple in that the combination of decent (but not the best) hardware and software brought together in a cohesive way creates something better than the individual parts. You're buying an "experience", which people often make fun of but ultimately I feel is more representative of what customers are looking for than looking at pure specs of the car. And a lot of the "experience" is powered by software or by custom silicon or other non-car things.
Android still can't compete with Apple in terms of the polish and cohesiveness of the product despite Google and Samsung being juggernauts, and I think Tesla vs. Ford/GM/etc. is much the same. Just pick up a Galaxy S22 and use it for a bit. The apps feel like a patchwork of different UX's, different ways of using the phone, and different modules that don't talk to each other.
Correct me if I'm wrong somewhere, but having 20% of a market vs 1% is a significant difference.
It's also quite more approachable for people to spend on a premium phone than a premium car, since a premium car costs more than what many "westerners" make in a year while an iPhone is less than a "westerners" monthly salary.
Time will tell, I have a lot more faith in Tesla that the legacy automakers at this point, if that changes, I will sell. If my 5 year lead is correct, I think we will see level-5 FSD by then anyways.
I personally expect Tesla to continue to be a fabulous car company but these other segments seem unlikely for various reasons.
Tesla was not incorporated yesterday, they are a 20 years old company, still they are in the making promises phase.
In the same timeframe Amazon completely disrupted the way we buy things, Microsoft put a PC on every desk, Google became the way the world searches for information and Facebook revolutionized the way we communicate.
I think it's time to admit to ourselves that this guy is just a wannabe influencer/politician.
Among the 500 companies in the S&P500 if Tesla disappeared tomorrow it would be the one whose demise would be felt the least by the American consumer, that shouldn't come as a surprise because frankly speaking the target demographic of Tesla and its CEO aren't consumers who buy products to improve the quality of their own lives.
It's a weird mix of financial speculators, cryptobros, people who feel the need to be part of something bigger than themselves, and virtue signalers.
It's a pity that such experiment cannot be performed, Walmart sold 600B worth of products last year, Amazon 400B, Berkshire has 800B worth of insurance premiums AUM. Diappear those companies and then let's see if people are still so eager to pay attention to mr. Musk and his absurd claims and social media trolling/bullying.
The valuation is questionable but saying he is just a wannabe politician / influencer is factually incorrect.
Sure in Bel Air is really important to own a Tesla, just like (if not more) than the car brands mentioned in my handle...
> substantial real revenues
How much of that is credits?
> growing at a remarkable rate
A company incorporated 20 years ago growing at a remarkable rate either implies incompetence in its administration up to now, or a dishonest scheme put in place to artificially simulate "a remarkable rate of growth" right now.
Companies with similar access to talent and capital simply came to dominate their industry in the same timeframe (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Salesforce, Intel, HP...)
Globally speaking what % of cars sold are Teslas? 1 or 2 % ? Tesla and Musk dominate the newscycle of the financial press, the tabloids and the blogsphere but out there, in the real world they are essentially nonexistent. It seems like the dictionary definition of an influencer to me.
Musk sued to gain control of Tesla in 2002.
He's been talking and rambling about the future™ for 20 years now. 20 years, all while pocketing billions of government money.
Now you are saying 2040, next year you'll say 2050, the year after that 2060.
In the meantime he's getting paid hundreds of billions of dollars right now, not in the future™. It's typical of cults to extract money from believers right now in order to compensate the cult leader for work that he will complete 30 or 40 years into the future™.
It's a scam. Amazon was built in 20 years and it also needed to deal with building factories in the real world, unions, logistics etc. Did so without govt. money and without constant pumps and equity raises. It's there selling 400B dollars worth of products every year.
The guy who built it stepped down and the company is still there because its so solid that it can stand alone now. You know as well as I that if Musk OD's on one of his drugs of choice the whole scheme would collapse because the cult only has a reason to exist as long as the cult leader is there to show the way forward ....into the future™
Exactly. Tesla is selling $54b at 71% YoY revenue growth, while Amazon’s $470b is 22% growth.
Amazon has total domination in the enterprise cloud business and is the largest player in online retail.
But you know in the world of contraries , winning is a huge liability because it means you arrived at the end of the road, whereas failing to achieve more than 1.5% of market share in 20 years is a huge success because it allows people to daydream of infinite curves which go up & to the right forever after slouching for 20 years /s
If you are good, you are good from the get go.
How many lives are gonna be disrupted if a company/human disappeared overnight? And how much the quality of life of the population is gonna go down the sink?
In each and every case as the companies you mentioned the answer is a lot on both counts.
Tesla, Porsche (35B) , the brands I have in my handle (Ferrari , McLaren) , Lamborghini, Gulfstream, Bombardier, Gucci, Sea-Ray....the answer is: not a much on both counts for all of them.
Nobody cries for the toys of the rich, not even the rich because they can easily pivot towards other toys
$17B in Q1. With 80% YoY growth, and new factories able to supply the growing demand, it is within reason to expect $30B profit in Q4 (or Q1 2022 if you'd prefer). They are trading at 10x multiple on annual PROFIT.
Toyota's profit last quarter was $6.8B with a market cap of $280B, and not growing. So they have annual profit of $28B, also trading at 10x multiple on annual profit.
Makes tesla look like a good buy to me.
- Total revenue: $18,756M
- Gross profit: $5,460M
- Total regulatory credits: $679M
So to answer your question, about 4% of their revenue is credits. It’s been tiny compared to automotive revenue for at least a year. So we can stop perpetuating that little myth.
0: https://tesla-cdn.thron.com/static/IOSHZZ_TSLA_Q1_2022_Updat...
Not saying Tesla will do the same but transition to EVs will clearly fundamentally change auto market.
The hail Mary is self driving.
This feels a lot like the statements people made about Apple at the start of the smartphone revolution. Plus they’ve had a long time already to beat Teslas at EVs - if they haven’t by now why should they in future?
Did you include the stock split? I don’t think so
Tesla was trading at a split adjusted $70 per share back then. It's trading over $1000 today. Little larry could have made a killing if he invested then. But then again, he is worth over $100 billion so I doubt he's losing any sleep over it.
I wouldn't call "hey, you broke the law and will receive the legal punishment" blackmailing. When a DA makes a plead deal with criminals, that's also blackmail in your world?
Like a lot of people in these situations, he may have thought he could beat this in court but due to circumstance (like Tesla's shaky financial situation at the time) accepted the deal to make it go away. That's still not blackmailing.
I think you should listen to the full quote. Musk said that bankers were withholding funding to Tesla when they were having a funding crunch so if Musk had pursued the defense in the lawsuit rather than settling then it would have bankrupted Tesla. Musk WANTED to not settle, but wasn't able to. That's what he's saying. BTW if you note, Musk in general has never settled basically any lawsuit he's ever been engaged in besides this one. He always fights until the end win or lose.
One would think those at ultra level of wealth would be more cautious? Or are conversations started on SMS and later moved to another app?
No golden keyboard and no CEO-specific encrypted message board, apparently.
Larry has a Merlin engine in his office in building 1900 (Googleplex).
I think he's talking about a different Merlin engine, though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Merlin