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Cont: Musk, SpaceX and future of Tesla II

Fast Eddie B said:
This is a perfect case of "it is what it is".

I remember when Apple was at $20 pundits saying it was "overvalued" and predicting its demise. Similarly Tesla early on selling in the teens with the same pundits saying much the same things.

The market is the only thing that determines what price a stock "should be" at, at any given moment. If you are confident its overpriced, short it and make a LOT of money. Or not.
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well it’s dangerous to a lot of people’s retirements when the should and is of the market get too divorced from market fundamentals and fair play, and criminal activity, market manipulation, and fraud is tolerated.
 
jeremyp said:
This is the thing. Actually he does not have a track record of home runs. Tesla wasn't his idea and since he took over the company it's been a litany of missed deadlines and broken promises.
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As a technologist, Musk himself is simply mediocre. The only thing he's good at is leveraging wealth to get more wealth. He's a bully who wants to be seen as a genius. He insists on being the figurehead of everything he pays others to do.

jeremyp said:
SpaceX looks good superficially, but we don't know if it is really profitable - or would be without the constant pumping in of external capital and lucrative government contracts.
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I like what SpaceX is doing, and I hope they succeed. I hope all the other private space ventures succeed. What Elon Musk did that gave me a lot of hope was make space cool again. He got ordinary people excited about space. Now, the exercise ended up being another Elon-worshipping exercise in the end, but I give him credit for giving the industry a much-needed shot in the arm.

jeremyp said:
No, it should be much lower.
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A company's stock price is only ever an indication of what people think the company is worth. That can have a lot of baggage.
 
Roger Ramjets said:
...and was regularly picked on by other kids, perhaps even once being thrown down concrete steps and beaten severely, resulting in being hospitalized for his injuries.

Maybe that is why he became an enthusiastic reader of books, developed an interest in computing and video games, and at age 12 wrote a game which he sold to PC and Office Technology magazine for ~$500 - thus starting him on the path towards becoming the Richest Man in the World.

Those kids are still picking on him today. Yes, we are older today, but few of us have grown up mentally (see exhibit A above). The only thing that's changed is he is now rich and powerful, and we aren't.

How could this have happened? I mean, any of us could have written that crappy BASIC program and received a cool $500 for it. All of us could have developed and marketed an Internet city guide for the newspaper publishing industry, with maps, directions, and yellow pages - which we coded at night, seven days a week, all the time.

Except we didn't. Which is why we didn't get $22 million for our 7% share after selling the business to Compaq, and then we didn't use that money to start up one of the first registered online banks that later became PayPal and netted us a cool $175.8 million for our 11.7% share. And finally we didn't pour almost all of that money into developing space rockets, electric cars, autonomous taxis and robots.

There's something fundamentally wrong with the Universe when the smart people in the room lose out to a kid who smells of pee. Musk's so obviously a huge fruad, yet somehow he managed to con top Democrats into giving him billions of our tax dollars just to help keep NASA going and reduce CO2 emissions. Wouldn't have happened if we were in charge, that's for sure. We'd have done what we always do, nothing except gloat about how superior we are to that dumbass.
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There are plenty of rich succesful people who aren't fascists and who don't start funding anti-enviromentalists the moment someone hurts their feelings.
 
JayUtah said:
As a technologist, Musk himself is simply mediocre. The only thing he's good at is leveraging wealth to get more wealth. He's a bully who wants to be seen as a genius. He insists on being the figurehead of everything he pays others to do.
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Precisely. He fails as often as he succeeds. Hyperloop is stupid. Tesla Solar isn't a success. The Boring Company is a joke.

I'm convinced the smartest thing that Tesla has done has been the building the nationwide charging network when they did. Without it, EVs would be limited in driving range and probably wouldn't have caught on as quickly as they have. It gave them a huge advantage over other EVs. I also give him credit for the giga-casting.

But the Cybertrucks are monumentally stupid. They don't fit a niche in the market.

The auto manufacturers outside of China seem to have forgotten about affordability. There's a real discipline to producing for the mass market. A skill that requires commitment. They're committed to it, the rest of the world, not so much.
 
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acbytesla said:
But the Cybertrucks are monumentally stupid. They don't fit a niche in the market.
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Well, there is a niche for them, albeit a small one. We’ve seen a half dozen or so on our Florida trip so far. Including a white-wrapped one that I think looks cooly futuristic.

But I’ll grant you that 50k or so sold to date falls far, far short of Musk’s rosy predictions. If they manage to get the bugs worked out, it could be a platform for a 3 row SUV. Something like this artist’s rendition.

53724984977_dc287d9813_z.jpg


Something like that just might really sell.
 
acbytesla said:
Precisely. He fails as often as he succeeds. Hyperloop is stupid. Tesla Solar isn't a success. The Boring Company is a joke.
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tesla itself is in a lot of danger of being a failure at this point as well. yeah the stock is up today, fine. their last earnings report had them at a loss if it wasn’t for carbon credits, and they have some pretty concerning sales trends right now.

i mean, his investment in government corruption might bail him out but it’s hard for me to consider that kind of behavior a success. at least to me, and people like roger may disagree, but there’s more to defining success as merely being rich. particularly if you need to cheat to be there.
 
Fast Eddie B said:
Well, there is a niche for them, albeit a small one. We’ve seen a half dozen or so on our Florida trip so far. Including a white-wrapped one that I think looks cooly futuristic.

But I’ll grant you that 50k or so sold to date falls far, far short of Musk’s rosy predictions. If they manage to get the bugs worked out, it could be a platform for a 3 row SUV. Something like this artist’s rendition.

53724984977_dc287d9813_z.jpg


Something like that just might really sell.
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But it can't. You're forgetting cost. It has to be profitable. The manufacturing runs have to be large enough to justify the expenditure. Not to mention opportunity cost. What they could be building that would be profitable instead? They can't sell the Cybertrucks they are presently manufacturing. How much are they making on every one sold? Or losing? They have almost a billion dollars of Cybertrucks in inventory and growing. Up from 200 million just a few months ago. At the present rate it could reach 2 billion dollars in inventory in two more quarters.
It's a high cost, high priced vehicle that doesn't make sense. There must be a growing pressure to shut down the line. Then what only makes sense is to retool for another product.
 
Fast Eddie B said:
This is a perfect case of "it is what it is".

I remember when Apple was at $20 pundits saying it was "overvalued" and predicting its demise. Similarly Tesla early on selling in the teens with the same pundits saying much the same things.

The market is the only thing that determines what price a stock "should be" at, at any given moment. If you are confident its overpriced, short it and make a LOT of money. Or not.
Click to expand...
How do you think the market usually determines what price a stock "should" be? The market is made of investors and speculators. They would normally take a look at the fundamentals of a company, it's revenue, profits, assets and liability and take a view on whether it is going to be paying dividends - or if the price is likely to go up because it is doing well.

A lot of investors and speculators are not doing that with Tesla because its fundamentals are terrible. There is nothing about Tesla that says it deserves a market cap. of $1 trillion.

Put it this way. Last year, Tesla made $17 billion profit. Assuming it does the same this year (indications are worse) would you be impressed with any other investment that had an RoI of 1.7%? At this point, Tesla investors are betting on the robotaxi and robots to boost profits, but the person who is promising these things is a known serial liar. The market with respect to Tesla is not rational at the moment.
 
dirtywick said:
electrek.co

Tesla has yet to start testing its robotaxi service without driver weeks before launch

Tesla has reportedly yet to start testing its robotaxi service in Austin without a safety driver behind the wheel –...
electrek.co electrek.co

tesla still not testing robotaxi without a driver despite pending launch of driverless robotaxi
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Good to see that journalist reads the forum!



Darat said:
Robotaxi, generic term, already exist so I know a new Tesla built one is nothing new but given his version is to launch in just a few weeks I'm surprised I've not seen photos of disguised ones in the press already. Has anyone seen such images ?
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It should be a concern for anyone investing in the company based on all or partly because of projected future profits.
 
Fast Eddie B said:
Well, there is a niche for them, albeit a small one. We’ve seen a half dozen or so on our Florida trip so far. Including a white-wrapped one that I think looks cooly futuristic.

But I’ll grant you that 50k or so sold to date falls far, far short of Musk’s rosy predictions. If they manage to get the bugs worked out, it could be a platform for a 3 row SUV. Something like this artist’s rendition.

53724984977_dc287d9813_z.jpg


Something like that just might really sell.
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I went the completely opposite direction and put a deposit down on a Slate pickup. Reminds me of my '88 Ford Ranger that I have back at the farm. Super simple, and meant for user customization. Still a year out, though.

Slate
 
Dread Pirate Roberts said:
I went the completely opposite direction and put a deposit down on a Slate pickup. Reminds me of my '88 Ford Ranger that I have back at the farm. Super simple, and meant for user customization. Still a year out, though.

Slate
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That looks like a tool designed to do a job. I like it.

(If I had the money, I'd have one of these)
 
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Dread Pirate Roberts said:
I went the completely opposite direction and put a deposit down on a Slate pickup. Reminds me of my '88 Ford Ranger that I have back at the farm. Super simple, and meant for user customization. Still a year out, though.

Slate
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We did the same! Reminds my wife of a Chevy Luv pickup she owned back in the day. Might be perfect for local errands.
 
Darat said:
Robotaxi, generic term, already exist so I know a new Tesla built one is nothing new but given his version is to launch in just a few weeks I'm surprised I've not seen photos of disguised ones in the press already. Has anyone seen such images ?
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Yes. The Robotaxi has been driving autonomously at the Tesla facility in Austin for over 6 months.
From November of last year.
Dozens more videos of the Robotaxi can be found here. https://www.youtube.com/@JoeTegtmeyer/search?query=robotaxi
 
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