TSLA - Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ)

[SirRumpole]

I wonder how much the debacle over Musk's attempted takeover of Twitter has created concern over his sate of mind and reliability to run his empire in the future.

Are investors starting to think twice about his judgement and about risking their money with him ?

As I said before , he's a genius technically, but that doesn't necessarily translate to business acumen especially with the size of his ego.

Just a thought...

 

[JohnDe]

I wonder how much the debacle over Musk's attempted takeover of Twitter has created concern over his sate of mind and reliability to run his empire in the future.

Are investors starting to think twice about his judgement and about risking their money with him ?

As I said before , he's a genius technically, but that doesn't necessarily translate to business acumen especially with the size of his ego.

Just a thought...

What happened to the TSLA share price on Thursday & Friday?

 

[SirRumpole]

What happened to the TSLA share price on Thursday & Friday?

Short term v long term.

To me, the willingness to spend billions on something outside ones area of expertise and apparently for one's personal gratification are danger signs in the long term.

We will see.

 

[JohnDe]

Short term v long term.

To me, the willingness to spend billions on something outside ones area of expertise and apparently for one's personal gratification are danger signs in the long term.

We will see.

How do you know what is outside his experience, and how experience matters?

Your fear of investing in something you know little about is good and understandable. Unless you're a financial advisor with knowledge on the subject, warning others and adding doubt in something that you don't know is not understandable.

Musk knew nothing about maps -

"....left South Africa on his own without anything or anyone. He went to Canada where he stayed for a while - without a permanent home - until his brother met up with him. They made their way to Palo Alto and started their first business. Zip2 was basically mapquest before mapquest (which was Google Maps before Google Maps). It would end up selling for $307 million. Cha-ching."​

Very little about finance -

"Elon poured all of his money into his next venture, a company that would change the banking industry. At the time people said he was crazy and that consumers would never trust the security of the internet for online banking. His company, X.com, was more successful than anyone had ever thought possible. He even beat out his biggest competitor, PayPal, started by Peter Thiel as they agreed to merge together with Elon becoming the largest shareholder."​

Rockets was his childhood dream -

"After his near-death experience, Elon revisited his childhood dreams of going to Mars. He visited NASA’s website one day and found no plan or even mention of going to Mars. Taken aback, he headed to Russia to see if he could buy a rocket himself. After being pushed around with ridiculous prices, Elon dove into books studying how rockets are built. On their plane ride home from Russia, he declared he would build the rocket himself with a spreadsheet detailing how to do it. This was how SpaceX was born."​

Who will be the eco era’s Rockefellers?​

On Boxing Day 2018, Elon Musk did not let the festivities keep him away from Twitter. Reminding his followers that they had only five days left to take advantage of a dollars 7,500 tax credit on electric vehicles, the Tesla founder added that “most importantly, every electric car, Tesla or otherwise, matters to the environment we all share. Every time someone chooses electric, the future gets a little bit brighter.”

It was a beguiling message: that Tesla owners could enjoy all the comfort and convenience of car ownership without the environmental guilt. And for the most part it was true. Electric cars are far better for the environment, on the whole. As we generate more of our electricity from renewable sources, and as we make more of our steel with hydrogen rather than coal, the environmental case for electric cars will only strengthen.

However, as Henry Sanderson shows in his book Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green, the uptake of the electric car will bring its own set of moral dilemmas, environmental and geopolitical. That uptake is well under way. Although electric cars make up only about 1 per cent of the global fleet, their numbers are growing fast.

olkswagen is aiming for half of its sales to be electric by 2030 - this is also the year after which it will no longer be possible to buy a petrol car in the UK. All those cars will be powered by batteries made from rare earth elements as well as lithium, nickel, copper and cobalt. Demand will skyrocket: for lithium, it is expected to increase thirtyfold by 2030.

Sanderson, a former reporter on China and commodities for the Financial Times, writes that whoever controls these resources will be “the new Rockefellers. A new strategic game has opened up.” His book is an account of the opening moves of that game, a travelogue of his journey through the supply chains that will shape our decarbonised future.

That journey takes him to the Atacama desert in Chile, where silvery flecks of lithium are being evaporated from vast pools of brine, and to cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where child labour is tarnishing the moral credentials of electric cars. His intention is to identify the pitfalls we must avoid if we are to transition equitably to electric cars.

As he travels the world, a pattern begins to emerge: wherever there are the metals needed for the green transition, China has already snapped them up. China, the world’s most voracious importer of oil, was quick to see that by embracing electric cars it could reduce its reliance on the rest of the world and in 2009 began handing out lavish subsidies to their buyers. To feed its domestic electric vehicle market, Chinese companies began buying up rare earth deposits in Chile, Australia, Congo and Indonesia, getting a head start in a race that the West did not even realise it had to run.

Sanderson recounts a series of deals that Chinese companies were able to seal without alerting their western competitors to their geopolitical import. In Australia, the Chinese mining company Tianqi bought a 51 per cent stake in the world’s largest lithium mine with the backing of the China Development Bank (CDB).

“Most western companies cannot get a vast state-owned bank such as the CDB to provide credit for a deal,” Sanderson writes. “The investors who owned [the mine] were only too happy to accept [Tianqi’s offer] and the deal was waved through by Australian regulators. It was the first round in the global race to secure lithium supplies, and Tianqi had won before anyone was paying attention.”

The pattern repeated itself in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Chinese companies now own 80 per cent of the country’s output of cobalt. In Indonesia too, the Chinese stainless steel company Tsingshan successfully lobbied for an export ban on nickel, so only companies with a presence in the country could take advantage of demand for the metal.

The impression one gets from these deals is that western governments have fallen for a complacent delusion; that it doesn’t really matter who owns which resources because whoever owns them will always want to sell them to the highest bidder on the international market.

By this logic, it doesn’t matter if most of the lithium mines are owned by Chinese companies, so long as Tesla can stump up the cash to buy it. But what happens if - as in the case of Indonesian nickel - it’s no longer for sale? What if a geopolitical calamity such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine suddenly isolates swathes of the global economy? In such cases, you would rather your supply chains started closer to home.

Sanderson shows that this penny has finally begun to drop in the minds of western governments and car manufacturers. He talks to the entrepreneur Jeremy Wrathall, who hopes to revive Cornwall’s long tradition of mining by extracting lithium from the county’s hills.

Commenting on that prospect, the prime minister Boris Johnson said: “It is a wonderful thing that Cornwall indeed boasts extensive resources of lithium, and we mean to exploit them.” Yet Sanderson adds that Jacob Rees-Mogg, the minister for Brexit opportunities, “replied haughtily that the UK had relied on fair and free trade for its industries and that would continue”.

Sanderson deftly guides us through the convolutions of which company bought what from which, and he livens up that potentially desiccated subject matter with an eye for characterful detail. Among the characters we meet is Robert Friedland, a copper tycoon and friend of Steve Jobs, the Apple founder, who posed in his younger days as a hippy and set up a communal farm, only for the other members of the commune to slowly realise he was working them to the bone for his own profit.

Despite the seemingly insuperable geopolitical quandaries with which it deals, the tone of Sanderson’s book is one of cautious optimism. “We shouldn’t be hostile to green technologies,” he writes, “but we shouldn’t be naive either. The oil age has left a long scar on the twentieth century. We should make sure that the industries of our green future do much better.”

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green

By Henry Sanderson

(Oneworld, 288pp)

The Times

 

[SirRumpole]

warning others and adding doubt in something that you don't know is not understandable.

I know about over reach, it's bought down many an entrepreneur. and a lot of investors have suffered.

I really hope it doesn't happen and Elon continues to turn out good products and stays solvent because he's a clever person, but I think that there are possibly more risks with him that others in the long term.

 

[Value Collector]

Short term v long term.

To me, the willingness to spend billions on something outside ones area of expertise and apparently for one's personal gratification are danger signs in the long term.

We will see.

I guess if Musk wasn’t willing to go outside his area of expertise we wouldn’t have either Tesla or Space Ex to begin with.

I mean he made his 100’s of Millions by inventing Pay Pal an online payment system, and then bet the lot on an electric car company and a rocket company, neither of which would have been considered his core competence when he was basically known as an internet/ software programmer.

Actually if you rewind back to 2007, people probably would have probably thought something like Twitter made more sense for him than a car or rocket manufacturer

 

[JohnDe]

 

[orr]

Oh Joe Manchin.... how I only thought I hated you... Is it going to be one of those abusive relationships? the early signs are there...

 

[qldfrog]

Are you sure this isn't a hoax?

"Finally, in 2027, the most audacious member of the new Tesla Hydrogen range will arrive – the Model O. This will be Tesla’s hydrogen-powered coupe and will also be known as the O-dster. It will incorporate an upgraded Hindenburg Mode capable of accelerating it to 60mph in just 0.2 seconds. To enable this mode, occupants must be strapped into the specially designed gel-based “crash seats” and, at least 30 minutes prior to acceleration, consume a custom drug aimed at counteracting the G-force and preventing aneurisms."

Yeah right.

Straight from sci fi series Expanse..on Amazon Prime

 

[JohnDe]

Tesla incorporating other businesses to improve the spread of charging stations and functionality. BK World have a contract to install self serve lounges, which are cubicles that are ready to go and dropped into place. These are going up all around Europe, in remote regions. Imagine if an Australian company could design and stall something similar, but then again, we don't have the population (or do we?)

Tesla deploys cube lounges at Supercharger station with automated coffee, food, and more​

Tesla has deployed large cube lounges at a Supercharger station in Germany that is equipped with automated vending machines for coffee, food, and more.
The new partnership with bk World to deploy these lounges could reshape Tesla’s Supercharger networks in regions where it is more challenging to deploy charging stations near amenities.

Tesla has been trying to deploy its Supercharger stations at properties located around amenities that offer food, coffee, and restrooms, but that is not always easy.
At a few locations, Tesla has deployed its own lounges to offer those amenities.
Now the automaker is trying a new approach through a partnership with bk World that developed a new deployable cube lounge that includes a bunch of amenities – many of them automated:

“bk World of course offers bathroom facilities, while a comfortable lounge area invites drivers to linger. But the concept is far more extensive. For instance, it makes extremely efficient use of the small footprint. Various products are dispensed in a fully automated way. The food that drivers can purchase on site is healthy, fresh, and low in sugar. When selecting the product portfolio, the planners deliberately avoided working with large corporations and chose instead to focus on keeping things regional and sustainable. Together with entrepreneur and investor Marcell Jansen, work is even going on to develop an innovative and healthy food portfolio especially for bk World.”

Drivers have to sign into an app in order to access the lounge:

Inside, you access different food, drinks, and even some electronics through a very high-tech automated vending machine:

Outside, there’s even a machine that can make fresh pizza for you in about four minutes:

Most importantly, the deployable air-conditioned cubes are equipped with full restrooms:

In the lounge area, there’s a Nintendo Switch for kids – big or small:

There are also seating areas with electrical outlets for people to work or charge their devices:

bk World says that the lounges are easily deployable and can be moved quickly:

bk World is made up of what are known as Qubes – modular, transportable room elements that can be combined in a number of ways to meet a wide variety of space requirements on site. When a charging facility grows, its bk World can grow with it. Qubes can be assembled, disassembled, and relocated in a very short time. This is particularly good news for property owners, but also for charging facility operators. If a lease expires, bk World offers the greatest possible flexibility. The smallest version, with a lounge area and bathroom Qube, takes up around 50 square metres – but there is no upper size limit to bk World. This reduces material waste and makes demolitions a thing of the past. And bk World’s inherent adaptability makes it easier to find suitable locations.

While this is the first station using this new technology, the company says that it has 300 locations planned across Europe:

The bk World in Endsee is now open and ready to welcome all visitors to the Tesla charging park. But this first location is just the beginning: in the next five years, bk World Holding GmbH plans to open 300 locations across Europe. bk World is coming soon to charging parks run by the largest charge spot operators and energy providers – to the benefit of customers, retailers, and the environment.

It’s unclear how many of those are in partnership with Tesla.
Here, Out of Specs visited the station and took a look inside the lounge. You can check the video here:

 

[orr]

A little snip from the Autoline channel last week noted Tesla repurchase loyalty at 71% , any other maker would give their lower ball joints to get over 50; and sales oblitorating BMW and Mercs in there class.

And the 200 day moving just being crossed.

 

[JohnDe]

The SP has been slowly going up from May lows of US$628

 

[moXJO]

The SP has been slowly going up from May lows of US$628

View attachment 144921

Lucked my way in at $700s. Waiting on the stock split pump now.

 

[JohnDe]

Lucked my way in at $700s. Waiting on the stock split pump now.

Well played. I am also waiting on the stock split ?

 

[moXJO]

I know many are long term holders. But was it better to sell after the stock split last time, or before?

 

[JohnDe]

I know many are long term holders. But was it better to sell after the stock split last time, or before?

I've only been involved in one sock split, and that one the SP went up significantly. That is no indication of what will happen this time around, the whole world has changed and competition is heating up. I personally believe that the SP will continue to grow and there will be more splits in the future.

DYOR

 

[moXJO]

I've only been involved in one sock split, and that one the SP went up significantly. That is no indication of what will happen this time around, the whole world has changed and competition is heating up. I personally believe that the SP will continue to grow and there will be more splits in the future.

DYOR

The climate is pretty negative and it seems for now that the low $900s is the ceiling.

Bit of a gamble that the split may bring on a bit more profits due to the lower price and fanboy exuberance.
Lucky for me I'm a gambling man.

Just need good jobs data tonight for some positive vibes.

 

[sptrawler]

The climate is pretty negative and it seems for now that the low $900s is the ceiling.

Bit of a gamble that the split may bring on a bit more profits due to the lower price and fanboy exuberance.
Lucky for me I'm a gambling man.

Just need good jobs data tonight for some positive vibes.

I wonder if the gloss is coming off Tesla myself, I'm not trying to be negative and Tesla have and are doing amazing things, but when you set the achievement bar as high as Tesla has it is hard to maintain it.
For example the battery giga factories, they soak up a lot of money not only in materials but in maintaining market domination in a rapidly changing field.
From an @JohnDe post:
The mysterious new Tesla order to the world's largest electric vehicle battery manufacturer CATL turned out to be not of its novel Kirin batteries, but of LFP packs. Not your regular LFP battery, though, rather a greatly improved chemistry with higher density slated for the Model Y.
Daniel Zlatev, 08/03/2022
E-Mobility

The world's largest EV battery maker CATL recently announced a novel Kirin batterytechnology that allows for higher energy density than Tesla's 4680 battery cells in the same footprint. It then became clear that Tesla has ordered CATL a new type of battery than the LFP ones it already supplies for the Model 3 units made in the Shanghai Gigafactory.
Bets at the time were that Tesla might have ordered the 4680-style cells, despite that it now counts LG and Samsung among its suppliers for them, besides the original partner in the battery's development Panasonic. Now, however, local media is reporting that CATL will be selling Tesla its even more novel, M3P battery technology. It is similar to the improved LFP battery chemistry with added manganese, the so-called LMFP packs, but CATL insists that its technology is different and proprietary.

I mentioned a long time ago, i couldn't understand why Tesla doesn't outsource it battery manufacturing to a battery specialist, will the giga factories become an albatross, will the be sold?
The Tesla business model and share price reflects a lot of blue sky assumptions, once clouds start appearing, some punters get nervous.

 

[moXJO]

I wonder if the gloss is coming off Tesla myself, I'm not trying to be negative and Tesla have and are doing amazing things, but when you set the achievement bar as high as Tesla has it is hard to maintain it.
For example the battery giga factories, they soak up a lot of money not only in materials but in maintaining market domination in a rapidly changing field.
From an @JohnDe post:
The mysterious new Tesla order to the world's largest electric vehicle battery manufacturer CATL turned out to be not of its novel Kirin batteries, but of LFP packs. Not your regular LFP battery, though, rather a greatly improved chemistry with higher density slated for the Model Y.
Daniel Zlatev, 08/03/2022
E-Mobility

The world's largest EV battery maker CATL recently announced a novel Kirin batterytechnology that allows for higher energy density than Tesla's 4680 battery cells in the same footprint. It then became clear that Tesla has ordered CATL a new type of battery than the LFP ones it already supplies for the Model 3 units made in the Shanghai Gigafactory.
Bets at the time were that Tesla might have ordered the 4680-style cells, despite that it now counts LG and Samsung among its suppliers for them, besides the original partner in the battery's development Panasonic. Now, however, local media is reporting that CATL will be selling Tesla its even more novel, M3P battery technology. It is similar to the improved LFP battery chemistry with added manganese, the so-called LMFP packs, but CATL insists that its technology is different and proprietary.

I mentioned a long time ago, i couldn't understand why Tesla doesn't outsource it battery manufacturing to a battery specialist, will the giga factories become an albatross, will the be sold?
The Tesla business model and share price reflects a lot of blue sky assumptions, once clouds start appearing, some punters get nervous.

I'm in the mind of getting out quick. I'll follow the charts and see.

True believer bases are generally pretty solid though. Bitcoin, apple, Tesla, Berkshire etc they all have that fanatical base that will just keep buying.
I love em. When they get all worked up it's easy cash. You also get group tards like Wall Street Bets getting runs with straight out stupidity.

Anyway let's see if the stock splits going to pay off.

 

[sptrawler]

I'm in the mind of getting out quick. I'll follow the charts and see.

True believer bases are generally pretty solid though. Bitcoin, apple, Tesla, Berkshire etc they all have that fanatical base that will just keep buying.
I love em. When they get all worked up it's easy cash. You also get group tards like Wall Street Bets getting runs with straight out stupidity.

Anyway let's see if the stock splits going to pay off.

Yes you are spot on, I'm always way too conservative, i'll never be rich.