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Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

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Re: Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

#31

Post by mruts »

brianpgordon wrote: post #2

> a fleet of self-driving vehicles that will make their way into the robotaxi service as soon as next year. So... are we living on the same planet? Does Musk seriously think that Tesla will have solved full autonomous driving, with no LIDAR, and have commercialized a functioning robotaxi service, by next year ? This is so far outside of the realm of possibility that it's like saying he's going to Pluto next week.

Is it fair to ask at this point if Elon Musk is going crazy? His decisions of late seem unwise at best, irrational at worst. Maybe he should just concentrate on producing Model 3's and then the Model Y?

Or what would be really cool would if Tesla could produce multiple car models... at the same time!

Re: Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

#32

Post by ergothus »

mpweiher wrote: post #18
dna_polymerase wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's worked so well for SpaceX In Elon's biography the author mentions that in all projects he was part of he would constantly give far optimistic delivery dates.

A true engineer! :)

I realize you're joking, but this is actually kind of bothersome to me.

Most of us give overly optimistic delivery dates without intending to. Over time we learn that we have this habit, so we pad in some time we think is unnecessary...and still give overly optimistic delivery dates without intending to.

If you add someone INTENDING to give such poor estimates, the problem moves from the "expected and occasionally problematic but still joke-able" to the "just plain lies" category.

Re: Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

#33

Post by Nokinside »

martythemaniak wrote: post #27
Nokinside wrote: post #12

Musk has done amazing things but his amazing ability to take risk and leverage is something that prevents me from investing into his business. The tech he is business develops is here to stay but investors may not get the return they want. There is endless stream of new ideas while not delivering fully on the old ideas (for the investors). Tesla bet it's financial future into being able to mass produce Model 3 profit…

Tesla has gone ~15x since IPO. Unlike virtually every other tech-related IPO, it was possible for retail investors to invest in a risky, growth-oriented company. They IPO'ed at a 2.2B cap, meanwhile all major tech-related IPOs seem to be about 10B. If you're a retail investor looking for high risk/high reward stocks, Tesla was a rare exception. In most other cases, only large funds have access to growth companies lik…

If you a retail investor looking for high risk/high reward stocks, Tesla today is not what Tesla was during IPO. The need for more money and future stock dilution means that risk is significantly higher but reward is going to be lower.

Re: Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

#34

Post by DennisP »

dragontamer wrote: post #29
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A robotaxi isn't too far off if you limit where it can operate. It's not infeasible to train an automated driving system specifically suited to the streets of LA or wherever. Some place where it doesn't snow, doesn't rain often, and drivers/cyclists/pedestrians are fairly predictable (at least compared to someplace like Asia). Alternatively, a robobus, that is to say an automated system that drives from one place to…

Is Tesla really ready for a long protracted war against Uber, Waymo (aka Google), and other autonomous taxi companies? Tesla just spent (probably) ~$100 Million or so developing a 14nm chip, already obsolete (NVidia has a 12nm chip already, Intel/MobilEye has 7nm incoming 2020, and who knows what Google/Waymo got up their sleeves. Those TPUs are fully proprietary and fully to Google/Waymo's advantage). 7nm is deploye…

There's more to it than feature size. Other companies have more general-purpose chips. Tesla basically built an ASIC for self-driving.

Re: Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

#35

Post by dragontamer »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #16
thrill wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ford and Tesla's market cap are about the same at $40 billion, yet Ford's total liabilities are ten times Tesla's: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/F/ford-motor/total... That doesn't mean Ford is ten times as likely to go under - indeed the market cap's being the same means that buyers and sellers generally believe that Ford can carry ten times as much debt as Tesla with about the same risk.

"Enterprise Value", which includes debt, is a much more accurate measure of a company's size than market cap. By that measure, Ford's Enterprise Value is $190B vs Tesla's $50B. Ford's sales are about 7.5X Tesla, and it's EV is about 4X Tesla. Tesla's financials and market cap are not completely out of whack when compared to other car companies.

> Tesla's financials

Tesla has literally never made a yearly profit in its life. Tesla hasn't even had positive yearly cash-flow for its entire life.

The best Tesla ever got was Q3 / Q4 2018, a very modest profit of a couple hundred-million dollars. But this was very quickly wiped out by Q1 2019 with a $700 Million loss and $1.4 Billion negative cash flow.

Tesla's financials are a complete disaster. Tesla's stock price has absolutely no bearing on its financials. Investors are chasing Tesla's future, they're hooked onto its story and 10-year plan. Tesla investors always ignore the finances of today.

Re: Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

#36

Post by gonehome »

martythemaniak wrote: post #27
Nokinside wrote: post #12

Musk has done amazing things but his amazing ability to take risk and leverage is something that prevents me from investing into his business. The tech he is business develops is here to stay but investors may not get the return they want. There is endless stream of new ideas while not delivering fully on the old ideas (for the investors). Tesla bet it's financial future into being able to mass produce Model 3 profit…

Tesla has gone ~15x since IPO. Unlike virtually every other tech-related IPO, it was possible for retail investors to invest in a risky, growth-oriented company. They IPO'ed at a 2.2B cap, meanwhile all major tech-related IPOs seem to be about 10B. If you're a retail investor looking for high risk/high reward stocks, Tesla was a rare exception. In most other cases, only large funds have access to growth companies lik…

I also invested early for similar reasons.

Though seeing what Tesla constantly has to deal with, if I was ever in a position to decide to IPO in the future I’d want to stay private for as long as possible.

Re: Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

#37

Post by vtail »

dragontamer wrote: post #35
bryanlarsen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Enterprise Value", which includes debt, is a much more accurate measure of a company's size than market cap. By that measure, Ford's Enterprise Value is $190B vs Tesla's $50B. Ford's sales are about 7.5X Tesla, and it's EV is about 4X Tesla. Tesla's financials and market cap are not completely out of whack when compared to other car companies.

> Tesla's financials Tesla has literally never made a yearly profit in its life. Tesla hasn't even had positive yearly cash-flow for its entire life. The best Tesla ever got was Q3 / Q4 2018, a very modest profit of a couple hundred-million dollars. But this was very quickly wiped out by Q1 2019 with a $700 Million loss and $1.4 Billion negative cash flow. Tesla's financials are a complete disaster. Tesla's stock pri…

Can you apply the same logic to Uber/Lyft?

Re: Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

#38

Post by keithwarren »

dragontamer wrote: post #29
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A robotaxi isn't too far off if you limit where it can operate. It's not infeasible to train an automated driving system specifically suited to the streets of LA or wherever. Some place where it doesn't snow, doesn't rain often, and drivers/cyclists/pedestrians are fairly predictable (at least compared to someplace like Asia). Alternatively, a robobus, that is to say an automated system that drives from one place to…

Is Tesla really ready for a long protracted war against Uber, Waymo (aka Google), and other autonomous taxi companies? Tesla just spent (probably) ~$100 Million or so developing a 14nm chip, already obsolete (NVidia has a 12nm chip already, Intel/MobilEye has 7nm incoming 2020, and who knows what Google/Waymo got up their sleeves. Those TPUs are fully proprietary and fully to Google/Waymo's advantage). 7nm is deploye…

Asserting that Tesla is behind because they are fab at 14 instead of something smaller is so laughable you cannot be serious.

Thermal profile and power, instruction set and a dozen other things are more important.

Watch the autonomy day video on how the chip was built and why, will help a lot

Re: Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

#39

Post by dragontamer »

DennisP wrote: post #34
dragontamer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Tesla really ready for a long protracted war against Uber, Waymo (aka Google), and other autonomous taxi companies? Tesla just spent (probably) ~$100 Million or so developing a 14nm chip, already obsolete (NVidia has a 12nm chip already, Intel/MobilEye has 7nm incoming 2020, and who knows what Google/Waymo got up their sleeves. Those TPUs are fully proprietary and fully to Google/Waymo's advantage). 7nm is deploye…

There's more to it than feature size. Other companies have more general-purpose chips. Tesla basically built an ASIC for self-driving.

NVidia is the only chip that seems a bit heavy on GPU features. But the Volta architecture has tensor processors with full FP16 and INT8 support, so it seems useful for self-driving as far as I can tell.

MobilEye EyeQ4 and EyeQ5 has no other purpose than self-driving. EyeQ5 is going to be 7nm and is launching 2020. A full ASIC for self-driving as well.

And no one knows what the heck Google / Waymo is doing. All we know is that its working, today, in Phoenix Arizona, where anyone can use Google / Waymo's taxi service TODAY. We also know that Google employes the same researchers who made TPUs that powered AlphaGo. They're very secretive about their hardware (for good reason!), but they're the elephant in the room with regards to self-driving.

https://waymo.com/apply/

Re: Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

#40

Post by DennisP »

brianpgordon wrote: post #2

> a fleet of self-driving vehicles that will make their way into the robotaxi service as soon as next year. So... are we living on the same planet? Does Musk seriously think that Tesla will have solved full autonomous driving, with no LIDAR, and have commercialized a functioning robotaxi service, by next year ? This is so far outside of the realm of possibility that it's like saying he's going to Pluto next week.

I've always been skeptical of skipping LIDAR, but a recent study at Cornell found that with binocular vision they could be almost as accurate as LIDAR, but with much cheaper hardware.

https://www.therobotreport.com/researchers-back-teslas-non-l...

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