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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

#61

Post by Judgmentality »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #53
Judgmentality wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That study has been highly disputed by people in the field; the methodology is questionable at best for the claims they're making.

Anthony Levandowski of Waymo LIDAR fame has said he now agrees with Elon Musk ("a wiser person than me") that LIDAR is a crutch. https://youtu.be/fNgEG5rCav4?t=105

Anthony Levandowski is so sleazy he makes Vinod Khosla look like a good guy. He is (well, was) one of the most untrustworthy people in the Valley, so much so he had to leave for China to start his next company because even local VCs - who care about money and nothing but money - found him too sketchy to work with.

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

#62

Post by adventured »

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…

> meanwhile all major tech-related IPOs seem to be about 10B.

I have some notable counters to that premise.

Square, $31.3 billion market cap. At IPO ~$5 billion.

Shopify, $27.8 billion market cap. At IPO ~$3 billion (already 9x after four years).

Splunk, $20 billion market cap. At IPO ~$5 billion.

Palo Alto Networks, $23.7 billion market cap. At IPO ~$5 billion.

Fortinet, $15.8 billion market cap. At IPO $1.5 billion.

ServiceNow, $50.3 billion market cap. At IPO ~$4.5 billion.

Atlassian, $26.5 billion market cap. At IPO ~$6.5 billion.

Twilio, $16.5 billion market cap. At IPO ~$4.5 billion.

Zendesk, $9.3 billion market cap. At IPO ~$1.7 billion.

Salesforce.com, $127 billion market cap. At IPO ~$3 billion. It hit 15x in about the same time as Tesla.

Netflix, $167 billion market cap. At IPO... a couple hundred million dollars. It hit 15x in eight years. This and CRM reach back a ways now, however you still could have easily purchased NFLX for sub $10 / share as recently as 2012.

And there are a bunch of tech-related companies that may yet produce 15x style net post IPO returns in the coming years. Such as HubSpot, which has a $7.6b market cap, versus ~$1.2b at IPO in 2014. Could have picked up ETSY at $7 / share (sub $900m market cap) well after its IPO, now $68 ($8.1b market cap).

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

#63

Post by toomuchtodo »

Judgmentality wrote: post #61
toomuchtodo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthony Levandowski of Waymo LIDAR fame has said he now agrees with Elon Musk ("a wiser person than me") that LIDAR is a crutch. https://youtu.be/fNgEG5rCav4?t=105

Anthony Levandowski is so sleazy he makes Vinod Khosla look like a good guy. He is (well, was) one of the most untrustworthy people in the Valley, so much so he had to leave for China to start his next company because even local VCs - who care about money and nothing but money - found him too sketchy to work with.

You can be sleazy and untrustworthy and still be smart and right. I wouldn't use VC funding as signaling, considering how many VC folks blindly funded Theranos (which wasn't just outright fraud, but abusive pursuit of whistleblowers).

It's fairly clear machine vision is going to surpass LIDAR in the near future (taking capability and cost into account), doesn't take a robotics expert to see that.

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

#64

Post by Robotbeat »

keithwarren wrote: post #38
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…

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

Frankly, it'd be insane to invest in 10 or 7 or 5nm at this point for a custom design of maybe a few million units. The investment required scales insanely with reduction in feature size (Billions of dollars, potentially), and you'll never get your investment back. That effectively locks you in to an old design for several years. And the difference in unit costs or efficiency between 14 and 10nm is not big enough to matter compared to the upfront costs.

Fabbing at 14nm is the only sensible thing for Tesla to do right now, and since they're able to do it to replace their existing Nvidia chip for lower cost, it seems quite sensible.

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

#65

Post by hef19898 »

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…

Tesla is not at all focused anymore, no idea why. To operate a robot EDIT:taxi service EDIT end: you need to figure out maintenance, placement of cars, customer service, you name it. And they already have issues running production and distribution.

But that might be a nice way to get outside funding for a new service that can buy a bunch of Teslas. That in turn would increase sales and, potentially, increase the stock. Kind of what Tesla did with Solar City, more or less. For me that is only postponing the time they hit a hard wall.

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

#66

Post by mplewis »

agumonkey wrote: post #56
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.

You don't buy his claims that lidar is non necessary and even inefficient at sdv ?

Elon/Tesla have a vested interest in making sure LIDAR isn't required by law for self-driving vehicles. In addition, his NN-camera-powered-cars are still trying to drive themselves into highway barriers.

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

#67

Post by matz1 »

dragontamer wrote: post #42
keithwarren wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Watch the autonomy day video on how the chip was built and why, will help a lot I watched it, and I'm calling them out on it. They focused their entire presentation on NVidia and completely ignored Google/Waymo and Intel/MobilEye Q5 comparisons. Autonomy day was an obvious hype-fest that ignored the competition. Tesla was only looking at NVidia Xavier or Pegasus, but ignores the real giants in the field. The argume…

Vertical integration. Tesla can have the chip solely focused on their specific needs.

They ignore google/waymo because they won't sell them the chip anyway.

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

#68

Post by SilasX »

DennisP wrote: post #40
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...

"Is theoretically possible" != "we can have an implementation next year" != "we'll have it past regulatory approval next year"

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

#69

Post by dragontamer »

Judgmentality wrote: post #52
dragontamer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 kn…

> 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. This is false. There are, to the best of anyone's knowledge, a handful of people in the Waymo One program (I'm fairly confident it's less than 10). Everyone in the Early Rider program is still under NDA. In order to be accepted to either, you h…

My point is that Waymo has taken large and public steps forward. People have seen the Waymo cars (and have to deal with them) in Phoenix.

No one has ever seen a "Full self driving" car from Tesla, despite the fact that hundreds-of-thousands of people have paid $5000 for the promise of future hardware to be installed onto their car.

My point is: other companies are ahead, and have demonstrated capabilities above and beyond Tesla's 14nm chip team.

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

#70

Post by dragontamer »

matz1 wrote: post #67
dragontamer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Watch the autonomy day video on how the chip was built and why, will help a lot I watched it, and I'm calling them out on it. They focused their entire presentation on NVidia and completely ignored Google/Waymo and Intel/MobilEye Q5 comparisons. Autonomy day was an obvious hype-fest that ignored the competition. Tesla was only looking at NVidia Xavier or Pegasus, but ignores the real giants in the field. The argume…

Vertical integration. Tesla can have the chip solely focused on their specific needs. They ignore google/waymo because they won't sell them the chip anyway.

Elon Musk is pretending like Tesla can make money from this self-driving taxi idea.

You can't make money from self-driving Taxis if Google/Waymo simply offers a similar service for cheaper right next to you. And yes, Google/Waymo has the vertical integration thing all figured out too.

Now if you think that maybe Tesla's chip is useful for its M3 customers... sure. I strongly disagree with that fact, but you're certainly entitled to your opinion on that subject. My main issue is that Elon Musk is trying to sell this idea... that Tesla can actually raise money by going into self-driving taxis.

That's completely hogwash. Completely. There's not a chance of that at all. The other companies are too far ahead, and Tesla doesn't have enough cash to enter that fledgling industry.

Tesla isn't a tech company anymore, its a car company. It built a $2.5 Billion factory that can only produce cars, and its stuck with that (and its associated loans). Elon Musk can't just pivot into a new industry with all of these loans weighing down on his company.

Now, maybe if Elon Musk wanted to start a new company, one that wasn't burdened by all of the Gigafactory Debt, to tackle the self-driving problem... well... maybe that would work. But Tesla has already bet its life on wide-scale deployment of the Model 3. It doesn't have any other chances. It simply doesn't have the money to do anything else, or to pivot anymore.

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