Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tesla Q1 2020 Update

ir.tesla.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 391 posts

Re: Tesla Q1 2020 Update

#161

Post by michaelyoshika »

kenhwang wrote: post #144
save_ferris wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He might be more concerned about the sales prospects instead of operational expenses. Automakers are getting hit really hard by this pandemic, and they need a healthy economy to sell cars. Many economic forecasts are saying that a full recovery is 2-4 years away, although there are many different opinions.

Tesla relies on high volume to make money; the other automakers are pricing EVs based more on margin. An economic slow down hurts volume much more than it hurts margins. Tesla also relies heavily on first-mover advantage to grow. With the virus stalling everything, all the more cash rich automakers get time to catch up on R&D, while Tesla is stalled from being unable to physically expand. Tesla also becomes more cash…

Isn't China restricting the sale of new gasoline cars like what EU is doing? I agree US market could be hit badly as CA is still under lockdown and tech companies are laying off.

Re: Tesla Q1 2020 Update

#162

Post by Tuna-Fish »

milansuk wrote: post #47

Page 16 blew my mind. From 70 pieces of metal => 2 pieces of metal. Does anyone know how they do that?

Casting.

Note that the Model 3 rear is a bit of a pathological case. In his teardown, Sandy Munro had a lot of good things to say about other parts of the car, but considered the tail end to be a horribly engineered overly expensive mess. So it looks so good because they started with the unambiguously worst piece in the car, and made it really good.

Re: Tesla Q1 2020 Update

#163

Post by tigershark »

kenhwang wrote: post #144
save_ferris wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He might be more concerned about the sales prospects instead of operational expenses. Automakers are getting hit really hard by this pandemic, and they need a healthy economy to sell cars. Many economic forecasts are saying that a full recovery is 2-4 years away, although there are many different opinions.

Tesla relies on high volume to make money; the other automakers are pricing EVs based more on margin. An economic slow down hurts volume much more than it hurts margins. Tesla also relies heavily on first-mover advantage to grow. With the virus stalling everything, all the more cash rich automakers get time to catch up on R&D, while Tesla is stalled from being unable to physically expand. Tesla also becomes more cash…

I don’t really think that any other automaker has a 25.5% margin on their mass produced electric vehicles.

Re: Tesla Q1 2020 Update

#164

Post by xiphias2 »

SEJeff wrote: post #138
xiphias2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Will Elon stop with tweets that hurt Tesla? Appoint a CEO, or COO to run things to take pressure of Elon? I have read this from so many people for the last 5 years all the time. Sure, the tweets show that Elon wants faster growth, and frustrated, and I didn't like that tweet either, but if you want a conservative CEO, buy IBM or Oracle stocks, please leave Tesla alone.

Amusingly, Larry Ellison, the Oracle CEO, is a Tesla board member and personal friend of Musk.

You're right, somehow I didn't like the fact that that happened...maybe it's just because Oracle was very hard to use for me 15 years ago when I tried it in university (especially compared to open source DBs), but maybe it became much more user friendly since.

I remember that while in MySQL I could just set the id field to autoincrement, and in Oracle I had to create a special kind of counter, increment it and read its value to create a new id for example.

Re: Tesla Q1 2020 Update

#165

Post by dangrossman »

maxharris wrote: post #118
hinkley wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been said before and should be said again: Elon needs an assistant who shuts his fucking phone off at midnight. It's like the moon comes out and he turns into a werewolf. There was a theory that he's Ambien-tweeting, but I suspect he just never learned in college like many of us that any idea that sounds really good at 1 am is probably really stupid.

Elon has done well by me. Every company he runs turns to gold. I wouldn't have him change a thing. Seriously, given his performance over the long-term, I hope he tweets even more. It enrages people that can't think past the next quarter, and that's good for long-term shareholders like me!

X.com was a bust that pivoted into a PayPal clone and merged with them when both companies were nearly out of runway from buying each other's users. He was CEO of PayPal for just months before a mass revolt of the engineering team over his incompetence lead the board of directors to fire him. Tesla has been structurally bankrupt for most of its existence, burning billions of investors' cash and still making no profit selling cars after 12 years [1]. SolarCity was on the verge of bankruptcy so he bailed it out with his other company and is still being sued for that. He's been having Tesla sell car parts to SpaceX (a private company so you can't look at its financials), more shuffling of money around from one company to another to paper over losses. His side gigs -- The Boring Company to build unusable tunnels, Neuralink, etc -- have accomplished nothing. What exactly has he "turned to gold"?

1: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-burns-cash/

Re: Tesla Q1 2020 Update

#166

Post by zoroaster »

zaroth wrote: post #53

As an investor, I like the format these results are presented in. The slide deck approach is a lot more approachable than the typical text-only SEC filing. An average investor is much more likely to open this and read it than the typical financial statement. It's not over-the-top marketing agency gloss, but it has some nice touches. Of course, you also get the text-only filing to follow. As far as the key numbers, Te…

As an investor, these financials are so sexy. Historical quarterly data presented, cash flow statement presented quarterly, so many small examples of excellence and thoughtfulness in how the figures are presented.

Re: Tesla Q1 2020 Update

#167

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

marnett wrote: post #149
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no very expensive vehicles or dining choices when you’re worth tens of billions. It’s literally meaningless, like it would be for me if all my meals for a year cost me 1% of a penny.

What about a catered party for 500 with staff and celebrity chef? The wealthy can throw lavish events that are not necessarily a drop in the bucket, especially if common.

Let's say this thing costs $200 per person, so $100k per party. Let's say he does this every day (or throws a 3.5x as lavish party twice a week), that's $36.5M per year. He can do this for 10 years and it will still literally be a rounding error in his wealth.

Re: Tesla Q1 2020 Update

#168

Post by gamblor956 »

xiphias2 wrote: post #156
gamblor956 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He thinks from first principles (aka how does the world really work?) and he communicates that way. Everyone does that. Most of us just aren't stupid until to think that this means we suddenly experts in fields we know nothing about, especially when the "first principles" Musk deals with are just simplified abstractions of very complicated subjects. Or all we all forgetting that Musk has claimed that a substance whic…

You're right in all of these, he doesn't care about the virus, because he's focused on stopping global warming and getting to Mars. Also he's probably not the nicest person with everybody, as that's also not his focus. I would be much more worried if he stopped developing the autopilot hardware for example, thinking that the current version has enough capacity for the necessary calculations. The truth is, even if it…

If Elon were truly focused on getting to Mars he would put more effort into robotics, agriculture/hydroponics, non-solar power generation and other things that would actually matter for a Martian mission, rather than wasting his money[1] into PR stunts like Boring Co which still haven't done anything that other boring companies have been doing for decades at bigger scale in far more complicated terrains and situations.

It would be better for example if the Model Y wouldn't be manufactured with lots of errors that QA should have caught, but that's also secondary to getting self driving, which is an extremely hard problem.

Tesla's inability to handle basic QA of their primary business activity nearly killed the company and doesn't speak well of their ability to properly QA something infinitely more complex like self-driving, especially when they've chosen to limit the available hardware.

[1] Boring Co is actually primarily financed by Tesla, and uses Tesla and SpaceX supplies and equipment, so Elon's not even investing his own money. He's investing other people's money and running.

Re: Tesla Q1 2020 Update

#169

Post by gamblor956 »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #167
marnett wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about a catered party for 500 with staff and celebrity chef? The wealthy can throw lavish events that are not necessarily a drop in the bucket, especially if common.

Let's say this thing costs $200 per person, so $100k per party. Let's say he does this every day (or throws a 3.5x as lavish party twice a week), that's $36.5M per year. He can do this for 10 years and it will still literally be a rounding error in his wealth.

Of his current wealth on paper, yes.

But almost all of Elon's wealth is in the form of his stock holdings, and stocks fluctuate in price. Moreover, his cash is almost all leveraged from his stock, and if the price collapses again, he could be wiped out by the margin call.

Re: Tesla Q1 2020 Update

#170

Post by mandeepj »

dangrossman wrote: post #165
maxharris wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon has done well by me. Every company he runs turns to gold. I wouldn't have him change a thing. Seriously, given his performance over the long-term, I hope he tweets even more. It enrages people that can't think past the next quarter, and that's good for long-term shareholders like me!

X.com was a bust that pivoted into a PayPal clone and merged with them when both companies were nearly out of runway from buying each other's users. He was CEO of PayPal for just months before a mass revolt of the engineering team over his incompetence lead the board of directors to fire him. Tesla has been structurally bankrupt for most of its existence, burning billions of investors' cash and still making no profit…

> What exactly has he "turned to gold"?

You wrote him off way too easily.

In my life I have not seen -

1. Two rockets landing simultaneously

2. An electric car that can take off like a plane, and self-drive on free ways

Post reply on HN