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Michael Burry of ‘The Big Short’ reveals a $530M bet against Tesla

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Re: Michael Burry of ‘The Big Short’ reveals a $530M bet against Tesla

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post #275
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if you round up $39K to 40K. It's still a far cry from your initial $50k assumption. Tesla 3's ASP was ~60K in 2018 https://cleantechnica.com/2018/08/23/tesla-model-3-average-s... That was the latest data I could find and I decided to give them a break. You will find in analysts calls a number of 50K is a common estimate. > Numbers don't lie. Agreed

From starting price now to ASP. What's next? That's some mental gymnastics going on there. FYI there has been several price cuts since 2018. > Agreed So... Do you have that calculation handy where a Camry/Accord cost less to own after 5 years? I would love to see it, so we can compare notes.

Independent of whether you are right or wrong, your tone makes you look like an asshole. Please moderate it. Your "sealioning" debate strategy does not help you either.

(The other posted also talked about ASP of Toyotas, so his comparison was fair btw.)

Re: Michael Burry of ‘The Big Short’ reveals a $530M bet against Tesla

#282

Eventually somebody on Wall Street is going to figure out that Tesla’s business is batteries, that Tesla’s batteries are getting good enough to compete with natural gas peaker plants, and that there is a massive effort underway to convert our electric grid away from burning fossil fuels.

Nothing beats fossil fuels, what are you talking about?

Re: Michael Burry of ‘The Big Short’ reveals a $530M bet against Tesla

#283

Teslas price is just too high. I think they will be very successful and become a big, dominant car maker. But their price only makes sense if they end up being the only car maker left. That's not realistic. Building an electric car is not that hard, especially if Tesla already did all the hard lifting for you. For a while I was thinking that the battery play - becoming the number 1 battery supplier - will justify the…

Tesla is also an energy company. They could be worth trillions in a decade or two.

Re: Michael Burry of ‘The Big Short’ reveals a $530M bet against Tesla

#284

Tesla has already achieved its objective: To bring about the electric car revolution. Its secondary objective of pushing the self-driving car revolution has done so-so. How Tesla performs going forward is more of a nice-to-have, but otherwise irrelevant since the ball is now rolling and not in danger of stopping anymore. The remaining pieces now are solar generation on building surfaces, battery tech, smart grids to…

This might be Elon Musk's objective, not Tesla's (whatever that means, as that will be a different thing if you ask it to one of its board members, to a sales person, to a developer, etc).

Re: Michael Burry of ‘The Big Short’ reveals a $530M bet against Tesla

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also solar, in addition to storage. All three technologies are really key parts of the future, and controlling that aspect of the suburban home energy profile have absolutely huge synergies. As we get to higher penetration of renewables, our grid will change from the current model of supplying whatever power is demanded, to a far more two way mode where excess supply will drive time-shifted demand. Right now…

That may be true for car makers, but in the energy world, other than some battery storage projects, Tesla is really not a major player at all, and there is an endlessly long list of companies that are more meaningful for this market and better able to take advantage of the increased renewables rollout around the world.

When it comes to utility-scale grid storage, Tesla definitely gets the most press, but I would agree that there are serious competitors like AES and Vestra. I would be interested to hear some names from your endlessly long list, because I can't come up with many of them. For the home battery market, Tesla is definitely one of the leaders.

I think the primary reason Tesla has not shipped more batteries that are permanently attached to the grid, either in from or behind the meter, is that selling a car is a far higher margin destination for their batteries. So as long as Tesla car sales can suck up batteries, the battery factories are probably going to be using most of their time making batteries for cars.

Re: Michael Burry of ‘The Big Short’ reveals a $530M bet against Tesla

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post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even the SPEAKERS inside of the Model 3 and Y are designed by Tesla In this particular case, is this really a good thing? Porsche's high end option for example is getting the speakers, amplifiers, tuned filters etc. from Burmester. Since Burmester specializes on this kind of thing, and the sound system (not the head unit and interface) are pretty much entirely distinct from the rest of the car, except that it has t…

While I’ve no doubt the speakers in your Porsche example sound great, the German car industry LOVES to upsell a customer to a speaker with a designer label on it - every single brand in the VW group does it, BMW, Mercedes… I think the German manufacturers just understand their customers vanity, sadly, where being seen to have the brand matters. The label is practically more important than the sound beyond a certain p…

Every auto manufacturer does this. Include a "Bose", "Harmon Kardon", or "B&O" sound system as part of a multi-thousand dollar premium package. Speakers are still the same paper cones as the trash-tier sound system; only difference is in some amp tuning, a sub, and a few tweeters. No surprise: the resale value of these systems is pennies by comparison.

Re: Michael Burry of ‘The Big Short’ reveals a $530M bet against Tesla

#287
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From starting price now to ASP. What's next? That's some mental gymnastics going on there. FYI there has been several price cuts since 2018. > Agreed So... Do you have that calculation handy where a Camry/Accord cost less to own after 5 years? I would love to see it, so we can compare notes.

Independent of whether you are right or wrong, your tone makes you look like an asshole. Please moderate it. Your "sealioning" debate strategy does not help you either. (The other posted also talked about ASP of Toyotas, so his comparison was fair btw.)

My question was made in good faith. I implore that you actually read the HN guidelines. Because it seems that you need to moderate yourself.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments

Re: Michael Burry of ‘The Big Short’ reveals a $530M bet against Tesla

#288

Teslas price is just too high. I think they will be very successful and become a big, dominant car maker. But their price only makes sense if they end up being the only car maker left. That's not realistic. Building an electric car is not that hard, especially if Tesla already did all the hard lifting for you. For a while I was thinking that the battery play - becoming the number 1 battery supplier - will justify the…

I'm not one to typically paraphrase billionaires, or think they're too connected to reality... but something I heard Mark Cuban say the other day was kind of "oh, shit that's true" moment for me. It was something to the affect of (I can't find the clip at the moment), "Back in 2010 we never thought we'd see a company hit $1 trillion. We never thought Apple or Amazon (et. al) would be able to continue their growth yea…

Sorry, but "cost way less to make" does not equal "a lot of fucking profit".

It's likely margins remain the same and prices fall substantially. That's what competition does, and the auto world is full of it.

Re: Michael Burry of ‘The Big Short’ reveals a $530M bet against Tesla

#289
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating subject. I also just want to mention why it makes sense that people SELL put options, in addition to buying them. If you sell a put option, then you have the obligation to sell in the future at the fixed price, regardless of the market price at the time. However, many of these positions are "covered", meaning that someone can sell a put option while owning as many stocks as they sell in options. So if the…

> these positions are "covered", meaning that someone can sell a put option while owning as many stocks as they sell in options A covered call is where you sell options backed by long shares. A covered put is backed by short shares. A common way of selling puts without shorting the underlying stock is just having enough cash on hand to buy the underlying asset if the option is exercised. And yeah, some small investor…

I've also long wanted to develop a low-frequency trading bot for automatic index futures options writing.

Re: Michael Burry of ‘The Big Short’ reveals a $530M bet against Tesla

#290
post #282

Eventually somebody on Wall Street is going to figure out that Tesla’s business is batteries, that Tesla’s batteries are getting good enough to compete with natural gas peaker plants, and that there is a massive effort underway to convert our electric grid away from burning fossil fuels.

Nothing beats fossil fuels, what are you talking about?

New solar is cheaper than operating existing coal plants: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/10/23/its-cheaper-to-build-...

Battery storage is becoming cost competitive with natural gas peaker plants: https://www.greentechmedia.com/webinars/webinar/will-energy-...

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