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Musk endeavours

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tjh290633
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Re: Musk endeavours

#145433

Postby tjh290633 » June 13th, 2018, 1:18 pm

Meatyfool wrote:
PeterGray wrote:Surprising how many company ceos could say that - though I doubt many could keep a straight face doing it!


It seems increasingly obvious to me that Musk has a real beef with financiers. He just seems to go out of his way to rub them up.

How many other CEOs would love to finance their business by getting customers to make large deposits years in advance of their purchase? Selling useless tat for large amounts of money as another cash line!

The redundancies could simply be face value - Tesla has burned a lot of cash and so needs to reign in before they run out. But just perhaps, maybe they need to start building bridges again with those financiers, and slashing jobs is always their first port of call for belt tightening.

Of course, he could just announce pre-orders for the Model Y but that runs the risk of cannibalising the pre-orders for the Model S - there is a "syndrome" for that - in the early 80s a computer manufacturer trailed their next product and all those who would have bought their current model held back for the next one and bankrupt the company!

Meatyfool..

In 1959, Pittsburgh Plate Glass announced that they had just bought a Pilkington twin plate grinding line. The next day, Pilkington announced the Float Glass Process. PPG changed their decision to buy a float glass licence.

Pilkington did well to keep their process under wraps for so long. Musk's problem could be that he is advancing too quickly and announcing his advances too soon.

TJH

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Re: Musk endeavours

#145441

Postby ReformedCharacter » June 13th, 2018, 1:46 pm

tjh290633 wrote:In 1959, Pittsburgh Plate Glass announced that they had just bought a Pilkington twin plate grinding line. The next day, Pilkington announced the Float Glass Process. PPG changed their decision to buy a float glass licence.

Pilkington did well to keep their process under wraps for so long. Musk's problem could be that he is advancing too quickly and announcing his advances too soon.

TJH

Apologies for going off-topic. The float glass process was apparently inspired by one of the Pilkingtons whilst finishing the washing-up. A case of lateral thinking, perhaps. If you have ever pulled a cloth from a sink or bowl of water and noticed that it can 'float' across the top of the water if pulled in a certain way you will get the idea. It's interesting the way the mind works...

RC

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Re: Musk endeavours

#145514

Postby odysseus2000 » June 13th, 2018, 9:35 pm

Musk buys $25 million Tesla shares:


https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon- ... 2018-06-13

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Re: Musk endeavours

#145543

Postby BobbyD » June 14th, 2018, 9:07 am

odysseus2000 wrote:Musk buys $25 million Tesla shares:


https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon- ... 2018-06-13

Regards,


Using the highly accurate methodology of googling 'elon musk net worth' to determine that he is worth around $20 billion, that would equate to 0.125% of his personal wealth, which isn't really much of a statement.

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Re: Musk endeavours

#145577

Postby odysseus2000 » June 14th, 2018, 11:10 am

Yes, if Musk is worth $20b then $25m isn't that large a %.

But how much of the putative $20b is money he can access?

Much of that wealth is based on his stake in SpaceX and consequently could fluctuate wildly.

How much cash does he have? Couldn't find an answer to that. He was apparently broke and had to be given money by friends to pay his daily bills not so many years ago, but now he has 4 multi-million $ US mansions.

Where has all this cash come from? Not as far as I can tell from his salary at Tesla, he doesn't take anything above the minimum wage, nor from sales of Tesla stock which he apparently does not do, but somewhere in his empire there seems to be a source of the folding stuff, but how much and from what sources. Its only with that kind of information, which I don't have, that one can judge whether $25 million cash is a lot or not.

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Re: Musk endeavours

#145821

Postby odysseus2000 » June 15th, 2018, 12:25 pm

Solar is now the biggest source of new US power:

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/arti ... ssion=true

Tariffs may hurt the supply of Chinese panels making me wonder if large US based fabrication could be coming, something like the giga factory for solar, perhaps not just base panels, but the disguised roofing panels that Musk has promoted.

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Re: Musk endeavours

#145887

Postby BobbyD » June 15th, 2018, 3:46 pm

odysseus2000 wrote:Tariffs may hurt the supply of Chinese panels making me wonder if large US based fabrication could be coming, something like the giga factory for solar, perhaps not just base panels, but the disguised roofing panels that Musk has promoted.


Would you really invest hundreds of millions of dollars on the expectation that Trump is going to be consistent for the rest of his term, and that whoever serves the next 4 years will also continue the policy?

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Re: Musk endeavours

#145902

Postby odysseus2000 » June 15th, 2018, 4:30 pm

BobbyD
Would you really invest hundreds of millions of dollars on the expectation that Trump is going to be consistent for the rest of his term, and that whoever serves the next 4 years will also continue the policy?


No, but as solar is now the new energy of choice, investing in the capability to feed that demand from an internal factory free from what ever tariffs/politicians etc that come along is something I would think very positively about doing.

The big question would be can I make such a factory and compete with lower labour costs elsewhere, i.e. can I use a lot of robots to do the work.

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Re: Musk endeavours

#145914

Postby dspp » June 15th, 2018, 5:00 pm

The Chinese factories already use a very large amount of automation. Putting a factory in the US is just making it a hostage, and a higher cost producer from day1. Why do it ?
regards, dspp

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Re: Musk endeavours

#145958

Postby odysseus2000 » June 15th, 2018, 7:53 pm

The Chinese factories already use a very large amount of automation. Putting a factory in the US is just making it a hostage, and a higher cost producer from day1. Why do it ?
regards, dspp


This is an argument I see a lot.

The problem I have with it is: How big a difference to a highly automated factory do labour costs make and what does one save on time and transport?

If you have a large scale US producer you make yourself independent of supply disruption, you likely pick up gold stars from the politicians for employing Americans in terms of grants, favourable tax treatment etc.

Additionally if the solar market is going towards roof tiles you can more easily make to order than having to deal with long lead times from imports.

I have no idea if Musk is thinking along these lines, but based on what he has done it seems potentially plausible.

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Re: Musk endeavours

#145994

Postby BobbyD » June 15th, 2018, 9:24 pm

odysseus2000 wrote:No, but as solar is now the new energy of choice


The energy of choice of the Trumpettes is coal, as dirty as you can make it.

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Re: Musk endeavours

#146011

Postby odysseus2000 » June 15th, 2018, 10:33 pm

BobbyD
The energy of choice of the Trumpettes is coal, as dirty as you can make it.


The political rhetoric of Trump is for coal, the reality is solar.

In investment one has to be able to tell the difference between what a politician says to get elected & what they do, often very different irrespective of politician or party or nation.

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Re: Musk endeavours

#146038

Postby BobbyD » June 16th, 2018, 7:03 am

odysseus2000 wrote:
BobbyD
The energy of choice of the Trumpettes is coal, as dirty as you can make it.


The political rhetoric of Trump is for coal, the reality is solar.

In investment one has to be able to tell the difference between what a politician says to get elected & what they do, often very different irrespective of politician or party or nation.

Regards,



The political support from Trump is for Coal. He isn't going to hold your hand and walk you around the Rose Garden for investing in Solar, and we all know how he treats Gold Stars.

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Re: Musk endeavours

#146045

Postby BobbyD » June 16th, 2018, 8:16 am

FT big read: 'Tesla: reality begins to collide with Elon Musk’s vision'

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Tesla ... e&ie=UTF-8

Off to get some breakfast to read it over.

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Re: Musk endeavours

#146055

Postby odysseus2000 » June 16th, 2018, 10:21 am

BobbyD
The political support from Trump is for Coal. He isn't going to hold your hand and walk you around the Rose Garden for investing in Solar, and we all know how he treats Gold Stars


In a small number of States there is a coal mining industry, paying heed to them gets Trump a few votes, that is all. Most States have no coal & don't want it.

Look at the coal shipment figures for CSX rail if you want to see the secular decline in coal.

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Re: Musk endeavours

#146059

Postby odysseus2000 » June 16th, 2018, 10:39 am

BobbyD
FT big read: 'Tesla: reality begins to collide with Elon Musk’s vision'

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Tesla ... e&ie=UTF-8

Off to get some breakfast to read it over.


I used to subscribe to the FT, but it became useless as it is full of opinions, most of them divorced from reality.

It neither predicted a Trump, or Brexit victory, and it has been an endless supporter of Bremain. Every bad thing that happens in the UK they cite as evidence that Brexit is wrong.

The writers & editors have a disdain for many things and in my opinion have decided what the conclusion will be before they do the research.

Sure Musk & Tesla can fail, but the shares have been very good to me recently, that is all an investor/trader cares about. The folk who have been critical of Tesla and who have been short, it is or maybe was the most shorted stock in the US according to some commentators, have been murdered.

Now after a huge run the FT gets concerned about Tesla & who knows they may now be right, but so far the naysayers have been wrong. Chanos, one of the major bears was even questioning the legality of what Tesla was doing, since his detailed short thesis has so hurt his investors, he now seems to believe that there is some conspiracy to defraud him. There were similar folk making similar claims against Amazon when their short positions got hurt back late last century.

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Re: Musk endeavours

#146066

Postby dspp » June 16th, 2018, 11:39 am

I read this FT article and thought it was pretty balanced in giving both sides of the debate at a reasonable level of analysis, and so it is worth reading imho.

As it happens I had a long run (2h) in a Tesla during the week, and was also discussing the duality of the stock vs the product with friends, and there are some interesting angles on it. In the FT article Lutz says that the Tesla factory is overmanned compared with the comparable legacy factory. In general I would agree with that, but I am not sure he is making an apples to apples comparison as I think Tesla insourced a number of big items that are outsourced to tier 1 in trad auto - but I haven't sufficiently good data to be sure. Also Lutz says that the Tesla contains nothing that a trad auto builder couldn't do, and that is a fair point, except they haven't done it. When you speak with trad high end German auto senior staff they admit how far behind they are in doing it. Achingly far behind. The Tesla S that I was in blows away a BMW 7-series in terms of real-world driving/travelling experience.

That speed-to-market argument is the nub of the argument for me. There is no doubt that at product level the Tesla is the way forwards, or clones thereof. However Tesla have to get past cash breakeven to keep the time advantage they currently have, and then pull ahead in the scale game. Therefore in stock terms it is a very legitimate short play. However it is a crying shame to watch the shorters (or some of them, and some of the more Darwinesque owners) engaging in bad behavior at the product level, but that's part of the market I guess.

The software update that Tesla put out to all the cars in the last week contains some anti-Darwin precautions in it that, for the first time, are getting some user-kickback. Which indicates that Tesla are just about finding the pain-point there. I witnessed that personally, and it was interesting to watch the owner's response.

I don't directly hold any Tesla stock, long or short.

regards, dspp

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Re: Musk endeavours

#146103

Postby odysseus2000 » June 16th, 2018, 2:38 pm

OK, so I Read the FT article & then I read the comments.

My impression is that almost no one has a clue about this.

A large percentage of the comments/article question Musk's mental stance which is fine if the folk also question their own.

Having a PhD caused me to walk among the kind of people & attitudes that are presented here & I used to have them to. Amongst the educated elite there is a generally held belief that the only solutions that matter are complicated ones that only folk with a good education can fathom. But here is the problem, if this is the case why does evolution or God (choose your predujice) make so many 'common folk'. If intellectual ability was what mattered the folk with higher degrees would in some material ways out perform others. In practice the folk with higher degrees dramatically under perform. Few of them make any substantial money, most of them are miserable depressed people with opinions on things that are endlessly wrong.

I could go through the FT article & comments & identify the folk who no doubt have good jobs but achieve nothing. Such kind of folk are vital for things like engineering, medicine, science, but in terms of creating a greater good they do so only as parts of the mechanism. The folk who change the world are the entrepreneurs & the politicians & most of the latter make the world worse.

There is something pure & spiritual about the folk who bring positive advancement: Evolution or God recognises this by arranging matters such that the direction of humanity is set by the folk who inspire us, not by the folk who are brilliant at some microscopic but vital part of civilisation. This can go badly wrong as it did with Hitler, but overall it has served humanity well.

For investors/traders it is not about finding the most brilliant of mind, but about finding the folk who can make things better for most of us. If you study histories entrepreneurs you will find this is the pervasive thread that runs throughout their lives connecting them all together in a powerful force for advancement.

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Re: Musk endeavours

#146196

Postby odysseus2000 » June 16th, 2018, 11:47 pm

If I was to be asked what is the biggest risk to Tesla, my answer would be that something bad happening to Elon Musk would trash the share price.

In Musk's twitter stream he has recently re-tweeted a tweet by someone saying that they were placed on Earth for one thing: To kill Elon Musk, tweet not linked here since it contains swearing.

One can recall the murder of the Kennedy brothers, the killing of John Lennon, the shooting of Reagan, the mass murders at numerous venues in the US...

For the moment I see harm to Musk as the greatest single point worry for Tesla longs, made difficult to handle as his future health & well being are impossible to predict.

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Re: Musk endeavours

#146201

Postby dspp » June 17th, 2018, 12:37 am

o2000,
If I may say so, and please excuse me if I am wrong, but your last two posts are quite identified with Musk. I am trying to understand and appreciate Tesla as being, at least somewhat, distinct from Musk. So wherever possible I am quantitative, and wherever not I am qualitative but aligned in some sense with business-relevant matters. I am very deliberately not worshipping at the feet of Musk.
regards,
dspp


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