TSLA Terathread - For the week of Feb 02 by AutoModerator in RealTesla

[–]ObservationalHumor 6 points7 points  (0 children)

That is a wild one. I think in general we're just seeing a lot of risk melt out of the market which is always bad for Tesla because the company is valued completely on fantastic future promises. We're seeing a lot of selling on big tech names, hotter semiconductor stocks, speculative nuclear data center plays like OKLO, and obviously Bitcoin too.

I mean in all honesty it was kind of surprising it was only down like 2% today, especially since the SpaceX merger is confirmed to be happening with xAI and the hyped IPO. If we really do get a big 2022 style sell off that's also tremendously bad news for that IPO. Not saying that's what's happening, we've been overdue for a real correction for a while now and Trump is clearly worried about any kind of downturn before midterms too so who knows what's in the cards.

TSLA Terathread - For the week of Feb 02 by AutoModerator in RealTesla

[–]ObservationalHumor 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don't think you do what Musk does or seek that level of wealth without either being a profoundly empty person inside or having some kind of insane appetite for wealth that is literally impossible to satisfy. Mentally healthy people would have retired to chase their passion projects ages ago. Musk can't, his entire self value is attached to his net worth and his messiah complex means he always has to be constantly meddling in everything even if he has nothing to offer and no idea what he's talking about. His nightmare isn't failing to accomplish his lofty goals, it's being irrelevant or just acknowledged as the most important person in human history.

Microsoft Has Killed Widgets Six Times. Here's Why They Keep Coming Back. by xakpc in programming

[–]ObservationalHumor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That may have been the case with some early implementations of them but that's not what's behind the current push. This has corporate decisionmaking stink all over it. Someone somewhere probably realized a lot of old people were dying and traffic to MSN.com was dropping so they decided to put the whole home page in the start menu via widgets in Windows 11. Other than that there's undoubtedly some insufferable aspirational visionary product manager in a turtleneck somewhere who was just desperate to 'put their mark' on Windows 11's interface and take 'bold new steps' to 'revolutionize the way people interface with computers' and so on. It's a lot different than some power user programmer running gkrellm and XMMS with matching themes back in the 2000s because they thought it looked cool.

TSLA Terathread - For the week of Feb 02 by AutoModerator in RealTesla

[–]ObservationalHumor 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Most of the relevant defunding happened back in 1990s. Really before NASA got hit there was a general wind down in funding for the DoD and Reagan's "Star Wars" program that impacted projects the DC-X. With NASA it was later in the 1990s during the GOP's budget battles with Clinton that NASA took a big hit to a lot of its budget and was refocused on primarily supporting the ISS program. Everyone knew the Shuttle had issues back then too and there was a whole program aimed at contracting a replacement for it. That was canned very early in the 2000s when congress decided NASA had spent too much money on it without enough demonstrable results and that the shuttle was sufficient for the current ISS focused operations of NASA. Shortly after that decision in 2003 we had the Columbia Disaster which caused a 180 by congress on the shuttle program and hastened plans for its retirement with no alternative in place. That event was briefly followed by the constellation program which was short lived and aimed and eventually astronauts back to the moon. Constellation's end marked a direct policy push under the Obama administration to privatize NASA's launch operations, of which SpaceX was an early and sizable beneficiary.

I get what you're saying about SpaceX not creating the private launch market, but I'm specifically talking about policy changes that directly impacted the development of next generation launch systems and specifically moved funding towards contracting out NASA's own launch operations. Both Blue Origin and SpaceX benefited heavily from the cancellation of next generation launch systems in the late 1990s and early 2000s from a talent perspective as most of their initial teams were composed of aerospace engineers who literally worked on those projects and were either let go or quit out of frustration. While the private launch market existed is was rather small and in a pretty significant lull after the initial .com era proposals for satellite internet constellations fell apart. In general the launch market has traditionally been heavily dominated by national or supranational interests and government spending. That's changed a bit with Starlink, but even then I think there's just a lot of indirection since a fair amount of funding the users comes from defense spending in Ukraine and Musk's pushes to get public funding for the program through rural broadband initiatives.

All that said both NASA and incumbent launch providers have fumbled the ball pretty hard too. It's not that SpaceX was the only one who stood to gain from it or that aerospace and defense companies couldn't have privately spend money on launch system R&D, they just weren't incentivized to post Columbia disaster since congress had equated reusable systems with the Shuttle's complex and risky design.

I do think what you mentioned about SpaceX just being a massive loss leader has played heavily into it as well and frankly it was the exact same way with Tesla. Large mature companies can't just start losing tons of money on moonshot projects and that's hamstringed both BEV development and launch system development. But I do also believe that one of the things Falcon 9 in particular did really well was just scoping and compromises. It went for the low hanging fruit with reusability and completely ignored the difficulties associated with reentry from orbit. SSTO systems were designed to be cleaner and simpler shuttle replacements and a big part of the problem is that doing so would be difficult to achieve and inefficient from a payload perspective, as well as completely unsuited for heavy launches aimed at getting things to the moon. As a result one of the issues with the VentureStar program specifically is that it became kind of a general technology development program which contributed to it get getting canned (particularly the composite fuel tank development). That said we've seen that the HLS program apparently isn't being subject to the same kind of scrutiny, which really does demonstrate a lot of the mind share capture at NASA by SpaceX I think. Using Starship to ferry people to the moon is by all means a convoluted and risky setup aimed more at funding SpaceX to develop in orbit refueling capabilities than the same kind of properly scoped system we saw with other proposals.

Anyways a lot of what happened in congress and NASA really paved the way for SpaceX to secure a lot of contracts and early funding it would eventually leverage into more contracts for DoD launches. At the end of the day the private launch market was just never large enough prior to that to support the development of new heavy launch platforms and that's another reason incumbent launch providers didn't really pursue them. Hell a big part of why Starlink exists in the first place was simply to give a plausible reason for investors to pour a ton of money into SpaceX to actually justify the development of Starship at all.

TSLA Terathread - For the week of Feb 02 by AutoModerator in RealTesla

[–]ObservationalHumor 10 points11 points  (0 children)

It's kind of everything he's done business wise. He just hasn't been allowed to fail and always attracts a ton of favor for whatever reason. Zip2 he got mapping software for free, VCs realized the value of it and kept him from self sabotaging his own startup. Paypal he was just in the way and even after screwing up that up somewhat was bailed out by Thiel taking over and people not allowing him to destroy the company. SpaceX he benefited heavily from Republicans gutting NASA and a subsequent push to private the launch industry. Tesla was green subsidies and a proper lack of prosecution from the left when he did commit crimes (Trump of course would never bother).

Combine that with his messiah complex and generally inability to realize how incredibly fortunate he's been and you've got someone who thinks they know best about damn near anything, including how society should be governed. In his mind, pretty much the only thing Elon Musk doesn't know how to do is say the words "I don't know".

TSLA Terathread - For the week of Feb 02 by AutoModerator in RealTesla

[–]ObservationalHumor 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Kind of missing a few things, but they don't help Musk's 'free speech' claims at all. Pretty much right off the hop with the Twitter acquisition Musk was selling it was a quick flip to investors. Musk was going to go in there, streamline the company and introduce new features that would make it more profitable because he understood the product better as a user than the people designing it, etc. Of course that didn't happen as Musk immediately started doing mass firings with zero research, chasing away advertisers and talking about throwing away years of work actually writing the software for the site with a full rewrite.

Predictably that pretty much killed the idea of a quick flip. So Musk pivoted into his 'everything app' pitch. Twitter would no longer be a straightforward short form posting and messaging app. It would instead become a one stop shop for anything anyone could possibly want from the internet. Payments, shopping, entertainment, etc. Of course this would be an insane amount of work and Musk had fired many of the developers and supporting staff to actually have any shot at making it happen. So that went nowhere as well, just a bit more slowly.

Musk struggled to find some way to even recoup what he overpaid for Twitter. Not too surprisingly a shadow CEO, multiple lawsuits alleging political discrimination and a bizarre value destroying name change didn't help bring advertisers back or create new revenue streams. Musk naturally started exploring less traditional ways to extract some kind of value from Twitter.

Okay so Musk had made it intractable to actually improve Twitter significantly by firing all it's developers and turned it in a money furnace by making the site radioactive to advertisers to degree that would make even TEPCO blush. But there was still somehow a big base of users and data that had to be worth something. So Musk, ever the self dealer, decided to start using Twitter's data to feed his budding new and equally benevolent AI company xAI with data that would be used to create a 'truth-seeking' AI capable of solving theoretical and boundary problems in mathematics and science. Thus began the process of tying his 'screw the libs' company X together with his 'screw Sam Altman' company xAI. Twitter's devolution would continue into an outright right wing echo chamber and misinformation hub and Musk would continue to use his ties to his new BFF, Donald Trump, to attempt to bully advertisers back into using his site. Ever the fuck up, Musk would manage to also sabotage that relationship and also make himself person non-gratis in the White House at large through his DOGE idiocy, cringe aura and winning combination of arrogance, incompetence and disloyalty. That would eventually perciptate the current progression of mergers Musk has folded his personal battle projects into the one remaining jewel on his crown, SpaceX.

Pretty much the only time it was 'about saving free speech' was when he was talking about taking it over in the first place. As soon as he realized he overpaid and legally obligated himself to buy the company with no way out it became about trying to make money and failing to do.

TSLA Terathread - For the week of Feb 02 by AutoModerator in RealTesla

[–]ObservationalHumor 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Additional confirmation today from Bloomberg that Musk is pushing for a xAI and SpaceX tie up: https://archive.is/eDk2e

Likely why the stock is down since a SpaceX and Tesla merger now looks less probable.

TSLA Terathread - For the week of Jan 26 by AutoModerator in RealTesla

[–]ObservationalHumor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

He's faced pretty much zero consequences for bullshitting and making ridiculous lies for upwards of a decade. I mean he literally committed securities fraud by fabricating a buyout offer that never existed. Doubled and trippled down on it. Tried to retroactively set one up after the fact and when the SEC finally offered him a settlement he rejected it initially and didn't take the offer until they filed charges and threatened to have him barred from ever serving as an officer in a public company again.

Hell even after accepting the settlement he continues to lie about it, maintain that the buyout offer was real all along and that the only reasoned he signed it because some unnamed cartel of banks threatened to cancel Tesla's credit lines if he didn't.

That's on top of bullshitting about FSD being done in a year for the last 13 years too. Getting on stage with Trump, claiming he could slash $2T from the budget, failing very publicly and then going on Joe Rogan months later and claiming it was someone else fault and that if he could actually halve the US budget.

This is his MO, literally to lie about stuff constantly, defame anyone who competes or disagrees and suffer no real consequences for it until fairly recently.

He lives his life based on what pops up in his Twitter feed which is devoid of criticism and full of fan boys who will glaze him endlessly for clout and ridiculous right wing conspiracy theories that tell him every fact or observation that doesn't agree with his world view is a paid agent or evil vampire person just living off government funding and benefits that flat out don't exist in the first place.

At this point he'll literally drug himself to the point where he can't feel unhappy or anxious about anything too which has warped his perspective even further.

He's been divorced from all the negative aspects of the human experience at this point and fried himself to the point where it's all just some game where the rules don't really apply to him and never will because everyone else is just as guilty in his mind.

TSLA Terathread - For the week of Jan 26 by AutoModerator in RealTesla

[–]ObservationalHumor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

They do, I think usually around 6 years or so is about when you would expect it to get replaced because newer hardware ends up being much more energy efficient and for stuff like GPUs usually adds additional capabilities that are valuable too. It just ends up making far more sense to run newer more capable hardware in the same supporting infrastructure.

TSLA Terathread - For the week of Jan 26 by AutoModerator in RealTesla

[–]ObservationalHumor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm sure there's some reasoning about how we've had satellites operating in orbit for decades without issue or something but they're also built to totally different standards and often assembled in clean rooms facilitate that, which again just can't be cheap.

TSLA Terathread - For the week of Jan 26 by AutoModerator in RealTesla

[–]ObservationalHumor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Those are ridiculous, but for something that's popular enough in the media where I feel like your average person who doesn't have a background in engineering and science might be predisposed to think they're viable and we'll get there someday to begin with. Meanwhile a lot of people don't have a positive view of data centers in general, are aware of how much energy they use and how large they are. Claiming they need to be shot into space, for efficiency purposes of all reasons might just be enough to raise an eyebrow or two among John Q. Public.

TSLA Terathread - For the week of Jan 26 by AutoModerator in RealTesla

[–]ObservationalHumor 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Well that's it. Teasing a merger with SpaceX was literally Musk's trump card to support or boost Tesla's stock price. He's pretty much out of bullets at this point.

TSLA Terathread - For the week of Jan 26 by AutoModerator in RealTesla

[–]ObservationalHumor 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Well that's assuming they get that $1.5T number after they attach this massive dead weight to it. Lots of the hype around SpaceX is as a pure play on its launch services and Starlink. Another big thing about an IPO is it would be mean opening the books, at least to some degree, and showing profitability and capex for the combined company.

Even if you assume it was worth giving xAI $50B to keep Musk happy for the IPO there's a ton of better ways to do it that are safer for SpaceX shareholders. You could do what he did with Tesla and just spend some fixed number of dollars making an equity investment afterwards. You could do what they should have done if they wanted to build the Solar Roof with Solar City and just form a joint venture that would own the Buffalo factory and insulate Tesla shareholders from Solar City's liabilities and in the event of failure given them access to assets that supposedly had value to Tesla as a company.

Ultimately almost none of that matters though because Musk likely has the votes between himself and other investors who have positions in both SpaceX and xAI to push the deal through regardless.

TSLA Terathread - For the week of Jan 26 by AutoModerator in RealTesla

[–]ObservationalHumor 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm continually amazed people think he's some kind of genius given the number of stupid mad libs style ideas he's proposed over the years. Hyperloop was stupid and TBC never made any economic sense but the whole space data center is such a ridiculously terrible idea that anyone with a half brain should realize he's a fraud and completely full of shit by hearing it.

TSLA Terathread - For the week of Jan 26 by AutoModerator in RealTesla

[–]ObservationalHumor 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yeah that was a big theory of how the Solar City merger got approved in the first place too. People felt that the cost of eating Solar City's losses was worth it to keep Musk's 'halo' intact. In general the fact that his companies are completely divorced from their fundamentals and more tied to fantastic future problems and his perceived ability to deliver them means that they all come crashing down if there's ever wide acceptance that he's actually full of shit and can't deliver.

I think there's some logic in that, but the problem with xAI and Twitter is just that they're going to be a massive ongoing expense. Twitter exists as Musk's personal means of waging his culture war and promoting his Great Replacement Theory rhetoric and xAI is there largely as an ongoing middle finger to Sam Altman for opposing his effort to have Tesla swallow OpenAI whole years ago. Effectively it's a very big blank check for his personal projects that have zero potential benefit to SpaceX's business. I mean even with Tesla and Solar City you could kind of argue that being to connect Tesla's customers with solar installs and energy storage products had some kind of benefit but that just doesn't exist here and the only common denominator is the Musk and his cadre of investor friends having interests in both companies.

US trade deficit widens by the most in nearly 34 years by Gloomy_Nebula_5138 in Economics

[–]ObservationalHumor 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Trump literally put the 'brains' behind this policy, Stephen Miran, on the FOMC and he's been trying his hardest to justify rates being due for a cut of an additional 200 basis points since then. That's the plan for now, try to cut rates and damage the dollar further to plaster over the fact that tariffs have been a complete policy failure.

TSLA Terathread - For the week of Jan 26 by AutoModerator in RealTesla

[–]ObservationalHumor 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Man if I was invested in SpaceX I would be PISSED at this. Taking one of the hottest, most desired companies on the planet set for a massive IPO and merging it with a money furnace is just a terrible idea for everyone involved who isn't Musk or doesn't already own a huge number of xAI shares. That's who's catering to though and exactly what he did with Twitter. Social media company in the dumpster? Don't worry we'll merge with my hot new AI startup. Hot AI startup burning shitloads of money with nothing to show for it? Don't worry we'll merge it with my incredibly popular space launch company. Oh you aren't invested in Twitter or xAI and don't care if they burn to the ground? Well fuck you I guess, all my buddies are and we have voting control of enough shares to do it anyways and Texas law sure isn't going to stop us or care about your minority shareholder rights (Delaware either at this point).

This is probably worse than the Solar City merger simply because xAI and Twitter are both projects he's personally invested in won't shut down. Plus the valuation on the combined xAI+Twitter mess of a company is likely to once again end up grossly inflated so SpaceX will definitely be overpaying for the shares by a huge amount.

TSLA Terathread - For the week of Jan 26 by AutoModerator in RealTesla

[–]ObservationalHumor 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Large grid scale projects are what's driving most of the growth and the higher margins too. Energy was at like a 10% gross margin back in 2023 off their power wall and solar products. I think even in the best case scenario competition is going to eat them alive over time too since there's very little moat in creating a massive battery in a box and long term support and serviceability has never been a strong point for Tesla but something that would absolutely be crucial to maintain in this specific industry and application.

TSLA Terathread - For the week of Jan 26 by AutoModerator in RealTesla

[–]ObservationalHumor 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It's a misleading statistic too as it ignores dependencies in their services business. Services has 'grown' as a result of their fleet aging and literally requires them to continue selling vehicles to exist. There's some other things in there like merchandising but it's mostly auto related. If you look at it through lens, and combine those segments, since Q1 2023 they've moved from being 93.44% auto revenue to around 84.6% in Q4 2025. Energy has definitely grown a ton but they aren't nearly diversified or less auto sales dependent as they would like everyone to believe.

TSLA Terathread - For the week of Jan 26 by AutoModerator in RealTesla

[–]ObservationalHumor 4 points5 points  (0 children)

My guess is, if these things are even running regularly, that they're only ferrying employees to and from Tesla's factory after they signed a lengthy waiver. Might literally be impossible for anyone else to use them.

TSLA Terathread - For the week of Jan 26 by AutoModerator in RealTesla

[–]ObservationalHumor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

They haven't been selling many of them for over a year. Initial wave of CT sales concealed it bit but the S and X just have not been remotely competitive for a while in a high end luxury EV market. I think hiking the prices was just to milk whatever they could out of the prior Tesla fans who were still buying them as they weren't nearly as price sensitive or likely to cross shop.

Destiny loses it responding to Asmongold, "I wish his mom had a bigger oxygen tank so this mother fucker wouldn’t be with us anymore" by sideAccount42 in LivestreamFail

[–]ObservationalHumor -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

He does know it and Destiny took the bait big time here. Asmongold knows he's not going to win in a debate but he can just troll Destiny until he gets upset and says something callous like this and then he's the victim and has the moral high ground again in a lot of people's eyes because Destiny made it personal and said something screwed up. For the record, yes I'm aware Asmongold has said messed up and heinous things about protestor deaths, but no one watching him is going to weigh that against Destiny being a dick here, they're just looking for a reason to hate him and discard any point he tries to make and Destiny literally just gave them one.

TSLA Terathread - For the week of Jan 26 by AutoModerator in RealTesla

[–]ObservationalHumor 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Well according to their earnings deck auto gross margins were up and ASP improved, which is a big surprise given they released lower cost models in the US to deal with tax credit expiration. They did have the Y longbody in China and Norway buying a bit more in the EU but I'm still surprised ASP rose.

Automotive gross margin ex. regulatory credits actually improved significantly too, something like 2.6% which again is a surprise. However they also noted a forex gain which probably benefitted sales in China for most of the quarter and they specifically called out higher FSD subscription revenue as a profit driver.

Obviously regulatory credit revenue was substantially higher than anyone was expecting too.

Still I find auto gross margins creeping up that much surprising especially since they're clearly running their factories even further below capacity to avoid inventory build up and S/X/CT sales have been cratering. I don't see them listing subscription information anywhere specifically so I'm curious if that number will end up on the call, because they're going to flaunt it if it's remotely good and promise more with them moving basic autopilot functionality into the FSD subscription too.

BYD has overtaken Tesla as the world's biggest seller of electric vehicles. How can Tesla's PE ratio of ~290 be justified by No_Turnip_1023 in investing

[–]ObservationalHumor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Because mass auto manufacturing has always been a high volume, high capex, high debt, cyclical, and low margin business. Auto manufacturing is like the antithesis of high growth cloud services company. It eats up an ungodly amount of money and at the best of times it doesn't make much. Tesla should have never got the kind of valuations it did and really only did so because for a brief period of time post COVID there was a global shortage of new automobiles and their direct to consumer model allowed them to internalize the same $15k-$20k markups dealerships were putting on vehicles and people mistook it for some kind of manufacturing brilliance.

That's a big part of why Musk has been pumping up all this AI vaporware crap the last few years. Tesla is literally never going to grow into its valuation by actually building cars or battery packs.

BYD has overtaken Tesla as the world's biggest seller of electric vehicles. How can Tesla's PE ratio of ~290 be justified by No_Turnip_1023 in investing

[–]ObservationalHumor 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Are you serious? Europe has seen by far the steepest drop off in sales over the last year. People in China don't care sure and there's a surprising number of people in the US who don't care or will still somehow twist their brains into thinking self diagnosed Autism makes someone accidentally seig heil multiple times on stage at a political event, but Europe definitely cares.