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P.S. SpaceX, if you haven't realised, is burning through money and nearly gone bankrupt several times. So has Tesla.

Elon relies on having a huge personal stash of money to burn. And governments, etc. let him because then they get cheap space launches (at risk, but cheap) because he and his investors are basically subsidising the launches and taking the heat for any mistakes.

https://seekingalpha.com/artic...

Both companies have been around for - what? 15-20 years? Musk is rich - he got rich off Paypal but it wasn't his, and certainly wasn't *solely* his. Since then, everything he's done is with his money at his risk. He can afford to burn hundreds of millions a year. He can probably afford to continue doing similar until the day he dies.

The reason that other companies haven't emulated his "success" is that they don't want to sit and just burn their money. They want to make a decent profit. So they let him break the new ground, burn through what they themselves invest as a small percentage of their profits in R&D every year, let him take the risk, and then if anything is successful they can leap on it.

Note that car manufacturer's aren't scrambling to sell you their electric cars. They have an electric model. All of them. But they don't really care about it. They don't push it heavily. It's a niche market still. They sell a thousand times more cars that aren't electric. He can own that market for decades, they won't even notice a dint in their profits. But when the tide turns and electric cars start being required, they can out-spend, out-produce, out-perform and out-sell his companies in a matter of days (they literally make as many cars in a few days as he sells all year long).

They're using him. He's the public face of all those movements. He's digging tunnels that would cost other people billions. Of *course* they let him do that. They get a cheap tunnel dug. And once the tunnel is there, it pretty much doesn't matter what happens to his company. They use his throw-away toy projects to achieve things on the cheap.

The train thing - you don't see other train companies scrambling to emulate it. Hell, even Samsung/Apple are constantly playing catch-up with each other in the most ridiculous ways. Nobody's even trying to play catch-up with SpaceX, Tesla, the hyperloop, or the tunnelling company. They won't compete because they can't because they don't want to - it's unprofitable for them to do so.

Musk doesn't have much to do with Tesla any more either - he can't make public statements, he's not in charge any more, it's yet-another-company that he's been thrown out of, effectively.

Now watch as it starts to "return" to a normal business. Sure, the paper will show they're not doing as much now he's gone. Because now all the things he did that *weren't* compatible with being a profitable business will disappear. Because he's not a sugar-daddy over there any more yelling to have that stuff done.

All the companies he's ever been involved with are the same... Paypal is a brilliant example. They bought his company. Made him rich. Then he shouted his mouth off. They sacked him. And the company *then* became the defacto payment method online.

Musk is a loudmouth investor. The companies he runs, he runs by shouting and doing things that no other company in the world would emulate, because they are not conducive to making profit. He'll burn through his money. People will get *really* great, cheap cars, etc. Of course they will. In time. And then that will disappear, and not much will have changed.

Musk has pet-projects that he funds / gets investment to the tune of hundreds of millions. They're hobbies to him. He runs them like hobbies. He's the rich version of the guy in a garage somewhere who makes an amazing, one-off beautiful car and engine from raw metal during his spare time/retirement, at his own expense. A labour of love. I'm s

The thing you have to watch out for in these PR pieces is that if someone at a company they hire spends half their time filling Apple's order, half their time filling orders for other customers, they'll still count that as one job. When in fact it's only half of a job. To appraise it correctly, you have to multiply the number of individual jobs by the percentage of those people's time which was spent producing stuff for the $60 billion (as opposed to time spent making stuff for other customers).

That will get you a revenue per employee statistic which you can then compare to other companies. If you take $133,000 RPE at face value, that's actually really low. About on par with the level most small businesses operate at, and indicative of very inefficient operation. Which is a pretty good sign that it's just wrong, and the true number of fractional jobs they add to the economy is much less.

And if you want to gripe about what percentage of that is going to the employee, you need to look at profit (net income) per employee. That is, how much more could these companies pay each employee if all profits went to them instead of shareholders. That's why revenue per employee isn't used that often - it mixes together COGS, insurance, equipment costs, taxes, etc with payroll and profit. Net income per employee is a much better metric for judging how much extra each employee could have been paid.

But the tech industry (along with banking, petroleum, and pharmaceuticals is skewed way towards the high end in terms of net income per employee. Most big companies operate at less than $10,000 net income per employee. That is, even if all profits were distributed to employees instead of to shareholders and owners, each employee would only get a few thousand dollars extra.

I completely disagree with you, and your post proves the point.

Disagree all you want but that doesn't make me wrong. Personal anecdotes about your family are not persuasive. I've done the research on this. Intel for a long time had a huge cost advantage in their manufacturing. You don't have to take my word for it. The data is out there for you to look up - I didn't just pull this out of my ass. Harvard has done case studies about this for business schools.

10 years ago my parents wouldn't buy a computer at all unless it had Intel Inside on it, because they trusted Intel made the best chips.

So what? It wasn't like they had any alternatives in the PC space 10 years ago. AMD wasn't exactly hitting it out of the park and there was no option #3 in the PC space. Saying you wanted an Intel CPU in your PC was like saying you wanted a Microsoft operating system. There wasn't much else for most people to really chose from. Furthermore your parents almost certainly DID buy a computer without Intel Inside because I'm betting they owned a mobile phone which is just another type of computer. If Intel's CPU offerings had been worse than AMDs consistently or if AMD had a cost advantage then Intel would have lose market share and no amount of clever marketing would have convinced Apple or HP or the rest to stick with them.

The Intel Inside ad campaign made some marginal differences for Intel but it was not EVER the basis of their market dominance. Intel started that ad campaign in the early 1990s. I remember when it started. They were already the dominant player in CPUs long before the ad campaign started. Seriously, you don't have to take my word for it. Go back and pull their old financial statements and look at market analysis of the day. Intel dominated the PC CPU market because of their cost advantages in manufacturing. Without that Intel would have lost a long time ago.

BlueMountain made the counter-bet that bond holders would lose when GM went into bankruptcy. And that was backwards from normal bankruptcy actions. And Andrew Feldstein, who founded BlueMountain, was a college buddy of President Obama, and both Feldstein and BlueMountain were significant donors to the Democrats and President Obama. Not as significant as the $13+MM of the UAW, but still pretty big...

It's because of import tariffs.
https://seekingalpha.com/artic...

So its valuation earlier this year was externally estimated to be $26 billion and just two months ago was self-reported at 27.5 billion, and securing an additional half billion in funding suddenly pops it to $30.5?

Ali G would be jealous.

A) The president can issue executive orders. Republicans used to think executive orders were bad and unconstitutional, but now they are legal, and necessary undo Obama's legacy of unconstitutionality. Even if courts rule against the executive order, they can maybe just keep making amendments until the courts are satisfied (e.g. like with the muslim ban). Trump doesn't necessarily need to change the law to prevent the federal government from issuing reimbursements through the IRS. I believe the courts will ultimately sort it out, but that may take years for people to receive the reimbursements and be very costly to the government (i.e. taxpayers)

B) The president can ask the republican controlled congress to do just about anything and they will probably listen to him if he can manage to make his request somewhat coherent.

C) They have already attempted to change this law (i.e. end subsidies prematurely) when the last federal budget was passed. Some of the revisions contained clauses to remove these subsidies, but the revision that ultimately passed incidentally did not contain that clause.

Executive orders should be minimal for sure, we don't live in a monarchy. While there are areas clearly under Executive authority they have been abused. Obama used them illegally to enact programs like DACA and DAPA. DAPA has already been blocked by the courts. DACA lawsuits were suspended because the filers expected Trump to reverse it. He did, but that has been held up in court because the Judicial branch overreaches too. "Muslin Ban" was the spin, not the regulation blocking travel from 7 nations. This is one area where the Executive branch clearly does have the authority, and the courts ultimately agreed, The Executive and the IRS can direct changes in some tax policy where they clearly have the authority. Eliminating the EV subsidy outright is not something they can just do.

The president has asked congress for a lot of things. They have a poor record of delivering.

It's pretty easy to call the tax credit a git to the wealthy and eliminate it on those grounds. Here (via reddit) from the Tesla site is how much you have to earn AFTER deductions to benefit from the credits: https://www.reddit.com/r/tesla...

Even if you are in favor of it, the American manufacturers will soon be at the sales volume point where the credit phases out anyway. After that it's pretty easy to justify eliminating it. Even Elon Musk asked Congress to do it: https://seekingalpha.com/artic... . He's no dummy, he knows it will help his competitors more than him.

GM CEO Mary Barra said the company is "still hiring people with expertise in software and electric and autonomous vehicles, and many of those who will lose their jobs are now working on conventional cars with internal combustion engines," reports Dallas News. "Barra said the industry is changing rapidly and moving toward electric propulsion, autonomous vehicles and ride-sharing, and GM must adjust with it."

Those car plants will probably be retooled over the span of a year or two and start producing Electric and Autonomous vehicles and the jobs that they couldn't automate will come back. The real losers here will be all the mechanical engineers that will be replaced with electrical engineers because those jobs are not coming back once the transition to electric cars is complete. This sucks but such is the cost of progress.

Meanwhile in the real world, Tesla consumes more EV batteries than everyone else in the world combined, with Giga alone making about half of the world's total (~20GWh/yr out of ~40GWh/yr). Tesla's US sales make everyone else's look like a rounding error.

US vehicle sales in Q3 were around 1.5 million; Tesla's 83,000 is a rounding error.

Two things:

1. 1) 5.5% isn't a rounding error for a single auto maker in the US market
2. 2) There were way more than 1.5m cars sold in the US in Q3

Meanwhile in the real world, Tesla consumes more EV batteries than everyone else in the world combined, with Giga alone making about half of the world's total (~20GWh/yr out of ~40GWh/yr). Tesla's US sales make everyone else's look like a rounding error.

US vehicle sales in Q3 were around 1.5 million; Tesla's 83,000 is a rounding error.

Meanwhile in the real world, Tesla consumes more EV batteries than everyone else in the world combined, with Giga alone making about half of the world's total (~20GWh/yr out of ~40GWh/yr). Tesla's US sales make everyone else's look like a rounding error.

As for Boring Company, their goals are low-cost PRT. That's the whole point of Loop and Hyperloop. But maybe you'd feel better if the rich were banned from riding? Even their first non-demonstration-scale project (the Chicago Loop) is to charge half as much as an Uber ride. By the time they're up to Prufrock, fares are supposed to be cheaper than bus tickets (but go straight to your destination at high speeds).

It's one thing to be dubious about their probability of success. But it's an entirely different thing to misrepresent their goals.

As for your comments about turning "this tunnel"... "this tunnel" is simply a demonstrator. Little more than an amusement park ride for the general public. It's neither meant as a transportation solution nor to make money; it's meant to inform their engineering for their subsequent tunneling activities. Heck, they're outright planning to have it end at a watchtower made from compressed tailings bricks, manned by a knight who shouts insults at passers-by in a bad French accent.

Krugman's NYT column is called "The Conscience of a Liberal." Nate Silver and Krugman had a public dispute [mashable.com] when Silver left the NYT to form FiveThirtyEight. Silver said, about Krugman [talkingpointsmemo.com], "Plenty of pundits have really high IQs, but they don’t have any discipline in how they look at the world, and so it leads to a lot of bullshit, basically,” Silver said in that interview."

Economic models are data fit to curves. See the 'Philips curve' [google.com] and 'the breakdown of the Philips curve' [google.com]. However, this data exists in the context of other systems. "All Models Are Wrong" [google.com] of course, but it seems to me many economists don't appreciate the error in their models and are willing (and paid) to make grand pronouncements based on highly error-filled models. Often in support of one social narrative or another.

Hey look! Chaff!

That's an awful lot of words to avoid facing that Krugman repeatedly says his simplistic models are not complete and not supposed to be complete.

Krugman: "In the aftermath of the Great Recession, I went with my models and they always worked!" Unfortunately he missed biggest economic event of the past 80 years, the Financial Crisis while a few others did not (side note, he had a feud going with that guy who predicted it).

Yes, it has since the 1980s, but it started stalling around 2005, and that is the point of curiosity.

It's not all that curious. There are plenty of plateaus in productivity in our history. Finding one, especially in an asset bubble that was sucking up a ton of capital, is not all that weird.

You're surprisingly making a bit of sense here. But your assertion that this is not a puzzle in economic circles is wrong.

No, not because 'reasons'. Because of its fairness and resistance to corruption, cronyism and favoritism.

That you can not actually design beyond high-level platitudes.

Nothing I said is a platitude. Work on your literacy, there are many good educational aids out there.

Don't conflate all of Europe as one.

Don't skip over the word "most".

So that leaves Germany.

You apparently think Europe consists of 6 countries, one of which is located in South America. Also, you want to warn people to not over-generalize Europe.

Your reading comprehension needs work. I specifically said Venezuela was not part of Europe, in the part you cut out.

I know you're trying, bless your heart, but try harder.

We're not as homogeneous as Germany for sure, or even the UK so our population has a different temperament, values and intelligence

And why am I not surprised racist bullshit appears.

Nothing I said is racist. One of the reasons the term 'racism' is losing its power in suppressing discussion is because people like you bandy it about too much whenever you disagree with something. It's an incontrovertible fact different groups have different temperaments, intelligence and values. Look up the UN indices on national corruption. Look up national IQs. You know what "Boko Haram" means? Educate yourself, you'll appear less foolish per

And Tesla makes batteries cheaper than anyone else (I think about 25% cheaper) that gives Tesla the edge and competitiveness.

Any source on the 25% cheaper battery cost? A recent guess deduces that Nissan manages lower-cost batteries.

Maybe once Gigafactory finishes ramping up, they will be the cost leader.

Well, then yes they can. There's nothing wrong with being in debt, as long as you can afford to pay it back, but I'm guessing that you don't think that's the case.
https://www.cnsnews.com/news/a...

Household income, even adjusted for inflation, has been rising ever since 2011 (median since 2010, with a dip in 2016), to a record $62,175.
https://seekingalpha.com/artic...

Obviously, I'm not claiming everything is all rosy. We clearly need to do something about college costs as well as the exorbitant cost of healthcare.

I think you're missing the point - all your talk about factory costs and capex are irrelevant; SG&A doesn't include those. Here's a good analysis of how Tesla is in the red from just gross profit and SG&A. This is before R&D, capex, interest expenses, or any other costs. Just the cost of making, selling, and delivering the car (and the related administrative costs required to execute the manufacturing, sale and delivery). It's not a temporary loss - it's systemic. Without a major overhaul in the process (mainly getting SG&A down to below 10% like most other car companies who push the majority SG&A to an independent dealer network), Tesla simply cannot make profit on cars.

Tesla has around a 20% profit margin per car - 5x higher than Ford. Kind of a lot different than "losing money on every car".

So presumably you read the article you linked? Did you really not find the use of 'gross margin' for Tesla's calculations to be a little strange? If not then it's time for you to be educated, here's a handy explainer for you.

The market doesn't reflect it- at all

Says you, the self appointed arbiter of all that is true and comforting on the internet regardless of evidence to the contrary.

But in spite of your blather, the market does reflect it.

Musk has to keep the price above $360/share, otherwise he has to pay back bondholders $960M in cash by March 1st, 2019. Based on its current cash position and expected expenditures Tesla wont have the funds to pay bondholders back.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4196101-elon-musk-desperately-needs-tesla-stock-stay-360

Cute literalism, Karen, but it's clear enough what AC was referring to, particularly for someone as close to the issue as I know you are.

You can't actually order a $35k Model 3 (for delivery on any date), and as shown in detail in the above link Tesla has restructured its ordering and pricing system (both on the website and on the price sheets on the vehicles themselves) to eliminate any reference to $35k as a baseline for the higher-margin configurations they'll actually sell you today. The fact as you point out that they're still including the number in their high-level marketing materials just amplifies the ongoing bait-and-switch.

They were shocked? Must not have listened to or read the Q1 earnings call.

"In terms of our overall 2018 revenue outlook, we continue to anticipate revenue growth rates will decelerate on a constant currency basis throughout the year."

And one of the questions asked included this tidbit: "Growth in MAUs in rest of world was up about 11%; I think last year, it was up almost double that, 19% or so. Anything changed there that maybe could explain the slowdown?"

Q1 Earnings Transcript: https://seekingalpha.com/artic...

There's a difference between being misled and not bothering to pay attention.

A more reliable indicator of wealth is whether or not a person has a subscription to The Wall Street Journal. Ronald Read was a janitor with an $8M fortune when he died and surprised many who thought he was poor old man in 2015. Other than a subscription to The Wall Street Journal, he had no other outward indicator that he was wealthy.

The business owners will be able to make as much as $300,000 a year in profit running a full-sized fleet of 40 vans and managing 100 employees, according to Amazon.

That works out to a profit margin (net income) of just $3000/yr per employee.

Most businesses have a net income per employee of tens of thousands of dollars ($28k/yr average for the fortune 500), with the best ones pulling in well over $100,000/yr per employee. Most of the companies with a net income per employee below $10,000/yr are huge corporations who gain economic stability from having 100,000+ employees (erratic performance by a single employee does not affect their bottom line much), and are able to leverage economies of scale to turn those meager profit margins into something worth doing.

If you take up Amazon's offer, you're basically dead meat. Especially since you're in the precarious position of only having a single customer, and have no leverage to negotiate prices - you either accept what Amazon says they'll pay you or they'll bankrupt you overnight. This is basically Amazon outsourcing the delivery business, where they take the lion's share of the profit for themselves, while offloading all the risk (fewer deliveries due to an economic downturn) onto the poor schmucks who took out loans to buy all those delivery vans and have to pay payroll and unemployment regardless of how poorly business goes.

With cancellation rates at 1/3 of the preorders for model 3,

It was 1/4th. Over the course of two years. With new reservations keeping pace or outpacing cancellations. With a reservation list that even at 5k per week would take them nearly two years to get through. With massive potential for reservation growth.

Complete. Non. Issue.

instead of wasting time on bullshit.

Half a billion dollars from the federal government to customers - some of which will be spent on extra options packages - is anything but "bullshit". Giving that up to move some deliveries forward a couple weeks would be moronic.

The only scenario where Tesla doesn't want to increase output is that they lose money on the variable costs - something you Tesla lemmings have been denying is true (although it is).

Meanwhile, Tesla has been upping their capacity from 2k at the start of the quarter to 3,5k in the middle and is now headed toward 5k. Maintaining production through most of the quarter, avoiding tolling the credit by instead saturating the Canadian market of first-production orders.

But by all means if you disagree, make sure you got those short positions in!

'For Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), however, Sloan's efforts weren't sufficient. "You should be fired," Warren told Sloan. "Wells Fargo needs to start over, and that won't happen until the bank rids itself of people like you who led it into this crisis." '

Attorney General to make a demand to Wells Fargo for damages on fake bank and credit card accounts (Nov. 29, 2017)

Wells Fargo cheated millions of customers. The Republican tax bill is about to hand it a big win. (Dec. 19, 2017)

Are you REALLY gonna sit here and argue that Hollywood and the LA music industry isn't as hard left as one can humanly get....really? Because if you truly believe that I have a bridge you might be intersted in buying, dirt cheap!

For the rest of us that have functioning brain cells we all know that endless copyright is being pushed by The House Of Mouse and Disney has been SJW central for the better part of 40 years. Feel free to look up Disney's donations to political parties, you'll see they certainly aren't friends of the right, neither is most of Hollywood which is who will benefit from this legislation.

Nope. That was the LAST shutdown. This is a new one: https://seekingalpha.com/news/...

https://seekingalpha.com/artic...

Not sure why we dont't read this anywhere, but a sales drop of over 60% YoY in Europe is quite a shocker.

https://seekingalpha.com/artic...

Less than 5% are recycled, according to this article: A Look At The Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling Industry, and the lithium is indeed destroyed.

OTOH, the article also suggests that the economics involved may be leading to a surge in the recycling rates.

Indeed. There's so many funding sources it's not even funny (even the short-selling echo chamber over at Seeking Alpha has covered this). And they didn't even get into the Musk aspect like you did. He's already demonstrated that he's more than willing to use some of his companies to bail out others, and that other stakeholders in his companies are - despite some grumbling dissenters - more than willing to let him. SpaceX is on a roll - they'll probably have half of the global launch market this year. Russia has basically thrown in the towel. SpaceX just got a 500M investment at a $24B valuation, and there's tons more investors wanting a piece of it who can't get one. If Tesla needed it, who wants to wager a bet that SpaceX doesn't suddenly decide that it wants to preorder a ton of semis for hauling rockets, preorder a gigacharger network along their route, order some powerpack buffers for their liquid oxygen plants, offload (at contracting rates) engineering work to Tesla, etc, if not outright buy part of the company? To say nothing of Musk's other ventures. At some point, for example, Boring Company is going to need to do a fundraising round in order to pay someone who engineer and build the Loop vehicles. Gee, what company do you think they might pay to do that?

Beyond the cash issue, the short selling thesis is fatally flawed because of numerous wrong assumptions, such as "Model 3 production will only be 2500-3500/wk at the end of the year", "SG&A will remain at a constant ratio with automotive gross profits", and "There's serious competition on the near horizon". All three of these premises are nonsense; for each of them, I understand their logic train, but it derailed a couple stops ago. They also ignore the growth potential of Tesla's other divisions (although, sure, they're not going to carry Tesla on their own).

No one, and I mean no one, pre-funds their pension fund 75 years out, it's not rational.

As others have pointed out, the USPS doesn't actually have to fund benefits 75 years out.

But in any event, the real irrationality is having defined benefit plans in the first place. Those by their very nature require long-range assumptions about lifespan and market performance, and the people who made overly optimistic assumptions decades ago are long gone when they're proven badly wrong. If an entity providing a pension ceases to exist, the pensioners get screwed because there aren't enough dollars to pay what they were promised and there's nobody to keep refilling the leaky bucket. And if people live a lot longer than projected (as continues to be the case), the entity can get put under significant pressure due to the extra unanticipated funding. Take a look at NCR for a good recent example of how this can go badly wrong.

Public pensions are generally just kicking this can down the road, to the tune of a ~5% per year increase in the gap between their promises and their assets. But the music will inevitably stop someday, and there will be some people left without chairs.

If the USPS insists on continuing with a defined benefit plan despite all that, it's perfectly reasonable in my view to ask them to put themselves (and their retirees) in an equivalent risk position by assuring sufficient funds to pay everything they promised to pay. That's all that's going on here.

But a gross margin around 25% is quite solid for the auto industry.

Tesla doesn't have a gross margin of 25% and in fact since 2016 it has only approached that level twice. Good but not mind blowing and likely to go down as it will be difficult to maintain the same margins on the Model 3 as they get on the much pricier Model S and Model X. Luxury cars for obvious reasons tend to carry higher gross margins. Most manufacturing companies have gross margins somewhere between 10-30%. My company works primarily in the auto industry and we have gross margins around 27% but we serve mostly aftermarket customers. That said it doesn't really matter. Gross margins matter a lot but they are just the starting point.

Plus there are some important differences in how Tesla books Cost of Goods Sold that make it something of a misleading comparison.

Tesla ran a negative not because of negative automotive margins, but because 1) SGA is scaled up to the size Tesla is actively growing to, not to the company's current sales, and 2) likewise for the R&D budget.

Your analysis is flawed. You cannot claim that all of SG&A isn't related to the cost of producing the vehicles because a LOT of it definitely is. It's just that it gets lumped into SG&A because it is hard to tease out fixed costs and assign them. Stuff like the salary of the top management falls into SG&A and it's obvious that a non-trivial percentage of their time should be allocated to the cost of each vehicle but it's hard to assign an exact cost number. Similarly the cost of selling a vehicle cannot be dismissed as unrelated to the cost of the vehicle.

You are correct that Tesla has scaled up SG&A in anticipation of growth so that should be considered but you cannot simply dismiss all SG&A costs the way you did. I'm a cost accountant and it would make my life a LOT easier if I could.

Gross margins prove the economic case for your products; operating margins remain negative until you've grown large.

Gross margins by themselves prove nothing about the case for a product. It's one bit of data among many that must be considered.

"So you're saying that Tesla has been lying to the SEC for years? The average margin on S and X was 25%. Their overall automotive margin is down to 18% now because of the problems with the 3 dragging down their average, but that's to be expected"

I know a few folks who know quite a bit about automaking including an old fogey who worked at Fremont decades ago both before & after it became NUMMI.
He's says there's no way Tesla's overall margins are that high. But even if they are, their R&D costs relative to their revenue is much higher than the competition.

https://seekingalpha.com/artic...

"Four. Years. The line downtime was 8-10 weeks, but it took four years to tool up"

No it didn't. The total time including planning may have been years because Ford didn't dare screw up their cash cow. After converting Dearborn, they pulled off the same feat 6 months later in Kansas City.
By the way, the reported numbers of employees at Dearborn and Kansas City are ~8000 combined and produce 800000 trucks annually. Tesla Fremont has 10k employees and has yet to surpass 100k.

Oops, I did mix up AP with AR. Have you heard? Tesla's CAO just left: https://seekingalpha.com/filin... If you own the stock, get out while you can.

Other sources, such as this article report far lower amounts of lithium: Tesla's Model S 85 KWH battery is made with thousands of small batteries or cells and would have about 6.8 Kg of lithium. . That would cost about $500 for the lithium.

Healthcare they can't afford, and don't need? That's laughable. So when they do get sick, I'm supposed to pay for them? Isn't that what you fucking people incessantly rail against all the fucking time? That's all I ever hear my dopey fucking sister ever say - "I'm tired of having to pay for these people!! I'm tired of having to pay for these people!!' She sounds like a fucking parrot. It makes me want to shove a god-damned cracker down her throat, followed by my fucking fist. Since Obama got the unemployment back down so fucking low after inheriting W's god-awful mess, they shouldn't have any trouble going out and finding a fucking job, so they can afford healthcare. If you're tired of paying for them, then why do you vote for a system that virtually guarantees you will have to pay for them (and their fucking kids) for the rest of their lives?

"Trump Bump vs Obama Effect." So, no, probably not sheer coincidence. However, seeing how unpopular Trumps policies are, it is my firm belief that the Trump Bump is due to the market's confidence that he'll fail to put most of his damaging policies into place.

You stupid fuck. Do you seriously think Shumer is going to allow that fucking crybaby have his wall? He can have all the temper tantrums he wants, but even most Repugs agree - HE"S NOT GOING TO GET THAT FUCKING WALL.

You'd think if Shumer was lying about the wall offer ever having been on the table, then Trump surely would be calling him out on it After all, it's been all over the fucking news. Funny that's not happening.

Things took a YUUUUGE Democratic turn with the last election cycle. Boy, I can't fucking wait until mid-terms. Gonna slap your bitch around.

Hey, the next time I see Chuck, remind me to ask him what tune he's playing on that violin. I kind of like it; it sounds like a waltz.

you forgot the solar companies.

As for the so-called "affordable" model 3 being "a wonder", that's quite a stretch.

http://bgr.com/2017/11/13/tesl...
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/0...
https://seekingalpha.com/artic...
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/1...

'It costs less to the consumer because it is highly subsidized by the government'.

In the US unsubsidized wind and solar are now the cheaper than natural gas and its natural gas, not green energy, that killed all the coal plants. Also solar+storage is cheaper than nukes.

As MSFT's business moves go, acquiring LinkedIn seems to have been one of the shrewder ones: https://seekingalpha.com/artic...

When using tax incentives to encourage consumer behavior ...

The tax incentives are to help kick start an new industry which will hopefully return a greater benefit to society than it costs. Based on the growth of solar, battery tech, and EVs, and the effect of reducing dependencies on fossil fuels, foreign energy dependence and millions of deaths a year from air pollution, I'd say they are working. Most of the vehicles in your list are foreign. The local competition only exist because of Tesla and subsidies.

Well the industry is booming along at this point. I say it is time to end the subsidies. But of you don't believe me, perhaps you will believe Elon Musk:

https://seekingalpha.com/artic...

He knows his customers will still happily buy his product without the subsidies.

News flash to Americans: there exists a world outside America.

As I'm sure you know, there are electric vehicle subsidies across Europe and Asia as well. So I'm not sure of your point. (As a side note, if the U.S. subsidies are truly so insignificant, why did Tesla's stock drop like a brick when the U.S. Congress announced its intent to end the subsidies?)

As to your broader thesis, were it really true that EVs are less expensive both off the lot and over their useful life, they would be selling like hotcakes on their own merits and there would be no reason for all those governments to offer all those incentives. So let's try to figure out why your analysis doesn't reflect real-world consumer behavior.

The most glaring issue seems to be your premise that the proper peer comparison is BMW rather than one of many other more cost-effective ICE vehicles. Just taking as true your claim that Tesla comes out on top (while squeezing my eyes shut and trying to pretend I didn't notice that the Tesla base model you're comparing doesn't even have power seats), that may work for the market segment that would have bought a BMW, but is a purely theoretical advantage for someone who isn't shopping for that level of finish in the first place. And I'm going to take a wild guess that you can't use any other EV to make this kind of comparison since all the rest are sustainably priced rather than effectively a loss leader like the Model 3.

A close second is your pairing of the shorter-range Tesla with a BMW with a V4 engine and the longer-range Tesla with a BMW with a V6 -- that's apples and oranges by definition. If my issue is range, the V4 BMW will be just fine. To the extent you're using a few tenths off the 0-60 time to draw that comparison, that's a metric that most people don't care about since they use their cars for things other than street drag racing. You seem to be engaging in the same single-issue myopia that you say people shouldn't with respect to long-range trips.

A third is comparing a vehicle I can actually buy today with one that I can get in a year to a year and a half -- maybe (note that Tesla's own website says that "12-18 months" ends in "mid 2018" and thus apparently hasn't been updated for a while).

A related fourth is assuming that Elon can still keep attracting investor capital and/or shoveling profit from high-end models into the massive money hole that is the Model 3 and won't have to substantially raise the price over the long haul.

But hey -- other than all that, I completely agree that everything is rainbows and unicorns.

Apparently Telsa's cars cost $2000/year to service on average. This sounds like a real issue that has not been sufficiently discussed.

Why is it any story about Musk ends up dominated by trolls and assholes? Butt-hurt much that he can actually get things done?

Because when Tesla is viewed as a black box - considering only revenue, profit, and other information without considering the context or goal horizon - the economic forecast is very bad.

Almost all stock predictions made today are based on this sort of black-box calculation. Every month the analysts plug a bunch of companies' numbers into their spreadsheet algorithms, and those algorithms tell them how well the stock is doing. They then write an article noting what happened in the previous month as the "reason" they say the stock is doing whatever the algorithm said.

The analysts give the impression that they reviewed the information and are giving expert opinion. In reality, they are reporting events and claiming the algorithm outputs as their conclusion.

Also, the algorithm goal horizon is 6 months, and Tesla has been reinvesting lots of revenue into new production (ie - gigafactory). Tesla's goal horizon is a couple of years down the road, where they will be in a position to corner the market in battery production or supercharger network or home solar.

So a lot of people bought Tesla short, and are hoping it goes down so they can make some money. I don't know how many people are shorting Tesla right now, but 8 months ago it was something like 22% of all Tesla stock was short. Since Tesla has been doing well, that number has dropped considerably, but there are still bunches of people holding out and hoping that Tesla crashes so that they can at least mitigate their loss.

It's a less right now, but we still hear "echoes" of all the nudging and convincing that people were doing to try to make the stock crash.

It'll fade over time.

Gold does have innate value. It is a rare metal with many desirable qualities.

But society has a surplus of gold. Industrial uses are a fraction of the total supply. Most gold is either used for jewellery or locked up as an investment.
https://static.seekingalpha.co...

lets see.
Tesla's CObalt is currently coming from Canada, with Idaho starting up as well
Lithium is coming from Northern Mexico, along with Nevada.
Nickel does come from Australia,Indonesia, and Japan, so, those will be imported.
Steel and Aluminum are from all over, including America.
However, these are the RAW materials. As it stands, IIRC, Model 3 is about 93% American made. Corvette, like its speed, does not touch it.,

The report is just McKinsey fishing for consulting business.

Both mobile operators and airlines have the same problems, namely regulation enforcing an UNcompetitive environment (which does not apply to the advertising, retail and media based FANG companies) and and economy that is burdened with excessive capital, allowing those so-called competitors to continue functioning with what would otherwise be crippling debt.

I've long said the U.S. telecommunications market is ripe for disruption and that could eventually change things. McKinsey will not.

Since none of us have seen the private docs and license agreements, all we really know about the above is that's how Apple has spun the PR on it. Qualcomm says that's not the case and spins it differently, to make themselves look like the aggrieved ones. Which specific patents are the each accusing, etc.

First of all, Qualcomm is being investigated by both the US (FTC) and European agencies for anti-trust. This follows South Korea fining the company $854M for unfair business practices.

Second, you can't claim ignorance after an assertion. In essence you're saying "We don't know what was in the agreements" right after you positively alleged the Apple wrongs did with the agreements. Either you don't know or you do know. So how do you know what Apple did?

Who's telling the truth?? That's probably why the ITC actually agreed to dive in and try to figure it out. Potential merit according to both stated positions, need a neutral party to look and decide.

Well I don't believe either party but it's not the first time or party that has accused Qualcomm of the same behavior, so . . .

Anyway, since Slashdot has gone hard on bear articles about Tesla, have a bull one.

Here's software company margins https://seekingalpha.com/artic...

Hogwash. Those are GROSS margins. Which is (revenue - COGS). In software businesses COGS is often near zero, since it doesn't include development costs (or the CEO's bonus).

So you're a software guy who thinks software guys should get more money ... and using government coercion is a legitimate way to achieve that.

Hahaha laughable as always. Yep government coercion you mean a government that actually enforces it's borders and acts in the interests of its citizens. Quelle Horreur.

Here's a little math for you. A fast food restaurant typically has 33% food cost, 30-35% labor cost, 10% or so occupancy/other. There isn't money to double wages there. (that's all the way down to the mom and pop that uses family as labor)

Here's software company margins https://seekingalpha.com/artic...

You can triple developer salarys and not make a dent or even impact the CEO's bonus.

What's more a strange thing might happen, all those people being pushed into STEM might actually start getting work in the fields they struggled so hard to get degrees in.