Elon Musk $41B offer for Twitter

[EddieSteadyGo]

soupdragon1 said:

I think Hyundai and Kia are a better buy. EV6 can be had for £25k, 2 year old plus a longer warranty with those brands.

Or Ioniq 5, 2 years old for £20k.

Those are better value IMO, longer warranty, car play, V2L. I personally love the V2L technology - using your battery as a mobile power station. Go to the beach and plug your George Foreman grill into the car when you are feeling hungry for example, or just to boil a kettle and make some tea. My next EV will have V2L for sure,or ideally, V2x depending on how UK moves along the V2G path.

VW are bringing out V2G capability via software update to some of their older EV's for bi-directional charging. Thats worth considering if you've got solar or even if you just want to arbitrage the night time/day time electric tarrifs and reduce electric bills at home. Something I'm keeping an eye on.

You could be right about the Ioniq 5 and EV6. I don't know enough about their specs to know which are the dual motor cars, single motor cars, and their relative specs. My feeling is that a 2 year old £20k Ioniq 5 will be a lower spec, smaller battery car but I could be wrong!

[EddieSteadyGo]

Byker28i said:

...

For £25k I'd be buying Audi E-tron 55 S line Sportback quattro 95kWh (408 ps)
https://www.autotrader.co.uk/car-details/202405089...

Yeah, I'd noticed the 'sportback' versions seem particularly good value. Bottom line is there are some very good used EV alternatives now, which hopefully is only going to get better.

[Durzel]

Cybertruck is a pile of toss, I don't know why (some) people are so enamoured by it. Yeah it looks like a movie prop made real, but so what? It missed all of the touted specs - no great surprise nowadays with Musk - and appears to be littered with issues despite them only having shipped around 4000 of them.

if they had made a "normal" truck they would have been first to market and would be actively competing with Ford, Rivian, etc.

[mko9]

You are correct, they aren't competing with either Ford or Rivian. They are crushing Rivian, and getting crushed by Ford. The Lightning is by far the best selling electric truck, and the Cybertruck is easily in second place.

https://jalopnik.com/tesla-cybertruck-is-already-t...

[Byker28i]

EddieSteadyGo said:

soupdragon1 said:

I think Hyundai and Kia are a better buy. EV6 can be had for £25k, 2 year old plus a longer warranty with those brands.

Or Ioniq 5, 2 years old for £20k.

Those are better value IMO, longer warranty, car play, V2L. I personally love the V2L technology - using your battery as a mobile power station. Go to the beach and plug your George Foreman grill into the car when you are feeling hungry for example, or just to boil a kettle and make some tea. My next EV will have V2L for sure,or ideally, V2x depending on how UK moves along the V2G path.

VW are bringing out V2G capability via software update to some of their older EV's for bi-directional charging. Thats worth considering if you've got solar or even if you just want to arbitrage the night time/day time electric tarrifs and reduce electric bills at home. Something I'm keeping an eye on.

You could be right about the Ioniq 5 and EV6. I don't know enough about their specs to know which are the dual motor cars, single motor cars, and their relative specs. My feeling is that a 2 year old £20k Ioniq 5 will be a lower spec, smaller battery car but I could be wrong!

Have you seen the EV9 - it's huge

As said EV6 2 years old is about £25k for the 78Kw model, 2 year old Ioniq 5 around the same price for the 78Kw model
VW ID3 half that price, or an Id4 for £20k

Lots and lots of competitors now all producing good cars, you can even get a brand new MG MG4 for £29k now. The market is changing

[off_again]

WestyCarl said:

off_again said:

And thats the problem - subjective at best. For what Tesla does well, they do it very well. For what Tesla does badly, well, its patchy at very best, often on the terrible side. Since purchasing a car is an entirely personal experience (I cannot tell someone that their preference is wrong), I can take some specific measures - efficiency, safety, features, ride, comfort, build quality etc.

But when its utterly random if you will get a decent one (and PDI's are nonexistant), it makes it a tough sell in my book. Chinese built models seem to be much better, so great for European buyers, but here in the USA, you can see those panel gaps from 50 meters away.....

For the public "quality" is a subjective measure. I would guess 90% of people couldn't spot or care about panel gaps, they care about the cars works and this is where Tesla is good.

I can walk up to it in the morning and by the time my seatbelt is on the car is ready to go with the Sat is showing the best way to work to avoid traffic. No buttons to press, no time for Sat nav to start, etc. I suspect this is what most people recognise as "Quality"

And that is the big question - what is quality? And what is the perception for the individual? Range Rovers get consistently good reviews from buyers, but score badly on reliability - owners just keep going back! Some parts of the vehicle are "quality", but it is clear that some corners are cut and there are issues.

Same with a Tesla - for owners who have fought with bluetooth connectivity on their previous vehicles, stepping into a Tesla must seem like stepping into the future. It works, its consistent and its reliable. Is that quality? Well its engineered well and it works reliably, so clearly a lot of work has gone into this and the parts dont fail (lets ignore very early Model S failures as they learned that lesson). This does tick the boxes for quality.

Then there is the minimalist approach to the interior - for some, an uncluttered dash etc fits quality. There are no buttons to spill coffee on, no weird behaviors (stop / start, is it on for off, or is it off to enable? Who knows!!!) and in general, some tasks can be easily automated or just 'work' in the background. Again, is this quality? To some, I would suggest it is - it works, its reliable and its something that you dont need to think about.

My point is that there is an expectation that these things work. If they dont, then it needs to be fixed, which some manufacturers fail to do! And given that the average Tesla owner can avoid the dealership, sorry, service center, this is a win. Perception is everything and for many, this is quality. However, when it comes to build quality, this is different. I dont really care if shutting a door makes a clunk or clink, but I do expect that the door handles work consistently. Or that the panels fit correctly so that it doesnt get worse over time. That the paint is decently thick so that it doesnt get chipped off that easily. Or that the interior trim doesnt fall apart after a few years.... yadda yadda.

It really depends on the viewpoint and the perception - and its a tough one to call.

[off_again]

I am happy to dunk on Tesla, when deserved, but why oh why do people think this type of thing is a good idea?

https://jalopnik.com/tesla-model-s-proves-no-match...

Someone throws a tungsten block at a Model S and it breaks the panoramic sunroof. Who knew? Really, metal, gravity and glass.... wow. Learned something new there.

But this is far from a solo event. We have had Tesla's making stupid jumps over the hill in LA, shooting Cybertrucks, driving Model 3's through flooded streets etc. I know that people do this type of thing on all sorts of vehicles, but why does it seem to be more focused on Tesla? I guess its for the clicks, but really, hasnt this trend stopped yet?

And I have to imagine that this does little to help the overall image of Tesla for the average person.

[dobbo_]

Shooting cyber trucks comes from the claim they are bullet proof. Do any other main stream manufacturers make these kind of claims?

That's the answer to why, and the reason is Musk and his PT Barnum approach to sales.

[EddieSteadyGo]

off_again said:

I am happy to dunk on Tesla, when deserved, but why oh why do people think this type of thing is a good idea?
...

Coz it makes them money.....

Looks like the "creator" has over 3 million views on that video and it has only been live for a couple of days.

https://www.tiktok.com/@ludwig

[dobbo_]

Musk: "I will be on Mars and you'll have Tesla roadster 2 and FSD and all my things are amazing and bulletproof pls send deposits I will def give you the thing"

Content creator: "ha look at the fking state of this"

Musk fans: "That creator is just trying to make money"

[Talksteer]

durbster said:

EddieSteadyGo said:

Insightful as it is to listen to people who don't own a Tesla, give their views on the quality of Tesla, it might be more relevant to look at some of the customer satisfaction scores for Tesla...

Why would you use customer satisfaction scores to gauge build quality?

Could it be because the data that measures build quality isn't quite to your liking?



This is a mad looking list isn't it, but it's the biggest and most relevant dataset for build quality I could find.

Btw everyone, there is a Tesla thread.

That you could find.....

JD Power's methodology is a joke, they rate someone not understanding how to operate a system as a quality fault. They rate all faults as equal and the survey questions lead the witness in the same way a poll in the Sun newspaper does.

Hence why people who do simple cars with less features do well by their metric. Also there is some degree of pay to play for manufacturers which question the objectivity of the survey.

[off_again]

EddieSteadyGo said:

off_again said:

I am happy to dunk on Tesla, when deserved, but why oh why do people think this type of thing is a good idea?
...

Coz it makes them money.....

Looks like the "creator" has over 3 million views on that video and it has only been live for a couple of days.

https://www.tiktok.com/@ludwig

Shesh, what a world we live in. I will admit that I have pretty much purged my social media accounts and been very careful with what I watch and click through. As a result, I am very proud to say that my Instagram is entirely populated with a few classic car channels, pets doing stupid things and home reno videos. I have managed to avoid these 'creators'.

Each to their own and how they make their money (as long as its legal), but I just hope that this is a passing fad and society can return to some sort of normality soon. Like the rock stars are rock stars....

[Byker28i]

Musk is diverting scarce resources from Tesla (a publicly traded company) to X (a private company owned mostly by Musk).
He's lost interest in Tesla?

By ordering Nvidia to let privately held X jump the line ahead of Tesla, Musk pushed back the automaker’s receipt of more than $500 million in graphics processing units, or GPUs, by months, likely adding to delays in setting up the supercomputers Tesla says it needs to develop autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/04/elon-musk-told-nvi...

[EddieSteadyGo]

Byker28i said:

Musk is diverting scarce resources from Tesla (a publicly traded company) to X (a private company owned mostly by Musk).
He's lost interest in Tesla?

By ordering Nvidia to let privately held X jump the line ahead of Tesla, Musk pushed back the automaker’s receipt of more than $500 million in graphics processing units, or GPUs, by months, likely adding to delays in setting up the supercomputers Tesla says it needs to develop autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/04/elon-musk-told-nvi...

You can probably guess what I'm going to say in response to this story, but from what I have read elsewhere, the actual story is this: we know Tesla is trying to rapidly increase their computing power for training their machine learning AI directly with video. This is how they intend to 'solve' FSD.

However, the new data centre Tesla is building has suffered quite a large delay, so they aren't ready to receive the chips. Hence, their choice was either to receive the chips and leave them boxed up for several months, or juggle the deliveries with xAI, who are ready to receive them, and then Tesla get their chips a few months later when they will be ready to plug them in.

Also, Tesla are not currently 'compute constrained' for FSD. So the rate of progress on FSD is currently limited by other factors, like testing resources etc so this delay doesn't cause any harm to Tesla

As evidence for their story, CNBC reported "Tesla shares slipped as much as 1% on the news Tuesday morning". However, anyone looking at the Tesla share price will know a 1% move is tiny and is literally noise. The current price is hovering around the $175 level, so I would argue, in contrast to CNBC, that the lack of any real move to the share price is evidence this is a non-story in terms of Tesla financials.

[rscott]

EddieSteadyGo said:

Byker28i said:

Musk is diverting scarce resources from Tesla (a publicly traded company) to X (a private company owned mostly by Musk).
He's lost interest in Tesla?

By ordering Nvidia to let privately held X jump the line ahead of Tesla, Musk pushed back the automaker’s receipt of more than $500 million in graphics processing units, or GPUs, by months, likely adding to delays in setting up the supercomputers Tesla says it needs to develop autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/04/elon-musk-told-nvi...

You can probably guess what I'm going to say in response to this story, but from what I have read elsewhere, the actual story is this: we know Tesla is trying to rapidly increase their computing power for training their machine learning AI directly with video. This is how they intend to 'solve' FSD.

However, the new data centre Tesla is building has suffered quite a large delay, so they aren't ready to receive the chips. Hence, their choice was either to receive the chips and leave them boxed up for several months, or juggle the deliveries with xAI, who are ready to receive them, and then Tesla get their chips a few months later when they will be ready to plug them in.

Also, Tesla are not currently 'compute constrained' for FSD. So the rate of progress on FSD is currently limited by other factors, like testing resources etc so this delay doesn't cause any harm to Tesla

As evidence for their story, CNBC reported "Tesla shares slipped as much as 1% on the news Tuesday morning". However, anyone looking at the Tesla share price will know a 1% move is tiny and is literally noise. The current price is hovering around the $175 level, so I would argue, in contrast to CNBC, that the lack of any real move to the share price is evidence this is a non-story in terms of Tesla financials.

My main takeaway from that article is that Musk appears to be telling shareholders one thing, then doing something completely different.
The reason you suggest for the change may well be accurate, but that's not the point. He's playing fast and loose with statements to shareholders, that tends to unnerve investors and potentially the SEC too.

[Byker28i]

rscott said:

EddieSteadyGo said:

Byker28i said:

Musk is diverting scarce resources from Tesla (a publicly traded company) to X (a private company owned mostly by Musk).
He's lost interest in Tesla?

By ordering Nvidia to let privately held X jump the line ahead of Tesla, Musk pushed back the automaker’s receipt of more than $500 million in graphics processing units, or GPUs, by months, likely adding to delays in setting up the supercomputers Tesla says it needs to develop autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/04/elon-musk-told-nvi...

You can probably guess what I'm going to say in response to this story, but from what I have read elsewhere, the actual story is this: we know Tesla is trying to rapidly increase their computing power for training their machine learning AI directly with video. This is how they intend to 'solve' FSD.

However, the new data centre Tesla is building has suffered quite a large delay, so they aren't ready to receive the chips. Hence, their choice was either to receive the chips and leave them boxed up for several months, or juggle the deliveries with xAI, who are ready to receive them, and then Tesla get their chips a few months later when they will be ready to plug them in.

Also, Tesla are not currently 'compute constrained' for FSD. So the rate of progress on FSD is currently limited by other factors, like testing resources etc so this delay doesn't cause any harm to Tesla

As evidence for their story, CNBC reported "Tesla shares slipped as much as 1% on the news Tuesday morning". However, anyone looking at the Tesla share price will know a 1% move is tiny and is literally noise. The current price is hovering around the $175 level, so I would argue, in contrast to CNBC, that the lack of any real move to the share price is evidence this is a non-story in terms of Tesla financials.

My main takeaway from that article is that Musk appears to be telling shareholders one thing, then doing something completely different.
The reason you suggest for the change may well be accurate, but that's not the point. He's playing fast and loose with statements to shareholders, that tends to unnerve investors and potentially the SEC too.

See this is why I like PH sometimes, proper discussions, both sides put, more information, more details.

Also, Yes it's having delays but they are normal in the current times, delivery issues, bad weather, and Musk firing the project director didn't help
https://www.constructiondive.com/news/tesla-data-c...

Then there's his chinese datacenter plans
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportat...

Edited by Byker28i on Wednesday 5th June 09:50

[EddieSteadyGo]

rscott said:

My main takeaway from that article is that Musk appears to be telling shareholders one thing, then doing something completely different.
The reason you suggest for the change may well be accurate, but that's not the point. He's playing fast and loose with statements to shareholders, that tends to unnerve investors and potentially the SEC too.

If this was a genuine example of misleading shareholders, then I agree, that could unnerve investors. However, the lack of real move in the share price suggests this wasn't the case in this particular situation.

However, I do think there is a *potential* serious issue with Musk's fiduciary duty towards Tesla shareholders relating to the potential for a conflict of interest between xAI and Tesla.

After the last investment round, xAI is valued somewhere around $25bn. Tesla is somewhere around $500bn. So it is a lot easier to imagine x4 growth in the current value of xAI (making it become worth say $100bn), than it is to imagine increasing the value of Tesla by x4 to become a $2trillion company.

I'm not that aware of exactly what xAI are developing with AI, but I presume it is LLMs, and so they are mainly a competitor to OpenAI, whereas Tesla is focusing its AI on vision based learning, so training directly from video. Maybe that is a sufficient distinction to avoid Musk breaching any of his fiduciary duties, but I suspect any overlap between xAI and Tesla is likely to increase over time, so this is definitely an area to watch.

[h0b0]

Elon's plans to take FSD data out of China are intriguing. Having first hand experience of data centers in China I know how hard it is to get ordinary data. I also know the hurdles you have to jump over to even set the data center up in the first place. 5 years ago we had to provide exact specifications of everything so the Chinese government could build a replica data center.

Take a look at google maps and try and get street view. There isn't any one. Elon is trying to get so much more data than street view would ever provide.. If he is successful, what concessions will he have made? What data will he be providing back?

[off_again]

rscott said:

My main takeaway from that article is that Musk appears to be telling shareholders one thing, then doing something completely different.
The reason you suggest for the change may well be accurate, but that's not the point. He's playing fast and loose with statements to shareholders, that tends to unnerve investors and potentially the SEC too.

The problem is that we (a collective we encompassing the regulatory bodies, shareholders, investment companies and the media) have failed to call Musk to task. He has been allowed to say one thing, do another and in essence not tell the truth as part of his statements about public companies. When he did get called out and fined, he then pushed the line so closely that he nearly got fined again and then stacked the board / advisory group to his whims anyway, so no real change other than he was out of some pocket change.

I saw another example the other day - I cant find the article because it was on the Apple News app, but it was from The Times. Basically was saying that "star investment advisor Cathy Woods and her ARK invest portfolio was doubling down on some stock or other", or words to that effect. The key part was the comment about Cathy Woods being some sort of star investment guru who is soooo successful. It was lazy journalism at best, generative AI at worst. A lazy journo paid by the word had to come up with something in an area they are not an expert in - just pull some crap off the internet and go from there.

Cathy Woods (who is big in on Tesla BTW) has been shouting about a number of tech stocks for years and has been constantly referred to as some sort of wiz at investment. She isnt. Morningstar did an analysis on ARK Invest and found that she has destroyed $14bn (thats billion) in wealth over the last decade. In fact, since its inception in 2014, ARK invest has grown by 121% - good eh? Except that the NASDAQ's top 100 have grown by 329%. Just dropping money on the top 100 NASDAQ shares would have over doubled your money compared with ARK Invest, without the fees!

Of course, she doesnt care - ARK Invest has some of the biggest charges and she owns the company - so she is sitting pretty. So yeah, Musk is saying one thing and doing another - no surprise there - but there is no come back on him. The press doesnt care, the federal bodies are powerless and anything he does say makes good press and gets the clicks. Its not going to change any time soon either - allowing Musk (and to be honest, a lot of other people) to continue to get away with this type of action.

[EddieSteadyGo]

Cathy Wood will say anything to hype the value of Tesla. Just like Gordon Johnson will say anything to drag them down. Everyone knows that, so you just have to take what they say with a large dose of salt.

But it gets Cathy on TV, and it gets her company Ark Invest headlines, and she still has several billion under management, so her customers must be reasonably happy. And Morningstar's ratings are not that good imo as it is a very backward looking rating system, and as we know, previous results don't necessarily predict future results. Plus also worth highlighting, Ark Invest run a number of ETFs, so it isn't just one fund.