Tesla at a forward P/E of 80 is massively overvalued as a car company. You can get Mercedes or BMW at a P/E of 6, with a 9% yield. Sure, the EV market is still growing, but Tesla is not the only player. All brands now have EVs, there are both cheaper and more luxurious Chinese EVs, that's some massive competition.
The only reasons Tesla could be valued differently are FSD and Robotics, which Musk and Tesla-friendly analysts are heavily pushing. Since Musk has made massive loans against his Tesla stake you can expect that he will keep highlighting those narratives as well. A revaluation of the stock to sane levels would certainly cause him some financial difficulties.
> They had 2 dozen vehicles with no steering wheels taking attendees around the venue.
To quote a participant[0]:
> After over 10 years of Full Self-Driving development, @Tesla
is limited to a 20-30 acre geofenced 5mph ride on a preprogrammed, premapped and heavily rehearsed route with no traffic and no pedestrians.
I saw pedestrians walking in front of the cars in the live stream. The rest is true though. It reminded me of taking the classic car ride around an amusement park where the cars all follow each other on a track.
There are countless videos on youtube of people recording their experience with FSD's open beta. It is probably 90% of the way there, if not more. Anyone who thinks Tesla won't get there first is peak delusional. Hate on Elon as much as you want, but Tesla are top-tier engineering.
Real funny seeing a bunch of web devs on HN talk shit about Tesla's engineers too lmao
Even if you'd be right about the 90%, I highly doubt they'll be first.
How long did it take to get to that 90% ? AFAIK they first mentioned FSD ~2016(Self-driving itself even earlier).
As the last 20% of work are often 80% of the effort we can estimate that those remaining 10 % take ~ 40% of the time. They've been at it for ~8 years , which gives an expected release of ~ 2029.
We'll see what Waymo and other competition has until then.
I feel like there’s some software adage about the last 10% being the hardest. It certainly holds true from my experience - even if they are 90% of the way there, it’s not a linear path to 100%.
A.K.A the Rule of Credibility: "The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule
> Real funny seeing a bunch of web devs on HN talk shit about Tesla's engineers too lmao
It's not "talk shit about Tesla's engineers", it's just a very hard problem to solve. It's easy to get it "most of the time" but extremely difficult to finish it. It's obvious it will take decades, not years to get us there. Whereas Musk insists he will solve it "this year", every year from 2014.
Tesla has the world's best autonomous vehicle offering by some way of measuring things. There are many ways to measure things, but at least in some "category" they are indeed leading: Level 2 systems for the US which you can privately buy.
US competition with Tesla isn’t even close and the only way anyone has able to get a functional charging network up and running was to piggyback off of Tesla. I know the Trump stuff is annoying, but there’s way too much criticism of Tesla out there that is our political emotion.
Elon knows Trump is a transactional person and as long as he supports Trump, he can get the necessary governmental treatment his companies need to survive (tax credits, Chinese EV tariffs, some sort of asinine Mars mission).
EV tariffs are going to happen throughout the entire west with or without Trump.
Western governments have discovered the Chinese plan to decimate western manufacturing by subsidizing it at over 10 X the rate required and seen in the west.
Vehicles matter because they are a means for war machine production.
- I believe he can launch rockets into space and land them on their own footprint.
- I believe he can revolutionize auto manufacturing and disrupt a 100 year old industry replacing fossil-fuel burning dinosaurs with clean electric vehicles that outperform them and that appeal to the general public
- I believe he can allow quadrapelegics to interact with the world in ways never thought possible
- I believe he can, to a great degree, restore free speech on social media even if it is messy and imperfect at times
- I believe that innovation is hard and just because he boldly claims he is going to Mars or make cars drive themselves - and hasn’t done it yet, is no reason to discount the possibility that he might actually pull it off one day
Mostly I agree, modulo "he knows how to make teams to do XYZ", which I'm happy to count for the same reason I'm happy to blame him personally when those teams he's ordering around do something I don't like:
> I believe he can, to a great degree, restore free speech on social media even if it is messy and imperfect at times
I strongly disagree with this.
Even if I ignore the proxy of all the investors writing off their buy-out loans by 75%, even if I ignore that when people link me to random threads I can only see the specific one linked and not any reply because of an invisible paywall^w account-wall, even if I ignore that loading a random tweet now often takes 26 seconds or more (yes, I did just record my screen to get that number), even if I ignore that undesirable stories can be buried by an avalanche of alternative narratives and not just by censoring the truth…
There's still the problem of Musk intervening politically in ways that, although totally legal, are exactly the kind of thing he was complaining about before the takeover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions
I'd like someone, eg Musk, to define "free speech". Start with some of those "first principles" he likes so much.
Then, per "theory vs reality" cliché, I'd like someone, eg Musk, to explain or demonstrate or larp or interpretative dance what "free speech" looks like in practice. Maybe even point to an existing example.
For bonus credit:
- explain relationship between "free speech" and news feeds (algorithmic hate machines)
- explain operation of "free speech" multinationally
- explain how to balance "free speech" and moderation
- enumerate the tradeoffs of, downsides due to, and consequences of "free speech"
ElonJet was a live geotracking site for private jets. You can post cisgender, it just comes with a warning.
Before, people were being banned for using "him" instead of "her" to describe biological males who self-identified as women. People were secretly de-amplified for criticizing the government policy of lockdowns. It was censorship on a whole different magnitude.
Two wrongs don’t make a right. Either you’re a “free speech absolutist” or you’re just a lying charlatan. Elon is clearly the latter, the evidence is right in front of your eyes and you choose to make excuses.
ElonJet is posting publicly available information and isn’t banned on other platforms. Something coming with a warning is the same as restricting speech.
> Something coming with a warning is the same as restricting speech.
Placing a warning is generally not considered a restriction on free speech but rather a tool to inform or protect audiences.
In contrast, restricting free speech involves preventing someone from expressing their views or censoring content outright. Warnings are typically seen as a way to balance free expression with the responsibility to inform audiences.
> In contrast, restricting free speech involves preventing someone from expressing their views or censoring content outright.
You mean like suing people for saying true things, and encouraging the government to criminally investigate for people for saying the same? Because that is exactly what Musk has done in the past year.
The warnings undoubtedly come with a derank in the Twitter algorithm, so it's very much not the same.
But if you want to get really technical then this isn't even about "free speech". A platform restricting speech has nothing to do with "free speech" as it is defined in the US constitution. That's all about governments creating laws that punish people for certain speech.
But hey, we're in a world where Elon spouts nonsense about being all about "free speech" so the world has lost that meaning anyway.
People are only being banned for impersonation and live geotracking. In the previous Twitter, you were banned, shadow-banned, de-amplified, etc, if you expressed views that the political left disagreed with.
You want to justify and downplay the latter my presenting Musk as equally villainous. It's disingenuous mental gymnastics to advance your censorious and authoritarian agenda. Getting Twitter back to being censored is what motivates the incessant attacks on Musk.
Let’s say you’re right. There is only one side claiming they are “free speech absolutists”. There is only one side demonstrably lying to you. It’s Elon Musk. You’re being duped by a billionaire and you’re too blind to see it.
I'd much rather X under Musk while he doesn't live up to his free speech absolutist claims than X under the establishment, where you must use left-wing gender pronoun conventions or be banned.
You're okay with the previous authoritarianism that was imposed that's why you'd prefer a return to the previous setup. If you believed in political neutrality and Free Speech, you would be hardly annoyed by Musk not being as committee to Free Speech as he claims, while he reverses what had been an overwhelming censorship program.
> HE can do nothing of the sort because he is an idiot with very few real skills.
Management is a real skill. Salesmanship is also a real skill. I may not approve of the showboating, but drumming up enthusiasm for a future that most consider to be fantasy, was a necessary (though not sufficient) part of building an electric car company in an era when most people thought hydrogen was the future and that "electric car" meant "a milk float" and, if they had memories of any real personal electric vehicle, those memories would have been of the failure of the Sinclair C5:
Pretty sure nobody except Toyota thought hydrogen was going to be a useful intermediate fuel: handling is ridiculously difficult compared to room-temperature liquids, energy density is ridiculously low.
It would have made more sense to sell Fischer-Tropsch synthesized carbon fuel from purpose-grown crops, at a mere 3x the current production price of fossil carbon fuels, using the existing infrastructure for distribution into existing vehicles.
I don’t like the guy but he’s built companies that are implanting brain chips to give people vision and parapalegics the ability to interact in the world, has blanketed the globe in true high speed internet, have built spaceships that launch more frequently than any nation has ever done their own. And then there’s the EV thing which many see as key to fighting climate change. If he wasn’t so unlikable and part of this twitter debacle, the world would be praising each of these efforts.
Most of the passionate (embittered? salty? flavourless?) critiques of Elon always sound like a confession: His critics can't explain why he is successful, why his companies are successful, nor why he is wealthy. When they attempt an explanation, it's less an explanation and more a dismissal: luck, other people, teams, theft, subsidies, corruption, "the system is broken!", a technoaccelerationist cabal secretly pulling the levers of power.
But, fundamentally, the question whose answer eludes the majority of humans especially Elon's critics is: Why am I not as wealthy and relevant as Elon yet I'm obviously smarter and more ethical than he is? (Their implicit answer is that "life is unfair and doesn't reward the best people.")
Because if any of his critics actually had a meaningful critique that corresponds to reality, they would simply build better products and companies, become billionaires themselves and exemplify rather than pontificate about a better mode of billionaire behaviour and grandeur of vision.
I wonder if Musk fans realize that constantly deflecting all criticism with "you're just jealous, bro" says more about them than about the people they're limply trying to discredit.
> I wonder if Musk fans realize that constantly deflecting all criticism with "you're just jealous, bro" says more about them than about the people they're limply trying to discredit.
I wonder if the critics of Musk's "fans" realize that deflecting all criticism with "they're just Musk fans, bro" says more about their own anemic ability to imagine the legitimacy of another perspective, their utter lack of humility and complete poverty of intellectual honesty, than about the so-called fans they're flaccidly trying to discredit?
Any day now a Tesla Semi truck will stop by to deliver my solar shingles. I can then use them to charge my Tesla robotaxi. My Robotaxi will ferry people around when I'm not using it and pay for itself in under 2 years. Then I can start saving for my ticket to Mars, where I'll be safe from the woke mind virus that is consuming everyone here on earth.
I don't think the argument is that everything he touches turns to gold. Transforming two industries and going from in debt to the planet's richest is an achievement in itself.
I do recognise his major contributions: Made electric cars commonplace sooner than I thought with the Model S, financed SpaceX's doubtlessly awesome progress, and... well that's pretty much it.
Thing is, the illusion is fading, his previously "inscrutable" politics are on his sleeve, and you can't just pretend he's not a complete liability for any company because of his irrational, and frankly childish, behaviour.
> Made electric cars commonplace sooner than I thought with the Model S
You mean financing and leading the largest EV maker in the world and fundamentally changing a 100 year old industry.
Car industry has been considered for a long time a incredibly hard place to get into for a startup. Most new companies happened when industrial powers rose and supported local companies.
There are decades of failed car companies. And at the same time as Tesla, there were other companies who promised EV revolutions and failed.
People point to the Model S, but the Model 3 was actually just as or more important. When the Model 3 showed profitability ever car company in the world massively increased their investment in EV, before that many companies were pretending and doing research. For years the story was EV can't be profitable below 50k and you can't build them at volume.
> financed SpaceX's doubtlessly awesome progress
If with 'finacned' you mean founded and lead the largest SpaceX company in the world that has revolutionized the whole space industry and is the biggest rocket company and the biggest sat company that can also fly people to space and build the biggest rocket in the history of humanity.
SpaceX Starlink literally fundamentally changed the largest war in Europe since WW2.
But I guess all he did is 'financed progress'. You got to be fucking kidding me.
> and you can't just pretend he's not a complete liability
Can you spell out in actual real terms what this means? SpaceX is going from success to success and has been for 25 years now. Tesla is still a large company doing pretty well. Both companies are much bigger and much more important and powerful then they were 4 years ago.
In the real world, customers don't care about 'childish' behavior. And claiming he is irrational when his companies mostly act rationally on net (no companies is perfect and never makes errors) also don't really work very well.
The only reason you consider him a liability is that he opposes far-left ideology and promotes free speech. If that makes you a liability then I want every business leader to become a liability.
At the very least, if you are going to impartially assess his business accomplishments, you should completely disregard his political views when making that assessment. Otherwise you're giving him a dishonest business leadership assessment as a ploy to punish him for his politics.
That's the reason he was able to get this rich with SpaceX and not stall sooner — most of the other space companies were (and in the west, still are) busy scratching backs rather than developing successful products.
It's possible that Tesla, which Musk didn't found, would have given us an EV by another name. Rivan also got us an electric truck before the cybertruck came out. Fisker's not doing so well though.
Possible sure - just as it is possible my next startup could be the next Tesla. In reality, when Elon joined Tesla they had nothing but early concept prototypes of a high-end sports car with the name Roadster. Elon took it from concept, to launch, to production. Then he did the same with the Model S/X/3, sold 5 million electric vehicles, made them so compelling that it completely disrupted the ICE vehicle market and sparked a gold rush of elecrification in the car industry resulting in a Trillion-dollar company.
It's possible "which Musk didn't found" is doing some heavy lifting in your statement above.
It's basically just a website at the moment with bunch of 3D renders which you too could get done from a web shop.
Tesla has nothing new to offer and competition is catching up, EV adoption slowing down and such.
If I had, I would gradually drop Tesla stock because it's going to go downhill if not rock bottom from here.