Tesla publishes its financial results for 2023; profit margin shrinks
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There are other car makers with substantial robotics expertise like Honda and Hyundai. Hyundai even owns Boston Dynamics. Yet I don't see too many investors value those car makers so much higher because of the potential value of the robot market.
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OrangeCream
Ars Legatus Legionis
My definition of 'competent and consistent' would have almost no range; they should be able to deliver in volume to a schedule, consistently (barring marketplace disruptions such as the covid pandemic); as it stands though they technically had models available, they faced consistent production issues and delays:
Production delays for the Model S severely delay it's initial production
https://www.technologyreview.com/20...blames-new-delays-on-production-difficulties/Tesla started production of the Model S in June, and so far it has delivered only 132 of the 5,000 vehicles it originally planned to deliver by the end of the year. It has now lowered that goal to between 2,500 and 3,000 cars, although it still hopes to meet its earlier target of 20,000 vehicles in 2013.
A one year delay for the Model X
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a...a-pushes-back-model-x-crossover-to-late-2015/
Model 3 launch was a paper launch in 2017:
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/01/tesla-model-3-production-problems.htmlTesla produced only 222 Model 3 cars during the quarter, the company said in a letter to shareholders. The company had expected to produce about 1,500 during the period.
They had a 12-18 month backlog in 2018 and only delivered a few 10s of thousands through May:
https://electrek.co/2018/05/20/tesla-model-3-delivery-timelines-new-orders-production/The backlog kept growing and even though the company has delivered a few tens of thousands of Model 3 vehicles since the start of production last summer, they still had over 450,000 reservations with deposits at the end of last quarter.
Until now, Tesla was guiding a 12 to 18 months delay to get the car for someone placing a reservation today as they work through their existing backlog.
The Model Y was the only launch not plagued with delays or manufacturing problems:
https://www.greencarreports.com/new...del-y-ahead-of-schedule-launch-in-summer-2020In a company update released Wednesday to investors, Tesla formally confirmed the launch of the Model Y electric crossover has been moved up to summer 2020.
If they are consistent, it's in consistently running into production difficulties. There was some hope with the Palladium/Highland refreshes that they've turned the corner, but they don't exactly have a stellar track record.
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The thing is...I honestly have no idea if this is true or a joke. If we were talking about most people, it would obviously be a joke. But when one is as incredulous as Elon Musk...this being true (if it is) wouldn't surprise me in the least.
He has shown himself publicly to be SO much of a shitstain, that this is where I'm at. There's almost no ridiculous thing he could be said to have done that I wouldn't at least consider the possibility that it's real.
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Is there any new Giga Factory in the pipeline? I don't see anything about new factories in the slides shared with the article. Because a sudden expenditure of capital to make new factories could explain the drop in margins.
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Its true. He told them he wants more money or he's gonna stomp off somewhere
“I am uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having ~25% voting control. Enough to be influential, but not so much that I can’t be overturned,” Musk wrote in a post on X. “Unless that is the case, I would prefer to build products outside of Tesla.”
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/16/tech/elon-musk-tesla-pay-package/index.html
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How long did it take for the Cybertruck to come out after it was first announced?
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I believe that Musk has been trying to open a new GigaFactory in Mexico, but I'm not sure where along in the process it is.
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Reality is coming home to roost. Tesla squandered their first mover advantage, wasted money on distractions, and now they're watching their lunch disappear.
On a side note Dankpods recently showed a clip of the inside trim quality on a BYD car in Australia and it was atrocious. Cheap horrible creaking plastics galore.
On a side note Dankpods recently showed a clip of the inside trim quality on a BYD car in Australia and it was atrocious. Cheap horrible creaking plastics galore.
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It's just so weird Musk is taking such a public stance deeply in the conservative-right side of the political spectrum when so much of Tesla's market is the educated white collar city types who tend to lean more liberal. It's like Must is actively trying to hurt his company and his wallet.
Looking back it's comical how popular Musk was among the environmentally conscious liberal crowd. They sincerely believed Musk wanted to save the environment and thought he was a genius engineer like Tony Stark. The STEM fad was strong and cringey.
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It's him having to replenish his wealth after wasting $44 billion on the dead site formerly known as Twitter.
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He's always been a libertarian shitlord. The mask is just finally coming off.
People still think he's some galaxy brained genius if you look in some of the SpaceX article comment sections.
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But they'll launch the Roadster any day now and that will justify the tech-company valuations.
Valuing Tesla like a car company, their stock should probably fall another two thirds in 2024. But the market can stay irrational for a long time.
Valuing Tesla like a car company, their stock should probably fall another two thirds in 2024. But the market can stay irrational for a long time.
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Musk is the one responsible for hyping non-existent businesses and projecting unreasonable margins to investors in order to pump the stock price.
Stock price is based on expectations of future growth and he wanted to make that appear to be astronomically high so that he could become very rich. Now that reality is setting in investors are starting to realize that Tesla is just a car company and the stock has a long way to go before it's priced like one.
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To translate that into dollars, the compensation package required to give him 25% of Tesla shares would be $100 billion, for the stock price at that time. That’s b for billion.
And the threat was more insidious. He’s been recruiting Tesla AI people to go work for x.AI, whatever his AI is called. He’s been doing this for a while. So, if the board, who consists of his family and friends, don’t give him a “nice” compensation package, he’d stop developing AI products at Tesla and do it at his private AI companies. He’d offer those AI engineers some nice stock packages from his AI company to move over.
Those AI engineers are supposed to be working on Tesla FSD. If Tesla doesn’t have FSD, there is going to be a lot of lawsuits.
Straight up jackassery and any other CEO would have been fired by the board immediately and sued.
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Delivery vehicles require specialized expertise. That's why many of them come from manufacturers you have never even heard of (they often buy the powertrains and frame from Ford or GM, and then build their own vehicles around that). For a niche manufacturer, it's probably wise to avoid branching out in that direction.
And normal looking trucks are not very promising for electrification. Ford seems to have problems finding buyers for their Lightnings, and Rivian is more of a pricey status symbol than a normal looking truck.
And battery cars are almost always premium vehicles, a large affordable battery SUV is an oxymoron. SUVs are rarely affordable to begin with, and neither are battery cars, especially when they are large. What is the average for the car market as a whole is pretty much the price floor for battery-powered cars.
What the market would need - but isn't feasible - is a sub-$20k vehicle with a 400 mile range.
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It wouldn’t be the first time a pioneering company ended up losing its dominant position. It’s not a bad thing.
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AmanoJyaku
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
And how, exactly, does this absolve investors of doing their due diligence? Look no further than this forum to see hundreds, maybe even thousands, of examples of people calling out Musk's bullshit. The modern investor is greedy, end of story.
I'm surprised the very same people who tend to dunk on investors are now portraying them as victims just because Musk is the huckster.
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For context he currently has about a 10% stake in Tesla. Since the IPO is done and dusted he can't just pull a Zuckerberg and just declare that his shares have 5x the voting power of any other share.
Presumably he's feeling nervous about investors seeing him as a liability and trying to oust him from the company.
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Well not all investors are sophisticated which is why we are supposed to have laws that prevent CEOs of companies from doing multi-year frauds to pump their stock; the problem is that it's never enforced until the stock goes down first. Tesla is consistently one of the most popular stocks with unsophisticated retail investors.
Sophisticated institutional investors either should know, or do and don't care because they know they can sell to idiot retail.
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The market doesn't consider it to be a car company. Just look at the P/E.
Some quick Googling shows:
Toyota Motor Corporation has a P/E of 10.4, with a Market Cap of $271B.
Mercedes Benz Group has a P/E of 4.3, with a Market Cap of $70B.
Volkswagen Group has a P/E of 4.2, with a Market Cap of $59B.
Honda Motor Company has a P/E of 8.5, with a Market Cap of $52B.
General Motors Company has a P/E of 4.9, with a Market Cap of $47.5B.
Ford Motor Company has a P/E of 7.2, with a Market Cap of $44B.
Hyundai Motor Company has a P/E of 2.5, with a Market Cap of $33B.
Nissan Motor Company has a P/E of 5, with a Market Cap of $15B.
Mazda Motor Corporation has a P/E of 6.5, with a Market Cap of $7B.
Even the current superstar, BYD Company (which now sells more EVs than Tesla), has a P/E of 18.7, with a Market Cap of $74B.
Tesla has a P/E of 67, with a Market Cap of $660B.
Compare this to Apple's P/E of 31.7, Microsoft's P/E of 39, or Alphabet's P/E of 31.
The market clearly doesn't even consider Tesla to be a large, stable tech company.
To find a comparable P/E in a large company, you need to look at examples like Nvidia (current P/E of 80). Right or wrong, the market clearly considers Tesla to have similar growth potential as Nvidia and its GPU compute business.
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I have no idea what the numbers are, but I am sure there is a non-insignificant number of buyers who changed direction due to Musk. But to add to that, the right has been preaching that EVs are evil/crap for at least the last few years. That is half the market that will never look at your vehicles. Chicago didn't help.
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Come on, it was just the extension of a joke, you don't have to take it so literal. Of course I know that Mars wasn't the destination. BTW, I meant to only link to the picture, grabbed the article link by accident.
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It's a little tautological, but there always has to be some fundamental rationalization for the price of any stock. The joke answer given it's market cap relative to all other automakers combined is "in the future, half of all cars are Teslas." This isn't quite true, as you build in assumptions about other revenue streams, but it just boils down to "half of all electric automotive related profits are Tesla."
Is this absurd? Yeah. But it's the thing that has to be true to rationalize the price. Whether this ostensibly absurd future comes to pass doesn't have all that much to do with 2023 Q4 margins in the grand scheme of things. If that's the "fundamental" that rationalizes the price, you need new news that speaks to that as an impossibility. I think some other EV manufacturer needs to have a stunningly successful, mainstream breakthrough hit that outsells the Model Y and 3 and the competes with this hoped for $25,000 peoples car. I don't see that happening any time soon, so I don't really see Tesla's stock price re-entering the realm of sanity any time soon.
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Is it even possible for him to do less work at Tesla? I thought all his time was spent sending tweets and making/demanding random changes to the Twitter infrastructure.
That kinda assumes that Tesla has an actual robot to sell, rather than a human in a robot suit. </snark>
Coincidentally, the Model Y was the only launch that was built on a platform that's common to another vehicle (the Model 3). Tesla has, of course, learnt its lesson and is building a common platform for all its vehicles instead of doing something stupid like building a completely new platform for an obvious dog like the Cybertruck that can't be reused for something else.
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And just to be clear: Tesla has no robot market. Every presentation they've done has been faked, no?
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"valuation" as used in the article usually refers to the price/earnings ratio, not market cap. If we look at Tesla's enterprise value/EBITDA ratio and compare that to other automakers, halving the stock price is not enough to bring it back to reality. If valued like General Motors, Volkswagen, Ford or Toyota, Tesla would be worth somewhere between an eighth and a fourth of what it is worth now.
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It's also likely that with his rethoric, Elmo has alienated half of his customers base (arguably the one willing to spend money on an electric car).
If only would have kept his mouth shut and left Twitter alone, Tesla would have been in a much different position than it is today.
If only would have kept his mouth shut and left Twitter alone, Tesla would have been in a much different position than it is today.
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The 3rd row in a Model Y is like the second row in a Porsche 911.
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Worse than that. To justify the lofty valuations from a few years ago, Tesla would have needed a market share of more than 500%.
That's what happens when people who promise exponential growth don't stop to think that if you keep doubling your sales, you'll soon run out of customers.
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