Musk moves Tesla's goalposts, investors happily move shares higher Elon Musk has a strategy and you may have seen it before: When things aren't going well, he'll say something wild to take everyone's eyes off the trouble, and raise share prices with dreams. Take last night's earnings call as an example. The first quarter of 2024 didn't go well for Tesla, either economically or reputationally …
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He added the fleet will likely grow to include "several tens of millions" of vehicles by the end of the decade.
And yet some people still believe what he says and laud him as some sort of messiah. He isn't anything of the sort, and people are finally, finally starting to listen to the utter crap he spouts and realising that it's all complete rubbish and he's just a monorail snake oil salesman who is very good as hustling.
Exactly. What experts (and journalists) so easily forget is, for every mug who's disillusioned by repeated failure, there are always at least two more who haven't had that experience yet, waiting to take up the slack.
There will always be people ready to invest in a scam that promises them an easy life in some semi-plausible way. Because they want to believe in it.
Yes. Sometimes from people who are, objectively, quite educated, informed, and intelligent. I've noted before Tim Urban's inexplicable (to me) fascination with Musk. Urban hasn't written about Musk (at least not on Wait But Why) since 2017, so maybe he's soured on that particular topic, but before then ... whew. Kind of troubling, frankly.
"www.theverge.com/24139142/elon-musk-tesla-aws-distributed-compute-network-ai"
With the mention of the cars being plugged in, that would have to be the case. The traction battery is disconnected when the car is off so running the car's computer flat out on the 12v LA battery would kill it permanently in a couple of nights. LA batteries don't like to be run flat.
I expect that Tesla would just put the agreement to hijack the car's computer in the EULA. You could opt out, but that would mean opting out of the entire telematics so no App, no updates, no supercharger access, etc, but you could still opt out. If taken to task, Tesla would come up with a technical reason why they couldn't split out the agreement into bite-sized chunks. Maybe by the end of the year or in the first half of next year, certainly by 2027.
"A Tesla exec announced he would be leaving at the end of the call, this is the third to leave in two weeks."
There's been people in those execs offices that have left as well. When their boss left, they knew why and got out too. I've heard of a few mentioned, but those sorts of people are often overlooked when they would be exactly the people needed so the next person in the executive position isn't going to spend the first month or two coming to grips with WTH is going on.
As a car company, Tesla stock would appear to be wildly overpriced, PE ratio 49.35. And that's presumably before expensing Musk's improbable salary demands. However, there is the North American charging network which may well by far the company's greatest asset. What's it worth? Who the heck knows? Possibly quite a lot. ... Or not.
As for Musk's projections. "Probably wildly optimistic" would understate the case by a lot. If you think the Cybertruck is a fiasco, wait 'til you see what happens (or, as many of us assume, fails to happen) with the robotaxi fleet.
"However, there is the North American charging network"
There's also Electrify America, Chargepoint, EVgo and many other in addition to site sponsored chargers at city parking structure and businesses. I was in Las Vegas recently and I don't remember any branding for the chargers at the hotel where I parked. There could have been or the hotel could have contracted it out yet branded the chargers with their own name and ads.
Tesla expanded a site near me, but there's no more Tesla cars there (it's Tesla only) than there was for the initial section. There's also very little in the way of services there especially at night when all of the shops are closed. That's not useful so little credit should be given for that site and many others. I expect the big reason for that location was the cost being very low, not that it had good logistics for travelers.
"And yet, there are still plenty of people who keep buying "sausage inna bun" from CMOT Dibbler, despite all previous evidence."
I wish Sir Terry was still with us so it could be asked if there was anybody or group of people that contributed to Diblah's persona.
Connecting a sausage inna bun to Elon is a good one!
Good question. Probably more than a few inspirations for that one. And it really is about selling the sizzle regardless of the underlying product. My direct thought processes involved Moist von Lipwig explaining to the stick-in-the-mud banker why he was inclined to give Mr. Dibbler a loan. Even *after* showing his arse in public and alienating a lot of people, Musk is excellent at selling that sizzle. I'd argue even moreso than the late, reality-distorting Steve Jobs, merely because Jobs was a perfectionist[1] when it came to the product itself. Tesla, not so much; it's more sizzle than sausage.
[1] Even if Apple kit isn't everyone's cup of tea and has had its own problems, and the company gives plenty of people good reason to hate it, I *still* hear confessed Apple-haters expressing the occasional envy.
“Fool and his money,” nothing.
Back in 2020 Trump cannily realized that Democrat voters could be reliably identified, and segregated, by manipulating them into demanding the Covid vaccine while simultaneously leading millions of Maga voters to throw away masks and refuse vaccines. The goal of this, by the way, was nothing more than making it easy to distinguish Democrat mail-in votes and thereby steal the election. One million Maga Americans threw away their lives, and died of suffocation, to give Trump a slight chance of stealing the 2020 election, and it didn’t even work!
“A fool and his money are soon separated,” nothing. More accurately, “a fool and his life are soon separated” is what actually happened…
He seriously thinks this could compete with AWS? The network co-ordination and latency issues would be horrendous. Plus the fact that it would be have to be powered by individual Tesla owners' private electricity bills, which I suspect many people might not be overly happy about. I can see how this idea might have momentarily dazzled the share price analysts. But it's never going to be a practical proposition.
Two things:
1: He's all but certainly just making up a bunch of nonsense in a bid at market manipulation
2: He knows about as much regarding this sort of thing* as someone who can barely on a TV with a remote that only has a single button on it
* Like pretty much every other topic aside from being a successful grifter and racist antisemitic troll on Xitter
Why not?
According to Apple, Google, Microsoft and TwatFarce our pads, 'phones, tablets and PC's all belong to *them*.
There's probably something in the 4,000 page EULA that mentions Tesla keeping the motors even after we pay for them.
BOINC projects, https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ and the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS, https://www.mersenne.org/ ) do very well with contributors using their own electricty, computers, bandwidth and personal time.
There are other distributed computer projects where tiny, little blobs of computer power inside our homes combine to mimic humungous super-computers when they are all added together.
The idea of using the *static* and *charging* Telslas as nodes isn't utterly idiotic, so long as the software running the show tells the projects to get the hell out of the way as soon as the motor car starts moving. Both BOINC and GIMPS are polite like that. They reduce their own usage of our machinery when we are using it for something. It wouldn't - or rather it *shouldn't* - be difficult for Tesla to "borrow" the code that does this.
The biggest problem could be making any "borrowed" code reliable.
But, even if it were implemented and it worked 100% reliably, and BOINC-types used the platform, ten million iPad sized PC's, some of whom would be disconnected from the network because they were being used as actual cars, isn't a huge distributed computer. Old Musty seems not to have any idea of scale.
> "It's analogous to Amazon Web Services, where people didn't expect that AWS would be the most valuable part of Amazon when it started out as a bookstore,"
> "I think you could have on the order of 100 gigawatts of useful compute."
Hang on, now he is talking about selling compute time from the fleet of Tesla vehicles in order to compete with AWS? And this is going to be from a fleet where many of the vehicles are driverless taxis?
"Bong
"Already, nearly two hundred Tesla passengers (or payload units, as the car maker refers to them) have been reported to have perished in this, the second week of The Elon Traffic Jam, as they remain trapped in their vehicles on the side roads across the country, lost to the world now after their mobile phone batteries died as the vehicles re-arranged themselves for optimum mesh positioning.
"Bong
"Tesla stocks remain buoyant as Musk continues to send out messages to his followers on X, excitedly describing how his company is using the combined computer power of all the now static vehicles, promising that the new ML model being calculated will 'almost certainly be good enough to finally allow the Tesla Optimus to walk up a flight of at least seven stairs before falling backwards'.
"Bong
"And finally, on a lighter note, lawyers on both sides of the hearing on the appeals of the bereaved were heard laughing today as the Tesla Terms and Conditions were entered: 'They actually signed that! What!? Why?'"
All of this round of lies have been recycled. Is this being green?
A Cybercab/Robotaxi is Level 6 out of 5 levels of autonomy. No driver, no controls and a reliance on the mothership via the cellular network. We've already seen with Waymo that if the network goes down, the "autonomous" cars are bereft of a brain. They can't even navigate themselves out of traffic to the side of the road. Will they engage the electric parking brake? Can they be towed? Will a passenger be locked in when the car suddenly decides to download and install the latest OTA during rush hour (hey, the car hasn't been moving for a bit). Tesla is going to be using privately owned cars to perform compute tasks? I am getting a vision of the worlds most mobile crypto mining rig.
Optimus is a dead end. There's a reason why industrial robots aren't humanoid. There's a reason why we don't see Boston Dynamics robots already taking over. They just aren't a good form nor is it cost effective to build such a generic product and expect it will bring people with high credit card balances running. Robots are great for dangerous and/or repetitive factory tasks. People are better for George jobs as they are easier and faster to program, "go around to the workstations with a trash can and clean up any trash you find" or "take this report and run off 6 copies and bring them to conference room 3, please". Yes, a robot might be able to be programmed to do those tasks, but it would be slow and painstaking to make sure the job was done properly. You'd find a way to get rid of somebody too dumb to not be able to handle either of the above tasks. You also might not want them to perform those jobs ever again so the tedious programming of a robot wouldn't amortize.
Requisite reference from the master <https://xkcd.com/1205/>
We've got a world with factories and services optimised for humanoid shape operators and inhabitants so humanoid form factor robots seem to be a rite of passage.
They're far from practical and it makes no sense to have a factory staffed by robots in that form when you could have one half the size, twice as efficient and far lower cost if you don't have to take meatsacks and their awkward shape into account.
Plenty of other manufacturers have demoed humanoid form robots but unlike Musk, they didn't cheat and generally aren't recyclers of rancid snake oil.
I am not sure I woud want John Lumic on my case but perhaps Musk is a reincarnation of Lumic with (re-)birth trauma brain damage?
With Neuralink and his interest in AI, free metal suits all round might be on the cards. ;)
I am sure terrorists are champing at the bit for Cybercabs to arrive in numbers. Order a Cybercab, a couple of store dummies and pack the vehicle with hundreds of kilograms of high explosive and send it on its way - bobs your uncle!
Oh of course. I'm sure many proud owners of a car that costs at least $35K will be overjoyed at the opportunity of having Random Joe Schmuck climb drunkenly in the back seat and vomit over everything during the trip.
And that is supposing that Full Self-Driving actually works, which I seriously doubt Musk will ever get to.
Much more to the point - are you going to rent your car out as a taxi for 10% of an Uber trip?
Because by the time Tesla and Uber and Visa have clipped the ticket, you will only be getting a small part of the customer charge, and be left paying the electricity, road user charges, repairs, and commercial taxi insurance rates. And the fines, since as the registered owner you will be on the hook for those stop signs they are fond of shooting through.
I could make more money taking in boarders, but I don't for exactly the same reasons.
In fairness, there could be a sort of insurance program to deal with some of that, where if something happens to your car, you can swap it out for one of the other cars in the network while they organize a cleaning, and you pay for this by collecting a lower amount when your car is rented out. I don't think they'd actually do this, but it's a problem to which a solution is conceivable. Compared to the other problems with the idea, this one looks kind of small.
The major problem as I see it is that the cars can't drive themselves at all, have not been able to since the first time Musk said they could, and aren't improving. Most likely, even if they got a bunch of really smart programmers, they'd need new hardware to get anywhere close, which means all the existing models wouldn't fit into the network. That makes getting tens of millions of them in 5.5 years hard to imagine. Then again, Musk has been promising self-driving for a long time and people still talk as if they believe him, despite that Tesla has never been the leader in self-driving cars and the companies that actually do it don't look great at this point either, so maybe the problems that we see are still being ignored by some people who clearly have a bunch of money to throw at their delusions.
This is why Musk has been so emphatic that Tesla FSD will only use cameras (which all the cars already have) and not, like every other attempt at self driving, LIDAR and other sensors. It means he can pretend that the existing fleet will become this taxi empire. The fact that it's not going to work doesn't matter. All that matters is the story it lets him tell.
I expect that Musk's thinking is that people do pretty well at driving with only two, in a few cases one, badly placed eye. Surely computers ought to be able to do as well or better with two (or more better placed "eyes" (cameras). And he's likely right. In the long run. But he seems to be underestimating just how long that run is going to be. There's that J M Keynes "In the long run we are all dead thing" to consider.
"so maybe the problems that we see are still being ignored by some people who clearly have a bunch of money to throw at their delusions."
My guess is that too many people have never been taught personal finance and hadn't picked it up over time. Now they find themselves behind on buying a home, paying down debt and saving for retirement and there's somebody that's come along and it going to take the few bob they have and make them filthy rich by the end of the year, maybe in the second half of next year, by 2029 for certain. The requirement is they can't NOT believe since if they back out, they'll be in even worse shape and will be kicking themselves when they see everybody else basking in an early retirement that didn't make that same mistake.
"Angela Chao"
Hmmmm, 3/14/24. I seem to recall some other event that happened that day that involved Elon that didn't end well either. I didn't see in the article I found why the car wound up in a pond. I've driven for decades without any pond encounters and would suspect there could have been a malfunction of the car (autopilot?) or alcohol in the mix.
If I owned a Tesla and parked it outside my house after a long day in the office, when I awoke in the morning I would expect that same Tesla to be there to take me back to my office.
You can't swap it out for a different one if mine is somehow inconvenienced, say stuck at an airport or self-driven off a cliff.
You can't return it with either more or less charge than I left it when I parked it up.
You can't stick me with a bill for a second job of which I knew nothing, topped off with a bunch of fees for non-payment of additionally owned taxes for aforementioned second job.
Basically you can't 'borrow' it at all so where's the opt-out clause? I need to get my robopen out to sign it..
And in the law of certain countries (e.g. the UK), I'm responsible as the registered owner of the vehicle for whoever drives it.
If someone uninsured or disqualified drives it, my car can be confiscated and even crushed, I can be liable for speeding tickets etc. (e.g. if Tesla refuse to pay for them), and so on.
There are myriad *LEGAL* issues to sort out long before anything like this becomes reality - and it has to include absolute and complete responsibility for the vehicle and its actions no matter what the driver's doing to Tesla, not anyone else.
Until that happens, this is all just "flying car" nonsense (we've had flying cars for decades... fact is that you need to be a licensed pilot to fly them and they need to go through the same certifications, maintenance and accountability of any other aircraft).
Oh… automated robotic mechanisms have been indiscriminately killing and maiming people all over the entire globe for decades if not centuries, by now.
“Robo Taxis” is nothing more than deliberately and maliciously fulfilling the prophecy of “Maximum Overdrive” Stephen King schlock movie.
Yes he managed to distract from a worse than expected (from already lowered expectations) earnings report and gloomy forecast. Stock went up 12% so wins again, right?
Not so fast. It only went back up to where it was a week and a half ago. It is still down 10% for the year, and he'll have to come up with more distractions in three months when the next quarterly results come in. What's he going to do then, play the robot himself and dance around for Wall Street analysts? I wouldn't put it past him, and maybe that would work too, but his distractions rely on telling bigger and bigger lies (tens of millions of robotaxis by the end of the decade, did he really say that??) and saying more outrageous things in general.
This isn't the start of some big rally in Tesla's stock price, and I wouldn't be surprised over the next week and a half it fell back down to where it was Tuesday. It still has all the problems it had at the start of the week, as does Musk. I think fewer and fewer people forget that with each time he tells one of his over the top lies to goose the stock price.
And everywhere else. It's your number plate on the car, not the drivers license number.
As the law stands, the cybertaxi passenger will need a drivers license, must be legally sober, and the car will be a rental vehicle with whatever special inspections and licenses and fees are required for that class of vehicle.
To get around that TeslaTaxis would need to be the legal owner, and you would need to be leasing the car instead of buying it.
@Dan 55
The registered owner is always responsible for paying the fines, yes. I can give you directions to the two locations where they caught us. However, "points" are not charged against one's license as they would be if a real live police officer had pulled one over and written a ticket.
Douglas Maurer, then a professor of computer science at George Washington University, once set to music the text of the Montgomery County, Maryland, traffic camera ticket, in a cantata called "Forty Bucks". I have never been able to find this on-line.
No doubt you will have to agree to Robotaxi terms and conditions (54 pages of 5 point type) that absolves Tesla of all possible blame before the vehicle will allow you to enter. And you'll need to agree to resolve any disputes before an arbiter in the Falkland Islands and sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement before you can exit.
"If you enable Autopilot, and it kills you because you are playing games on your mobile; then fair enough."
In the recent accident in Washington state, it was a motorcyclist that got killed when a Tesla on Autopilot and the driver on mobe were involved.
I was just at a trade show and want a ruling on whether I can swat aside people buried neck deep in their phones blocking the aisles and not looking at where they are going in a big crowd. I used my phone once while there and moved to perimeter to make the call. The rest of the time I was doing what I was there for.
According to Musk by 2030 we will all be getting into our self driving Tesla cabs, which will go down the 1000s of miles of tunnels the Boring company have dug avoid traffic, then a quick hop onto a hyper loop train to your nearest Space X port to get onto a rocket to your second home on Mars. All of course paid for with crypto currency through the X everything app on your phone.
I just wanna know what dealer he gets his gear from, cos it must be good stuff if he believe all this BS himself.
Musks Marching Powder is synthesised in zero gravity by ex-wives smuggled up there in the boot of a roadster, and brought back on Falcon 9 boosters. Starship is driven by the spiralling number of ex's he has to blast into orbit, and nose candy he has to de-orbit.
Now you know what really makes landing the rockets economic.
Musk is so utterly full of shit. That is understandable - he lives in his little billionaire's bubble surrounded by sycophants. What I find hard to fathom is the adulation he gets from otherwise sane people. Take my boss: he's a decent bloke - kind, sharp and savvy - yet he's totally convinced Musk is some sort of 'disrupter genius' and that all his monumental fuck-ups are part of some subtle plan. Unbelievable...
"I can't imagine SpaceX being able to subsidise the other toys."
SpaceX is burning money soaked in LOx by the barge load. They have to raise more funds at least a couple of times a year and have burned up 2/3 of the contract money for delivering a Lunar lander system to NASA. I say "system" to emphasize that it's more than a rocket that doesn't blow up. It's tankers that can fill up the tank of an orbital fuel depot so the HLS can transfer astronauts to and from the moon's surface. The vast majority of the Falcon launches are to place Starlink sats in orbit, not launch services for paying customers.
SpaceX isn't in a position to subsidize anything.
Whatever people think of his personally (The Twitter screwup), there should be no doubt that he is a very successful businessman, and not a snake oil grifter type at all. You don't get to start and be successful in so many areas by being a dumbass. SpaceX (specifically Starlink) is going to make so much money he'll run out of wheelbarrows to put it in, they already have a stranglehold of cheap mass to orbit - and that is all down to Musk. The Boring Company is a sleeper - get that right and there is another cash cow there. Tesla, not so sure, the competition is winding up nicely, as long as you are happy to buy Chinese, but they still make decent cars. Not sure what to make of X. Twitter clearly needed a kick up the arse, but it's just too much of a cesspit nowadays. Free speech is all well and good, but most people don't care for what uninhibited free speech ends up looking like. Neuralink, again, a sleeper, could do very well, might go tits up. If they get it right, another cash cow.
He's actually not a successful businessman. His one and only skill is at being a serial grifter.
His initial X Corp merged with what would become PayPal and he was fired as CEO for incompetence. He was an early investor in Tesla, but he was never a founder -- if you have to file a lawsuit to claim you're a founder of a company, you weren't a founder -- then he staged a hostile takeover to become CEO and, by and large, they were the only real game in town for EVs for a number of years. SpaceX was literally on the verge of insolvency and he bet the entire company on a single rocket launch, and all Xitler really did was buy a lot of Russian rocket designs and start making modifications. Starlink I doubt will ever make money because it's just so expensive to launch things into orbit which then have a finite lifespan. Boring seems to exist only to fuck with the bidding process on large public transit projects, has completed only a single tunnel, and is currently under investigation for toxic sludge in some other tunnel they're working on. Neuralink is basically an animal torture outfit masquerading as a bio-implant company, but also is like a good decade or so behind basically everyone else in the field and taking the ridiculous approach of trying to achieve maximum complexity right from the start instead of incremental improvements.
If the guy didn't come from a wealthy family, no one would know who he was because he wouldn't have had the capital to start that first company. He would have needed to use that money for silly things like rent and food. But because he did come from a wealthy family, he never had to worry about becoming homeless like the rest of us. Basically, he got lucky with Tesla, pure and simple. It's not because he was some kind of genius businessman or any other nonsense, he got lucky, full stop.
Also, as an aside, I hate Starlink with a burning passion as an astronomy enthusiast. Now every time astronomers think they may have discovered something significant they have to rule out all these asshole objects in LEO, making their work significantly harder.
"Also, as an aside, I hate Starlink with a burning passion as an astronomy enthusiast."
I'm with you there and also since it's adding a debris field that's going to make any future space projects much more risky. The last time I was trying to get some photos of Venus, it was hopeless.
no not the car kind, the bipedal ones
has any one got any idea how they are going to power them for any length of time, I'm suspecting from their design they don't really have the space for a huge battery?
and having them tethered would cause a lot of issues, so how the fuck are they better than present static robot arms used in industry. the walking about seems to just be a stupid gimmick
Its funny how so many people think they are smart with autopilot doing the driving but they never stopped to question why they are wasting soo much time driving in the first place. WHy are they driving again over there for hours instead of thinking of other options...
hey thats freedom, sitting in a car for hours every day commuting watching the same shit for the 1000th time on FB or TT.
Tesla is a good company. But it is amazing that investors fall his next thing flim flam hype of his. It is kind of like how Tesla claimed for so many years that they made their own batteries. Guess what they were simply packaging battery cells made by Panasonic. It is only now that Tesla is building their own battery cells...!!
Its like religion, some might realise its a lie, but when all your friends are in the same religion, you cant exactly leave because your friends might not speak to you any more.
Its the same here, they have so much money in tesla, they cant admit anything else, because they will lose it all.
This very well might be the start of the biggest collapse in history for a single company.
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