With the way you're framing your opposition, I agree with you.
But I'd like to add some nuance.
Parts of building a product or a set of features is about search, rather than great engineering. Sometimes it's better to build two good-enough features to figure out which one is valuable to the user, rather than building one solid* one.
I've always been in the "let's fuck around and find out" camp. I appreciate that someone with a different attitude built git!
Just saying that there's a balance here, which will depend on the degree to which you're in the middle of a search problem.
*solid in a pure engineering sense - availability, maintainability, chance of leaking the users' nudes etc.
So this guy was pretty active in the TeslaQ community. They believed Tesla to be (extremely) overvalued in 2017-2019 on the grounds that they would never become profitable.. or something.
They lost a lot of money shorting Tesla.
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/91aha1/montana...
Anyways, seems like he's keeping the grudge alive.
They were right about a couple of things back then. But majorly wrong in aggregate and with respect to the outcome.
To be fair, they were overvalued in those days as well. Just because the on-paper value went up doesn’t make their statements false, it just means we’ve continued the charade.
When I followed TeslaQ, the valuation was around 60b.
Today Tesla has 39b in accumulated retained earning (pr latest 10k, not q).
If the thesis was that Tesla would be unable to create a system that would churn out cars that could be sold at scale with an economic surplus, then we have to reject it.
And Elon has also acknowledged that they came within a hair of going bankrupt during that model 3 production ramp up. Tesla was either going to go bankrupt or become quite valuable, and their proper valuation would have been based on the unknowable odds of the two scenarios. Maybe it wa a 1% chance of going bankrupt, maybe it was 99%.
I mean. Sure. Value is ultimately what someone will pay for something, and the name of the game is to buy low and sell high. People who bought TSLA made money.
The point is, it's completely irrational - like winning lottery 3x in a row. Tesla's PE ratio, depending on how you look at it, something like 200-350. That means that if nothing changes, the expected return of earnings on your investment is 0.3-0.5%. You'll struggle to find a riskless fixed income instrument paying this little.
Ok, so clearly that's not why people buy this. They hope the earnings will increase, and/or the value of the stock. Seeing as you can lock in 4.5% riskless yield for 10 years, you'd hope for at least this much from a stock - realistically much more. Let's call it 7% - still low methinks but so be it. That's 14-25x more than it earns now.
You could say you don't care about earnings - just about price increase. Sure. But even to maintain the meagre PE ratio, earnings would have to double over 10 years. But realistically - this PE seems crazy for anything other than a crazy-high-growth stock. Which maybe Tesla is now but can't be forever. If it crawls down to a meagre 50x PE in 10 years time, to make your 7% return, earnings would still need to increase 8-14x in that time.
Maybe they can do it. They now sell, apparently, about 2% of all cars. No idea if total car production is stable; if it stays the same, and their margins stay the same, Tesla would need to increase their market share 8-14x too, to 16-28%. Maybe they can improve their margins and sell fewer cars, yet make more money - but typically increasing market share comes with lower profit margins as you lower the price to sell more stuff.
This is a veery bullish scenario. This is something an investment analyst for any other stock would need to sweat blood to argue. Yet this is what youre committing to when buying Tesla today.
Of course none of it really matters at the end of the day. Prices can levitate forever given enough believers. Wars can apparently be declared won with tweets with nothing to back them up - repeatedly. But if you think reality will come at some point, this is what is needed for Tesla to make sense as an investment.
Tesla's valuation is high because investors expect them to sell goods & services other than cars, such as autonomous vehicle rides and humanoid robots for domestic & industrial use.
Who knows if they'll be able to pull it off, but an analysis that treats Tesla as a car company misses why investors have priced so much growth into the company.
Market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent by Keynes says everything about what happened here.
But to say there’s a “grudge” seems to ignore another market fact “past results are not indicative of future results”. He might be right this time around for all you know. Is there anything you disagree apart from saying he is a Musk hater? Otherwise this comment is just unhelpful.
So what is the reason of Tesla having greater valuation than Toyota while making 3 car models and you can't connect Apple Car / Android Auto into either ?
Do you think that Kathie Woods trying to memestock Tesla to 2000USD/share is normal?
Or do you think that promises like 20 million cars / year within 2030 while having extremely limited amount of models were ever achievable?
To be fair, few could have anticipated that Tesla and Musk would be unaffected by valid scrutiny and criticism.
This is also addressed in the article:
> E. DON’T TRY TO SHORT SPACEX!!
> Elon Musk is a cult figure. Moreover, he has again and again proven himself immune to any meaningful market, legal, or regulatory scrutiny.
> Musk’s detractors have been correct about Tesla’s terrible fundamentals, its Full Self-Driving lies, its robotaxi fantasies, its shaky accounting. But when they have imagined these things might affect the stock price, they have been wrong.
All that.
But also he makes products so compelling that people who dislike him drives in them. "Fuck Elon" gotta be an all time top seller among bumper stickers.
> few could have anticipated that Tesla and Musk would be unaffected by valid scrutiny and criticism.
This almost implies that the scrutiny itself, and not the economic reality, should be the reason of Teslas demise or otherwise lesser financial outcome.
Which seems a little self referential.
If Elon doesn't wash his hands after peeing, and we pointed it out, that would be valid criticism. Ewww pee-hands.
But the economic reality and aggregate outcome wouldn't change.
Like not even if the frontpage of WSJ, The Times or FT said "eww Elon pee-hands".
And that the thing - with enterprises of this scale, you could always nitpick and find some things that are suboptimal. But we gotta see it in proportion. 100mm accounting error in Tesla is not the same as a 100mm accounting error in the local McDonalds franchise. For one the error is magnitudes larger than their real economic footprint. For the other it's a rounding error.
TL;DR:
I hear you - yes there is valid criticism. We just gotta see it in proportion.
I like Teslas cars. But I don't like pee-hands.
Tesla isn't the technology, performance, luxury, infotainment, or value leader in EV's any longer. If you think the Germans know what the salute meant, and they stopped buying the cars, you can take the hint and have a lot of excellent choices.
There is no future prospect of explosive growth at Tesla any longer. That price to earnings ratio is not less absurd for having lasted this long.
I hear you. And I believe disagreement is good.
The markets were right back in 2018 - Tesla did manage to overcome their manufacturing struggles, and they did become profitable (now having retained earnings equal to ~65% of their then market cap).
The markets may well be wrong now. But they weren't back then, and the arguments haven't changed drastically.
Currently I'm sitting in Palo Alto. So I get to see a lot of Waymos and Cybercabs. I struggle to see how Waymo can compete on price if Tesla can keep production prices in the same realm as M3.
And making a car is a pretty steep barrier to entry. So that edge may take some time to compete away.
You are living in a fantasy world where, for one thing, Tesla overcoming early production problems merits and astronomical P/E ratio. For another thing you think a non-functioning robotaxi service portends some future growth. Sleep in the backseat of an FSD Tesla if you dare.
At least half of the people in this thread survived growing up with access to social without age verification.
And I'm pretty sure we've all had an encounter with some creep in some random chat room too.
We talked about these things at school and at home.
Don't share things with people you don't know etc.
Idk if it's illegal to tell kids what to do these days. But when I grew up, we were occasionally also told to get off the computers and touch grass.
I hope I'll get to raise my future kids myself. I think I can do a better job than the government :)
Soon enough you will realize that kids spend more time with their friends than with their parents. Most parents want their kids to be curious, build autonomy, and feel free. For this to work, they need a safe space. There are to place to enforce a policy: client side (parental control) or server side (age verification). Personally I don't want to transform my kids general purpose computer into a locked down infotainment machine. I think it would be a worst society if the norm becomes "this is not your device".
How are kids supposed to have a safe space "to be curious, build autonomy, and feel free" if they can't get out from the authoritarian hands of their parents or their government?
Good question. Maybe we can find the answer by getting them drunk at the strip club - two things that we'd be authoritarians if we prevented children from accessing.
"we've all had an encounter with some creep in some random chat room to"
My parents generation survived lead in gasoline and they never wore seatbelts or helmets.
"I think I can do a better job than the government :)"
Is exactly what their parents said about the government telling them they have to get their kids to wear seat belts and helmets.
I don't think this argument works for two reasons:
1) It don't address the materiality of the concern.
If 'creeps in chat rooms' are causing material harm, it's an issue, then youre making the 'anti vaxxer' / 'anti seatbelt' / 'anti helmet' argument.
I'm not saying you are - if 'creeps in chatrooms' really is a 'lesser issue' - then you're not making a bad argument at all.
The real issue is the 'materiality' of these things.
'Creeps in chatrooms' is a harder thing to assess, but it's real, if it is real, we can't just dismiss it.
2) "I think I can do a better job than the government "
If someone wants to protest the governments current age restrictions cigarettes - and also not vaccinate their kids - that's a choice.
But this argument is usually made by people who don't have kids in their life and haven't yet realized that 'the all or nothing internet' is not really a choice, it's chaos.
Lack of very basic regulations means people aren't afforded the opportunity, in a way the government is dictating that 'kids will get guns and porn and that's it'.
The alternative argument - is that we can have age restrictions and parents can then be in a position to actually be parents, and make a choice.
'Slippery slope notwithstanding' ... because it's a complciated issue
>At least half of the people in this thread survived growing up with access to social without age verification.
I was like 8 - 10 years old, I wandered into the "Adults Only" chat room on Microsoft Networks (Oh sweet, I thought, they have a small pen to keep the boring adults in, better check on them) and said "Hi everyone my name is X and I am Y years old" and everyone was nice to me and said hello. I got bored and left.
ofc, if you don't want the Excel sheet, you can find my contact details in my profile.
Otherwise you get free access to the web version (which is far better), just by signing in with Google (you don't actually have to sign up to anything through the affiliate link, you can just wait out the timer).
I kind of like it. I mean here we all are on it. And sites like HN can just be written by one person and put up by one person with no permissions. The alternative if the government controlled it would be something like the Apple app store where you have to pay a fee to maybe be allowed to do something.
No it would not. We're already in some alternative where the government says that you can't make a website to sell CSAM, for instance. And we all agree that this is a good thing.
The goal of regulations is to prevent undesirable behaviours by making it "too costly" to do. The goal is not to take 30% on every app sale.
The post I replied to was on an internet designed with a "profit motive". What you describe is still basically profit motive with laws to stop bad things. I'm not quite sure what you get if you removed the profit motive. Maybe the app store wasn't a good example. Maybe something like the BBC?
My point was that the post you replied to was not saying that the alternative would be that the government would run it for profit. It was just saying that maybe it's better to have rules set by the government than to have the whole thing driven by profit-maximising machines.
Any website can have a button to reject all cookies. Or if you use only functional cookies, you don't even need it! Websites could come together to make it a standard and enable a browser option to avoid bugging you.
Guess what: they didn't want that, and some prefer to make cookie banners which are really obnoxious.
I'm all up for incentives for better websites, and penalties for shit ones.
> Loosing it for a couple of days is more palatable
Sorry, I'll just be "that guy" for a moment.
Assuming that access is cut at a random time during the week, the average number of days without Claude would be 3.5.
That's not reasonable as it's dependant on usage.
So assume that you've always been just shy of hitting the limit, and you increase usage by 50%, then you'd hit the limit 4.67 days in. Just 2-3 hours shy of the weekend - a sort of reward for the week's increased effort.
My original post wasn't clear and that's my fault, but I am taking that into account. When I said "that's it for the week" I meant "the remainder of the week." It's just a mouthful to write "the remainder of the week" each time.
And... well, I am worried that I could do something stupid or accidental on Monday and Tuesday and then loose access with more than half of the week left, especially since, as everyone else has noted, Claude doesn't show you how close to the limit you are until you've almost hit it. (That said, I also appreciate that it doesn't warn me too early, or I would be constantly watching the usage tick up well before I actually need to worry about it.)
A couple of weeks ago, Claude got into some kind of weird loop where it just kept saying something like "now I need to add the code continuation" over and over and over again. I had auto-accept turned on, and it was chugging for several hours before I realized something was wrong and stopped it. Who knows how much usage that burned! Luckily, it happened late in the evening, so I knew my usage would reset the next day anyway. But IIRC it was also a Monday evening...
This might more be a European thing, but over here some of the sellers on marketplaces like Amazon, are linked with organised VAT/Tax fraud.
While I can't say it's all, it'll all things being equal, be baked in to the competitive dynamics. Thus undercutting legal operators, or destroying their profit (incentive) to provide good or domestically produced wares.
There's a podcast episode from some ML (money laundering) specialists, that make mention of it. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/trigger-warning/id1448...
Then we learn about the perils of "majority rules" setups, of lobbying, of trying to evaluate thousands of different decisions across hundreds or thousands of legislators, etc. and it becomes a lot less simple.
You live in a democracy until you don’t. It can disappear overnight with the stroke of pen from some populist leader who just ignores laws. Never think you are safe just because you’re in a democracy.
If a future totalitarian government wants to save money on medical treatments then they can just euthanize anyone who gets cancer rather than euthanizing anyone whose genes say that they have a 50%+ greater risk than average of getting cancer. Or collect genetic samples themselves and use that to cull the population rather than just do it for people who were 23andMe customers.
Killing people off after they get cancer saves money but it does nothing for the gene pool if they already reproduced. Individuals who represent high cancer risks can be forced into sterilization and can consider other options for children in the future, such as adoption or raising a genetic alternative child. Totalitarian regimes can take note here.
Was about to comment something to the same effect.
He's got 341 million subscribers on youtube (on his english channel). If we imagine that there's 1,35 billion english speakers worldwide (the figure that came up on Google when I searched), that means that 25% of english speakes actively follow him on Youtube.
While I agree that a 13 y.o. is probably more likely to follow him than a 30 y.o., his reach is anything but limited to the teens & children segment.
Chamath Palihapitiya have have worn Mr. Beast merch on multiple occasions on the All In pod as well - which I find kinda funny :D
That there's no separation anymore. YouTube added support for multiple audio tracks and since then everything goes to one channel again. The channels in other languages even redirect to the main channel.
*solid in a pure engineering sense - availability, maintainability, chance of leaking the users' nudes etc.
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