The Big Short investor on Tesla (TSLA): It's a cult

No 💩

Of course it is, i mean they make fine cars, but not fine enough to warrant that valuation

You're right about the second part but they make generic poorly built cars

Exactly, it’s not a premium car

You're a founding member of that cult, Fred. You have no room to criticize it now.

You mean the ones that catch on fire and incinerate the trapped passengers? Or are you referencing the ones that kill people while in FSD mode? Maybe you are thinking of the ones with trim that falls off and have the accelerator stuck to the floor causing deaths.  Oh, perhaps you were referencing the pinnacle of automotive excellence, the cybertruck. https://mashable.com/article/every-cybertruck-recall-full-list Or do you mean the entire brand which is by far the most deadly on the road today, for both passangers and pedestrians? https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a62919131/tesla-has-highest-fatal-accident-rate-of-all-auto-brands-study/ Yep, their cars are indeed *fine*....if your goal is to die and take out a few people with you.

>Eisman famously said that “making investment decisions by looking solely at the fundamentals of individual companies is no longer a viable investment philosophy” as *valuations are now completely detached from fundamentals*

Seems like all the stock market peeps are hitting the ketamine pretty hard...

I think they mean “fine” in the sense of “it’ll do”, like “I suppose it’s better than walking.” Like when you’re hungry and you see a plate of 3-day old leftovers in the fridge and go “ok, fine.”

They made impressive POC cars a long time ago.  Today they are still making POC cars while cutting back on quality and safety.

Actually it is not a cult but a Ponzi scheme.  In addition Elon’s excessive borrowing on his stock’s value has looped in most of the major financial institutions. Everyone Elon has loans with is now tied to the success of Tesla for billions of dollars. They have a vested interest to keep the price high so they can keep collecting interest from Elon and to prevent them from losing billions if and when Tesla crashes. So these financial institutions have been providing positive investment reviews and high target prices for Tesla.  It’s a scam not a cult.

I think to some amount of credit he recognizes this. My view is we should be accepting of people who are willing to step back from the brink with Tesla and Musk and realize just how wrong they are, but maybe I just think that bc it was my own situation, too. 🤷‍♂️

I think he means the ones that have indicator stalks as a $600 extra

Tesla is 3% of a S&P500. It's not going anywhere

My Tesla investor buddy thinks that Tesla’s secret to the stock valuation making sense is their energy storage tech, that this is the future. But why isn’t anyone mentioning this part of their business when discussing Tesla, only the cars and robots?

The cars are shit cans on wheels with a computer screen mate

Majority of their cars are fine, not good, just fine… Fine is not good, bur it’s not bad, it’s okay

It's definitely a serious problem, and has been for quite some time. I guess someday we'll see the bubble pop.

This is the mistake that most ponzi schemes miss out on. Usually they just take rich people's money, but they need to take money from investment banks instead. “If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.”

A scult

Elon started the party, filled the punch bowl, and left for a better party down the street.

It was half the current sp earlier this year. What changed?

My refutation of the $2T+ bull case is: where’s the Moat?

My opinion of my 2023 MY AWD. Overpriced at $60k maybe, but I got it for $40k OTD so no complaints..

Feels like the entire economy is just a big ponzi scheme

What gets me most is that they would be worth at most 100bn on the merits of being a car company alone, looking at others. The excess 1.3bn is in essence from „AI“. OpenAI was recently valued at 500bn and people are worried it’s too high a valuation… Teslas AI is supposed to be worth almost triple???

Don’t forget taking a big old dump in the punchbowl with that Nazi salute.

When you dig deeper on cults, you *see that there’s always a lot of grift at the top. So same difference?

One defining feature of a cult is they usually have secret knowledge of something

Until they aren’t. Stock market is doing Wile E. Coyote run in thin air right now, sooner or later it will stop and look down.

Yea but I'm curious why I don't see other cultists talk about the power tech (like, almost at all), they all seem to be talking about robots and AI. Like, is the power grid tech so obviously not market-leading, or just the fact that Elon doesn't hype it as much?

So, the house will come crashing down once one of these institutions writes of the loss and takes the money.

Now i also come from Denmark, and here they are fairly cheap versus other cars for what you get

So we've progressed from "late-stage capitalism" to something else entirely. Capitalism sets prices with markets, but we've stopped doing that and now we're using, what? Imagination instead?

The Chinese dominate power storage, buy CATL shares. Tesla is nowhere. Optimus is the new story.

Because energy storage just isn't that big a business.

probably because energy is only 6% or so of their business, Tesla doesn't have a technical advantage over other battery storage manufacturers, and this administration refuses to consider battery storage as a strategic priority (it should be). artificial intelligence is where all the hype is, and is the core of autonomous vehicles and robotics.

Probably but I expect none of them can go after the money directly. The collateral on the loans is the stock and if they try to do equivalent of a margin call they will destroy the value of the asset used for collateral. It’s really a replay of the 1929 stock market crash in the making. The amount of money we are talking about here has to be nearing a 100 billion. Combined with the crash of Tesla we could be talking about a trillion dollars.  At this point it is almost a too big to fail issue.

I think battery storage is just a commodity really, even more so than cars. Tesla doesn't have any patents to get a sustainable advantage. RBC just put out a $500 price target and this was their valuation assessment: The humanoid segment “accounts for 36% of its total valuation,” with “Robotaxi contributing another 37%, followed by FSD at 11%, Cars at 8%, and Megapacks at 8%.

Government capture? His friends are one Trump-heartbeat away from running the government and there's a reasonable belief that we could see the end of Democracy during their rule, so that makes Tesla a publicly traded oligarchy play.

I've dealt with their energy storage business. It's very similar to the rest of the market, nothing special or any sort of secret sauce. They're not the cheapest, not the best.

That’s when I realised they are a cult. That $600 option is available NOW but when I was last car shopping it was not. Tesla apologists were very active in attacking anyone who questioned that stupid and dangerous decision. Some of the YouTube’s on this are quite funny as reviewers try to pretend they “get it” and adapted quickly. Then in follow-up videos admit that they can’t. Credibility already lost as far as I’m concerned. That was the reason I didn’t buy one. Months later, the sales guy called to excitedly tell me that the stalks were coming back. “Too late”. I could tell he had a list of people to call.

That's naive.

I think he means their power grid large scale battery projects, is that what you worked on?

I said it before I think the YouTube people are getting kickbacks from Tesla. I never thought getting rid of the signal stark was a good idea. Especially for people in the European markets because of the number of roundabouts they have. So they created the problem and now charging you $600 to fix the problem.

They said that in the dot com bubble too. It just means we’re experiencing a bubble again.

Yes

All the tailors are heavily invested in making new clothes for the emperor.

The Tesla storage product is just their traction battery, which is not optimal for power balancing. There are more appropriate chemistries for the grid, which are slowly catching on where it makes economic sense. That is rarely the case for home owners unless completely off grid.

Imagineering and Engination!

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I’ve been involved in several cults. Sometimes as a leader, sometimes as a follower. You make more money as a leader… you have more fun as a follower.

We’ve been trying to tell you for over a decade now. We were dismissed as luddites and haters.

Why’s it matter if the whole point of investing is to make money? I’m up 60k this year off of $tsla alone and I’ve never owned a single share.

I agree I don’t think Tesla is a meme stock. It’s just a giant scam and people have fallen for it. Also generally Meme stocks don’t move down when the market is down they move independently. To equal their valuation Tesla would have to sell 300x as many cars and do it for way cheaper. The average pay for a base level Tesla plant worker is like 40 an hour.

Lol. There is absolutely zero value and utility for a humanoid robot. Battery storage is a moot point since we can already create endless nuclear power for free. Tesla is a giant scam.

It’s not a too big to fail scenario. It’s only like a trillion dollars. Apple is worth 3x that. Other than that you’re spot on.

when the bank is owed too much money that's the government's problem which usually means the people

I assign a $30/share value to Tesla based on patents, supercharger network, battery/storage, etc, but here’s the major flaw….they’ve been neglecting this part of their business. Tesla has been installing less solar panels, they’ve basically installed a few solar roofs instead of the promised tens of thousands of them that would revolutionize the industry, their solar grid solutions won’t be adopted in the US with Trump in office, etc etc. Their car sales are in decline, they haven’t introduced an exciting growth product in years. Their only consumer product growing is the Powerwall, but that’s reliant on government subsidies. i still see no market in the next 10 years for mass market humanoid robots, and they don’t even have models that are functional. I’m expecting their Q4 to show a loss. and at some point they’re going to have to take a big writedown on their leases, right? if they have a hundred thousand (speculating) leases on their books that are likely showing an overinflated value (since they’re supposed to appreciate, right!?), then those are going to have to be adjusted downward at some point. and aren’t their gigafactories currently running at under 50% according to reports? This has to be some expensive capital. so $30 based on the company currently. the rest is based on potential, and I just don’t like what I see, because right now they are a mess. no functioning profitable rideshare service, no robot, declining solar installations, losing all govt subsidies, a massive failure with CT, and now lower sales price cars that will drive sales and profits likely lower?

They're not mutually exclusive. In-fact wherever you see a cult, there's almost always a scam involved. Musk et. al. are the scammers. The cult is the mark.

Nah, he's just in a k-k-k-hole on the bathroom floor.

Which would you rather have: a cookie for being ahead of the curve, or the dissolution of the Musk cult? You got your "I told you so" catharsis. Maybe get off your high horse.

Uh... because there's a great deal of pain on the horizon. The nature of a ponzi scheme is a lot of people get left holding the bag. You don't actually have those $60k. It's Monopoly money. I assume you're talking about some index fund. When the crash comes, all that "value" will be wiped out. You either take the hit or you sell to someone, move to a more stable investment and the sucker who buys from you takes the hit. If it's anything like 2008, a lot of the loss will be "socialized" which means every taxpayer takes some of the hit while the oligarchs get away with it.

Why isn't everyone talking about the fantasy your friend invented?

Fred Lambert "As a professional journalist" as he claims in the article - one who's done no formal journalism training. (He did a business studies degree). His sole relevance has been as a mouth piece for Tesla riding the hype machine on the way up. I don't think he's Tesla's Goebbels though, rather a useful idiot.

It's felt that way for a decade. Before the current bubble we had the venture capital bubble. Instead of it popping and crashing, we just kept sailing upward on the next bubble. It's not healthy. Markets need corrections from time to time.

I think you missed the part where I said I don’t own a single share? My gains have been from selling options on Tsla.

If I can’t scuba then what’s this all been about?

Is that a similar valuation to the combination of unicorns and leprechauns

How about if you don’t have a functioning bullshit detector, you try listening to someone who does? If people did that, the Cult of Musk never would have happened.

Because we’re seeing the actual demand for energy storage and while real/important/etc, it doesn’t support the valuation. The robots + cabs are the “magic bullets” that do (because we can guestimate the demand as high as we want)

Just got this ad on my feed with Optimus! https://www.reddit.com/user/VoteTesla/comments/1o3btoa/teslas_annual_meeting_is_coming_up_on_november_6/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&p=1&utm_term=1

They haven't really made any major advances in energy storage, and, importantly, Musk stopped even making hyperbolic promises he can't deliver on in energy storage *years* ago. I presume your buddy has been in Tesla for at least 6 or 7 years? Energy storage was always more of a niche Musk hype train, not as sexy as self driving, robots, rockets, etc, which made it attractive for people who consider themselves "grounded" and "above the hype". But Musk stopped pushing it years ago.

You misunderstand. All those other AI companies are just AI companies. Tesla is AI + Elon Musk. If Musk farted generally within the vicinity of the building, it'd up the value by at least a few percentage points.

Oh we'll get one. And it won't be pretty. If you've invested in pumped up meme stocks detached from companies' fundamentals you're going to be one of those people who were dropping out windows in 1929.

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I looked into batteries for my house, and there are benefits You can use them (with solar) to power your house in a blackout, which happens ALL THE TIME where I live. At least a few times per year. The power company wants to use them to store power and then suck power out of them at peak times. They pay you enough that over a decade or so, it dramatically lessens the cost of the batteries. The problem was that I determined I needed 3 of them, at $10k each after incentives to be able to run (most of -- but not all) my house during a blackout. I couldn't afford that.

Wellll ....duh

he was publically short when it was a $40bn company six years ago and now they're sitting on $30bn cash he was very wrong in the past but is probably right now

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I didn't miss that part. I said "I assume you're talking about some kind of index fund". I guess I was wrong. But it doesn't matter if you actually trade Tesla stock. If you're making gains on the grift, those gains are either an illusion or at someone else's expense. You're unlikely to escape the pain that's coming either way.

Umm none of those things since I’m trading in stock options only. There is no pain coming my way from it at this point. I’m finding it hard to find the words to make this sound in a not so mean way, but you really need to learn more about the subjects you are doling out to people before doing so as that typically leads to misinformation being parroted.

A correction is getting a belt on you’re ass. We’re looking down into a bloody wicker basket.

I don't think you're picking up what I'm putting down. There are two ways people are going to hurt from this bubble bursting. Directly and indirectly. After [Black Thursday](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_crash_of_1929), a lot of people who **weren't trading stocks at all** lost everything they had. They were collatoral damage. It hurt **almost everyone** in America and many others around the world. Do you get it? Are you so sure you're going to come out ahead after the bubble pops? $60k doesn't sound like a whole lot when we're talking about something that will probably whipe entire life savings out and last for many years. If you're not in the top 0.01%, you're fodder, friend. That's part 1 of my answer to, "Why’s it matter if the whole point of investing is to make money?" Since, as Upton Sinclare put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his wealth depends on his not understanding it." I don't think this has much chance of sinking in. But, you admited right off the bat that you're making money off this grift. You seem to think that degrees of separation like derivatives mean you can somehow make money or otherwise benefit from the grift without getting your hands dirty. Nothing works like that. You said, "I’m up 60k this year off of $tsla alone". That means, **if Tesla wasn't running a grift, you wouldn't have made that money**. You can hide behind convoluted logic, but that's the fact. That's part 2. You've denied part 2 because you believe in the fairytale of making money off a grift without culpability, but you've never refuted part 1, the indirect damage. The fact that you asked, "what's the matter if people are making money?" in the first place means you have zero license to talk down to me. How many times do you think people just like you have asked that exact question throughout history?

Again, I don’t know how else to say this, but go read up on how options works. Whether they are running a grift or not doesn’t matter. You are trading more on volatility rather than actual stock value. It works that way on all company stocks and not just Tsla. Whether tsla is at $800 or $100 valuation doesn’t meant anything to the option trader.

In all honesty, the storage tech is the only truly viable segment of the evonomy. But it’s not flashy, it’s not S3XY, it doesn’t have lots of moving parts and it doesn’t roll out on to the shareholders meeting stage. They did a bbag up job in Australia and -quit-. Every wind farm, every solar farm should be investing an a storage array.

First: why do you keep ignoring my first point? Like blatantly? Second: Where does the money you make come from?

1. Because you don’t understand how options work so you make assumptions that aren’t true at all. 2. The money comes from other options traders. Seriously, it’s hard to get anywhere with this discussion if you don’t know how it works. If I was talking about the actual stock, and its manipulation, then that would align more to what you are talking about.

1: Jesus you are being dense about point #1. It's not based on any assumption. I don't care if you make money lobster fishing. **Crashes hurt everyone** **including you**. It has has **nothing to do with options trading or any of that BS**. It's just one reason "why it matters", which is what you asked FFS! I've only made a single assumption, and it was wrong and I already admitted it. **It's only relevant to point 2.** On point 2: What happens when someone else buys those options and the stock crashes? Do they get left holding the bag? You're really sounding like a crypto-trader right now. They somehow think endless layers of obfuscation constitute an actual magic trick. Whenever anyone points out the grift underlying the whole opperation, they're like, "no no no. **You just don't get it**. I make money off the grift, but that doesn't mean I'm part of the grift!" You know what, I do understand crypto currency. I'm a software engineer. None of it is confusing to me. Compared to the layers of BS in crypto land, the underlying mechanics of options trading are not complicated. I also understand physics: **There is no free lunch**. If you're extracting value from something that isn't providing value, however indirectly, you're doing it at someone else's expense OR you're deluding yourself and you're about to be scalped. Like I said before, I know this isn't going to sink in, but it bears repeating: Point 1 has nothing to do with how you make money. You are exposed to general economic damage when a bubble pops. Point 2 is that if you're making money off it, you're either extra-exposed or you're culpable. Options are just a game of hot-potato. Edit: Also, the fact that you think an economic crash only matters in so far as your personal finances are concerned is pretty sociopathic. "Other people are going to hurt" doesn't seem like an acceptable answer to "Why's it matter" without relating it to you personally.

It was profitable, but will it be with the CAFE credits?

I’m just curious how this works. Can you still see my reply?

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but bitcoin has value.. its a place detached from regulation for all these billionaires to park money without having to pay an apartment manager Tesla will crash when they all start panic selling

wired wrote a great article on batteries a few years ago... we've hit a wall... and that includes Tesla.. most of their "advantage" is overpriced because of marketing

It is another example of a hyper over-inflated stock caused by FOMO. I would say the dot com never hit the levels of bubble that Tesla is at this moment.

$1.6T is a helluva valuation on a 2M/yr car company, yes. This is 25X BMW and Mercedes market caps.

Man all those people getting scammed but you somehow know the truth.

The more you think about it, the less the valuation makes sense.

I think the point he's trying to make is that if the stock crashes (and it must, being built on thin air) then the resulting recession will cause a great deal of pain for everyone including you. I don't think you'd be in any way responsible for that, and frankly we're all better off making hay while the sun shines if we can, but there is a bubble and its existence is a bad thing.

If Tsla crashes due to their own doing then it’ll affect a lot of people yes, but not to the level that he was claiming. If tsla crashes because the tech sector is crashing then it’ll affect would cause a great deal of pain to everyone. Here’s what I was trying to get through to him though, the only people that will get hurt a lot if Tsla crashes are the people that hold a large percentage of their portfolio in actual tsla stock. Most index funds and 401k have a minor holding in tsla so it’s not doom and gloom if tsla crashes.

I was curious so I checked my pension ETF and found that Tesla is 3% of the entire portfolio. Frankly I think that's way too much for a single company, and I can't see a way that Tesla crashing won't have a wider impact. I know that's the stock market, and it goes down as well as up, but I'd prefer if the money from my country's pension funds was being used to build something useful.

3% is a lot for a single company in a 401 I agree, but do you know how pissed people would be if their 401 had let’s say 0.5% of Tsla for the past 10 years? That’s a lot of gains lost. Ideally the company managing your 401 will move out of it when it starts to drop.

Eh, mostly agree but they do have the certifications and name recognition to simplify permitting in many areas. Certainly not worth a trillion fucking dollars though