Things at Tesla are worse than they appear

i love how lemmy's c/upliftingnews brings actual uplifting news

Hahaha hey elonazi fuck you in the neck!

The "uplifting news" that makes us all think about US politics again, for the 40th time today.

In the eloquent words of Matt Serra,
"Good. Fuck 'em"

Excellent news!

What makes this uplifting instead of just news?
- The fascist owner of that company.
  
  And we are better off spiritually or socially for his company having a hard time?
  Its not him. Its a symbol of him but not the actual fascist.
  I am not upset at the news but it doesn't bring me great joy as it does not change the situation, he has the ear of power.
  This feels like celebrating a neighborhood burning cause you got mugged once when walking through it.
- This news does make me happy, but if you're implying it doesn't belong here I'd like to say I agree.

let's go for the trifecta and get it to happen at starlink and spacex too
- Im shorting tesla stock lol 3000$, hey if i lose whatever but could win big lol, also fuck that nazi elon
- Their best and brightest are being poached, it's only a matter of time really.
- Nah, I can't say that about Star Link despite who the awful owner is. People rely too heavily on Star Link now and there's no competition. If you need a car you can buy a different EV, but they can't do the same for an Internet connection. However, this would be a great time for some other billionaire who sucks a little less to start a competitor.
- It's not happening at starlink. There is no competition and people who have it are not going back to the shit they had before.

I love how this is in positive news

I deeply dislike Elon Musk and would be glad to see him suffer.

It is fun to see that the little plus they made came from regulatory credits, i.e. emission trade. Which is likely to be chopped under Trump for being woke in the highest.
- Musk is in charge of the chopping...

Suddenly I realize what all the data he gathered is for. It's a dead man switch. He dies or gets thrown under the bus, he releases all the data the government knows about all the wealthy dodging their responsibilities and shitting on the middle class.
- Why though. It seems nobody cares. It could be released and people would go who cares.
  
  This, yeah. Heck, remember the Panama papers?
- I don't know, for the purposes of everything that got him to power and is keeping him in power those people don't seem to care if everyone knows their business.
  Nobody's saying the quiet part quietly anymore.
- That would be the best case scenario, in reality he just datamined and is using it to sell metadata to foreign countries and train an AI on data that nobody else had
- So you are saying Elon saw what happened to Epstein and thought "He might have been onto something..."

Good. Let them burn. The moment that loser heil Hitlered he should have been removed the next day. You are now complicit and have chosen your side.
- He is both the leopard and the face.

Their CEO is a nazi so yeah, we get it.

But they could always be worse :)

Lol, read the title of the article, saw that it is in "Uplifting News", was confused for half a second but yep, I'm ok with this.
- You are experiencing Schadenfreude
- I too had a sensible chuckle. I do feel for the employees who just want to produce cars and innovate. Sure sucks being drowned by your own mother.
  
  Is the new one out yet‽
- Didn’t even realize until you pointed it out. I did feel a bit happy while reading, so that checks out.
  Then, I thought about the way America is sinking, and the power vacuum being left behind. Gotta say, I wasn’t quite so uplifted any more now that I remembered that China will be taking that role on the world stage. Maybe 100 years from now people will be watching Chinese movies and using Chinese loan words.
  
  We had a chance at Star Trek, we decided to aim for Firefly instead.
  
  Maybe 100 years from now people will be watching Chinese movies and using Chinese loan words.
  In the West those movies will probably still be in English and mainly from Hollywood. But China will own half the companies making movies there.
  Things will change, but somehow they will remain mostly the same.
  
  China is facing a huge demographic crisis in the next 10-15 years, so I don't think so. More likely the EU steps up but the world becomes more multipolar in general.

- I'm using this now but it does disturb me that it is playing below the bridge.
  Have an upvote.
  
  It's because they don't want to produce a pleasant sound for Musk

And still their market capitalisation is probably higher than the biggest ten automotive manufacturers combined.

Okay, so people really need to understand what's going on at Tesla and their profits because while things aren't great, it's not as dire as you might be hoping.
Are their profits down, absolutely.
Does Tesla get a lot of money from ZEV credits, yes.
Are things as dire as everyone seems to be thinking, not quite.
Tesla knows they are getting the ZEV credits, and have for years, and they plan their business around it. All those years, and even this quarter, where someone looks at it and says, they only made a profit because of those credits, misses the point entirely (although this quarter I'm sure was unexpected for them)
When you know you have 400-500 million in credits coming in, that means you can plan to spend 400-500 million extra on capital expenditures and R&D and that's what they do. Tesla is spending billions on capital expenditures and research & development to expand, making their own battery cells, building a lithium refinery, scaling their energy business by building 2 new factories (1 in California, 1 in Shanghai), building a massive AI datacenter etc.
It's always been like this at Tesla. They've always been highly profitable if they wanted to be, but have been plowing money back into the business.
So yes, there have been many years or quarters where their profits were entirely ZEV credit based, but that's intentional. Its how you grow a business.
If this sales slump continues, all they need to do is slow growth, or not slow growth because they have something like $35 billion in cash and almost no debt. Is slowing growth bad? Absolutely. But they aren't going to be magically losing money unless they choose to not slow growth and take the hit. (Note: The cybertruck might be the exception there, that might be a money pit)
Is this bad for the stock price? Hell yes.
Is Tesla in dire trouble? Not really.
- The thing is: in the past they used the R&D for things like model 3 and model y, huge commercial successes, now they are investing it in cybertrucks, robotaxis, humanoid robots and AI, which are either proven failures, vaporware, non-monetizable or a combination of all the above.
  As they slow down sales, the credits will also slow down, and if (when) he is thrown under the bus by Trump, will go away completely.
  2025 tesla is completely different from 2017 tesla. Both overvalued, but with very different outlooks.
  
  No doubt there that R&D is being spent differently now, and a lot of it can fail and end up being a waste.
  A lot of it is going to their new batteries though which they've stated are now cheaper than all their suppliers. That doesn't mean it's cheaper to produce than others, but they don't have to pay a profit markup, so it ends up being cheaper. The refinery is just going go make those even cheaper, assuming that is successful as well.
  That kind or investment will pay off if they keep it up and stay in that position, and long term, is transferable to the energy business which could prop up bad car sales (but that part would be many years away as they don't have it scaled to that yet)
  Then yes they're spending many billions on the cybercab, which might be a failure, but the whole new manufacturing process they've created for it is transferable to other vehicles if they have to admit failure on the cab itself due to FSD failure. But the whole new process itself could also be a failure. That would be ~~very bad~~ catastrophic for them as the new process is how they plan to reduce costs moving forward. There's an additional 2 partially designed vehicles using that new process which were put on hold, so as long as the process itself isn't a failure, they could admit failure on the cab and pivot to those sooner than later.
  The cybertruck is a flop, but a lot of the tech is transferable.
  Optimus is an easier problem to solve than FSD at least for commercial stuff IMO, and it derisks their heavy R&D into AI stuff as now there's 2 things counting on it instead of 1. But yes still a huge risk, and yes both AI things could fail which would now be very bad.
  There are a lot of gambles right now on certain things absolutely, but I wouldn't say all the R&D is wasted.
  They can only have so many failures / flops though while also going through a dramatic sales slump. If that worsens they'll rearch a point where they have to reassess their goals and plans or it risk becoming a dire situation, but it's not dire yet.
  If everything keeps going bad, they'll have to kick Elon out, or he'll have to change course, or it will actually become dire and they'll fail.
- Great points all around, well thought out and reasoned. There's just one problem: slowing growth won't save them if nobody buys their rolling dumpsters anymore lmfao.
  
  I mean we'll have to see how bad things get, but there's a long ways to go from now to sales so low even the energy business can't cover the costs of the facilities and staff even if they stop most of the capital intensive projects, idle the lines, and try to turtle while working on kicking Elon out and reorganizing.
  Edit: just to clarify, the commercial energy business isn't going to get hit as hard as the consumer vehicles market. I don't expect to see such a huge slump there compared to the consumer vehicles.
- Thank you for the well reasoned insightful post
- But what if that income disappears?
  It was only able to post a $409 million profit in the quarter thanks to the sale of $595 million worth of regulatory credits to other automakers. But if the Trump administration gets its way, the company can kiss those regulatory credits keeping it in the black goodbye, too.
  
  Then they spend 400-500m less on capital expenditures or research and development. It means slower growth and give others an advantage, but it's not the end of the world.
  That or they say fuck it and eat into their 35b cash for a bit.

It was only able to post a $409 million profit in the quarter thanks to the sale of $595 million worth of regulatory credits to other automakers.
- Musk is the biggest welfare queen in the US, likely the world. All his businesses are propped up with governement funding.

Spirit Halloween Store coming soon!

squints*
I can't tell, the Tesla lot is awfully dark. Would anyone mind lighting it up?
- Be careful about that - don't want to let them claim them on insurance!
  
  Let em. Make them too expensive for insurers to support.

well then let's make them worse so they appear even more worse

That's crazy because it looks pretty bad lol
- https://lemmy.world/comment/16935886
  They're a welfare queen

One down, who's next?

Music to my ears.

Worse? Its been looking pretty bad for the last couple if months. The stocks did bounce, that's true, but I would buy - that said, I haven't picked a winner yet either.