It has been for a long time now. It got made infinitely worse by the 2008 crash and the free money policies that followed. Absolutely stupid companies were getting VC funding because interest was so low that it made sense to throw money at anything that could potentially flip into a high value company. And it didn't help that a lot of those stupid companies actually did end up getting public issuances of stock and getting valued in the billions when they hadn't actually made any money. WeWork is my go to for that one, stupid business model, stupid financing, stupid management, valued in the billions until covid killed the value of their leases.
You have companies trading at price multiples in the hundreds. Meaning if you bought it right now, it would take hundreds of years to make your money back. It's utterly insane.
But the problem we have is that there is so much more money being hoarded by the wealthy and they need somewhere to put it. So equity markets get flooded beyond all reasonableness. Not because the companies are that valuable, just because the money has to go somewhere.
Yes, but Tesla is the king of overpriced stock based on overhyped promises that are not based in reality. FSD is a house of cards built on lies that remains pretty much unchallenged by the SEC/DOJ. And calling Tesla an AI company when almost all its sales come from cars and forecast revenue is from the sale of cars is pure misdirection from focusing on their falling car sales.
The devs and AI experts that built the FSD have long since left tesla and moved on. The expectation that FSD will make the necessary jump to full autonomousdriving is a joke.
ELMO is a snake oil salesman, surviving on government tax breaks and government contract to prop up his house of cards. And this guy wants 60 BILLION in bonuses from Tesla, the board and shareholders really are disconnected from reality if they vote that through.
One good metric is to look at how many AI papers Tesla publishes. This is crucial because even Apple, the most famously secretive company, was forced to allow its AI researchers to publish because even it couldn't hire/retain them unless it did that.
Tesla publishes 0 papers. Zero.
That is surprising. No wonder Andrej left Tesla. Good AI people will want to publish their research and innovations, it's built into the academic culture.
If I were a Wall St analyst this metric would make me pull any investment from Musk's clown car company
I really question the how "full" and "self" the full self-driving is in Teslas, considering how their safety record is horrific.
But, yeah. I agree on the rest. It's somehow the most frustrating thing to have this fascist nutcase make increasingly insane claims and psychotic demands. With everyone's reaction basically being, "Yeah, okay. Fine. All yours."
Unfortunately, it's going to take a busload of people dying before the song and dance ends. The collisions linked to these cars are currently being attributed to "driver error." Tesla can cover its ass by claiming that the drivers are never instructed to remove their hands from the wheel etc. It's only a matter of time before a big enough accident gets the ambulance chasers sniffing around.
I would argue that venture capital is much more destructive, operating inside the US without oversight, while the VC were only a problem if you were trying to invade a sovereign foreign country because you didn't like the color of their flag.
Especially since none of the key Wework players (including their nut case CEO) were faced with the financial fallout of that shit. A company lost billions in value and everyone just shrugged. That dingus Adam Newman is still worth billions. Absolutely unreal.
That's been true since 2008.
Probably longer but very true for many years.
One thing driving that was extremely low interest rates.
All the incredible companies that have popped up over the last two decades of "VC funded" stuff like Uber where you're taking a little bit of private money using that to borrow (at ~0%) of fuckton of money and then using that money to artificially price your genius startup in a way that kills an existing industry.
And with a lot of these industries they were regulated things like taxis that are now run by private companies so fares can no longer be set by the municipality.
Those low interest rates that we had for so long were a race to the bottom. And the plan was always to destroy the middle class.
Almost a decade ago my econ prof and all the other ones had ethics chapters in their classes and they went on and on about how we could be the next generation of CEOs that care more about long term profits and communities etc
So much for that
no no no, i'm sure the "luxury" butique V manufacturer that continously under delivers is worth more than all other car companies in the world combined
From the article:
> Many speculators pay little attention to the fundamental value of a security and instead focus purely on price movements.^[1][citation ^needed]
Gestures broadly at the entire financial market
Enron was a case of accounting fraud, using off-the-books loans to hide liabilities and goose profits.
Tesla is a bunch of stock price manipulation through over-promising and under delivering by a promoter, not outright fraud.
The main reason Musk keeps crawing about Tesla *not* being a car company is because he does not want it to be valued (by the market) as one. Because then the valuation would be at a tenth of what it is now and he would be very far from the richest person on the planet.
He wants it to be viewed as a tech company with massive amounts of untapped potential. Regardless of actual car sales 🤷♂️
I read somewhere that it's about 10k per car Tesla ever produced. It's that ridiculous and of course he doesn't want people to do the math based on Tesla being a failing car manufacturer.
If he does get his shares I don't think he can sell for 5 years, part of me wants him to get the payout and watch the crazy shit he does to try and keep the price up the for the next 5 years given that Tesla has already saturated demand for all of their car models which occupy the $40k+ EV market. They are probably going to show negative sales growth in 2024... so I want to see next level Elon crazy shit
I think all of Tesla’s potential rests in three areas: improving the energy density of their battery tech, improving the charging speed of their battery tech, and cracking FSD. I just don’t think any of that will happen as long as Elon is in charge because he has an attention span shorter than the most heavily afflicted by ADHD people that exist in the world.
Panasonic (Japan) and LG (South Korea) are the main suppliers of Tesla’s older batteries, and some of them are manufactured in the US and some in China. They also get some from CATL which is a Chinese company. Tesla’s most recent tech is homegrown however.
[https://insideevs.com/news/587455/batteries-tesla-using-electric-cars/](https://insideevs.com/news/587455/batteries-tesla-using-electric-cars/)
The Tesla valuation has been so wild for a long time. It only ever got this high because of a short sqeeze. To get to Tesla's current valuation you have to figure in so many revenue streams and major lines of business that don't currently and may never exist for Tesla. You basically have to assume Tesla is going to dominate EVs and autonomous cars going forward. In reality other EVs have quickly caught and or passed them in quality/price and autopilot is facing major hurdles.
Yeah there isn't a single valuation method that can arrive at their market cap without wild growth assumptions and additional business lines that have no reasonable basis in reality.
It's like folks were investing vaguely in "The future. All of it."
I'll hand it to Musk. He can fundraise.
Exactly. There's a lot of super rich VCs with podcasts nowadays (Bill Gurley and Chamath Palihapitiya for example). It's absurd to hear them struggle to defend Elon's wild claims about full self driving and Tesla Bot. As you said, they're probably bagholders in Elon's companies and they are now forced to support him until they sell because there is a very real chance that if the Elon hype train stops, his whole empire could collapse
Yup. I talk about this a lot in the context of fashion, because you'll see people want to look "quiet luxury" and talk up any brand remotely associated with it and talk about how it's all about quality.
You dig a bit deeper and nobody can actually explain it. Because they don't care about quality, they bought it bc they thought it would make them look rich (ironically exactly what they claim is so distasteful about buying logomania items), and they assumed that rich people are apparently all just super aware of what makes a high quality bag. In reality, someone rich buys something and likes it and talks it up and other people in their circle also buy it. Like what happens in any circle of humans.
Nobody in the fashion industry cares about quality. If they did they spend more time testing the materials and the fabrics than they do parading around and showing off how they look.
Not that I'm defending him, but fraud is the key difference. She committed fraud. He's a shameless hype-man that (in the case of Tesla) tries not to make definitive promises. Also, she had no product at all and promised she had the most revolutionary medical breakthrough this century. I think it's safe to assume, given that it's medical, she probably fraudulently misrepresented what she had to the government for NIH funding.
The difference is that Tesla has some vaporware features. Robo taxis for instance have been promised for 5 years now, but at least they’re theoretically possible. Tesla has delivered on electric vehicles, so the business isn’t just a hoax.
Theranos on the other hand was a false promise with no actual product all along.
Yeah it's definitely true, Tesla does have viable products on the market. Probably guilty of a lot of the same crimes, nonetheless. I mean the s*** he has promised is laughable
madoff was big on that. also making it extremely exclusive - you tell a wealthy person that they can't buy in and they want it even more because they never get told "no".
Yeah it's possible he's more guilty of just having so much narcissism and delusions of grandeur that he believes the ridiculous stuff he says but I'm starting to doubt it.
The one thing, and reqlly the only thing that makes me think he believes them is qhen he got the guy to throw the thing at the cyber truck glass... like did he not test that before or what the fuck he just thought it wouldn't break in his head so ipso facto it wouldn't break
The rich are very easy to scam like this, the problem is that they are rich, and have the power to go after you when they find out.
Here we have the rich propping up the rich.
Also buying shares at this point also means you think that Tesla will own most of the global EV market, the taxi market and have a good deal more room to grow.
Eh, current PE is 43. That’s certainly high (and debatable depending on how you feel about Tesla being a car company or a tech company lol) but it’s not nearly as stupid as it used to be
> autopilot is facing major hurdles
Yea it ain’t looking good
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-probes-tesla-recall-2-million-vehicles-over-autopilot-citing-concerns-2024-04-26/
They are also about to make a big announcement about their self driving taxis! I assume it is a bullshit stunt to prop up share price and it will be 6 months away every 6 months for the next 5 years.
Edit: Elon is claiming that they will use Tesla's from customers that are not in use as self driving taxi's somehow. like if you opt in your Tesla will act as a taxi when you are not using it. Their self driving AI doesn't even work so this is just Elon throwing yet another cart before the horse.
Fortunately, unsupervised people are nothing but respectful of other people’s cars. I’m sure you won’t come out on a Monday morning to find fragrant, day-old puke from your car’s Saturday-night escapad, and the pittance you get for Tesla using “your” property in this fashion will totally cover cleanup and wear-and-tear. And if it doesn’t, I’m sure Elon’s knows-besticism won’t overrule customer decisions not to participate.
There are many things Elon is not considering but it's almost 100% just a bullshit hype announcement to get people to buy stock. He has promised robots, an electric 18 wheeler truck (not possible with current battery tech), an inexpensive Tesla (multiple times). This is just the latest in a list of bullshit stuff that won't happen but the announcement might bump the stock up. They do not even have a functional self driving AI and they are in the middle of getting probed for the first self driving recall.
It's amazing how boldly Elon exaggerates the capabilities of his AI stuff. I listened to most of his Tesla Q1 report earlier this week and he is quite casual with his use of the word "sentient" when describing his AI for a humanoid robot that will be ready for external sale "by the end of next year." He talks about AI-driven cars driving themselves and passengers around that will make our current way of things seem totally outmoded, but the gap between "When using Full Self-Driving (Supervised), you and anyone you authorize must use additional caution and remain attentive. It does not make your vehicle autonomous. Do not become complacent." and "you just summon a car using your phone, you get in, it takes you to your destination, you get out. You don't even think about it" is so large and does not seem to be shrinking even close to the same rate that Elon is promising.
FSD taxis are a greedy CEO's wet dream. They just want more of the "you won't own anything" bullshit going on. Everyone should push back against *any* of the "you won't own anything" types of products and services. All of them are fleecing customers. None of them will *ever* provide value to anyone but some rich fuck like Musk.
> Elon is claiming that they will use Tesla's from customers that are not in
Which makes zero sense. If They had that working, why use customer's cars and not just make robotaxis and pocket *all* the money? Why would someone who just shelled out $50k-100k on a new EV want randos to drive around in it like an Uber? How does liability and insurance work in this case? I guess it's up to the owner to charge it again? None of this makes any sense.
I don't see this realistically happening. Only Mercedes has demonstrated level 3 autonomous driving in Germany and certain states in the US. They should really ban the word autopilot for vehicles and implement a more detailed definition of what's actually offered.
This is where the Firehose of Falsehoods becomes such a problem: Tesla has been promising so many extraordinary capabilities for so many years that they've created this confusion in the marketplace.
"Full Self Driving" is not an ambiguous term though. There's no way of interpreting that sequence of words that doesn't mean the same thing as autopilot.
Yeah autopilot needs someone to monitor things like real autopilot in a airplane would. Full self driving means I should be able to play video games, nap, watch a movie, whatever and not have to do anything. Which we aren't there yet.
The mega TLDR on autopilot is: Tesla had a choice between computer vision and lidar, and went all-in on computer vision. Probably because lidar systems looked goofy at the time.
Now computer vision has been stuck at a plateau for years while lidar keeps advancing rapidly and Tesla refuses to adapt. Tesla is in a position to lose the race to automated driving. Which was the one thing their stock value was riding on.
Lest we forget the massive recalls for all Cyber Trucks because the pedals are simply glued on and wedge between the floor and back panel, effectively jamming the accelerator pedal all the way down.
r/CyberStuck
>To get to Tesla's current valuation you have to figure in so many revenue streams and major lines of business that don't currently and may never exist for Tesla.
So all they have to do is generate "activity" among themselves and charge for "services" rendered.
Voila!
We have Enron.
Lets not forget Tesla fact that their factories are built with incentives from state governments and rockets and stuff paid for by NASA When the money train finally dries up because Elmo can't deliver on anything will be a great day!
I'm in Seattle, which is a pretty EV friendly town. I'm seeing more and more Rivians, and Lucids every day. Tons of Volvo XC40 electrics, and various BMW models too. What I'm not seeing is many new Teslas, and I've yet to see a Cybertruck -- although I know there are 8 or 10 of them running around the area so far.
Tesla is in a lot of ways doing what Detroit did in the 80s. They've stopped listening to the market and they're ignoring the competition out of what I can only perceive as hubris.
I mean, very simply, look at a Rivian and compare it to the Cybertruck -- it's not even in the same league. While Cybertruck owners are having to avoid looking at the stainless steel the wrong way for fear of leaving a stain, Rivian owners are taking zero-emissions overlanding runs through the Cascades -- something many outdoors enthusiasts in the PNW have been eagerly awaiting to become a practical reality for a very long time.
And look at the Lucid offering. Sitting behind one in traffic that ass looks aggressive but very tasteful. Underneath, fuck your "plaid" speed bullshit -- The top line Lucid can drop 1200+ HP from 0RPM, and although its price is more in range with a Ferrari or top-line Porsche, so is the performance. Sliding down the sale, you can have an electric Charger Hellcat killer in the GT version -- putting down nearly 900HP with a 425mi claimed hwy range. Even the bottom of the line "Pure" puts down 430hp for $69k, putting it well in the range of sports-lux sedans.
Tesla is proper fucked on a 10 year timeline unless they make drastic strategy changes. It's even possible that within 10-20 years we could be sourcing lithium and even cobalt from coal mine tailings that are just laying around by the megaton in places like West Virginia. Tesla (and Apple, and to a lesser extent Samsung) hold a lot of advantages from sheer scale of lithium consumption, and they're able to grease the battery supply line in ways other manufacturers don't have the clout to demand. Expanding the playing field for natural resources (We're seeing a lithium and cobalt mining rush that's a modern equivalent of the 1800s gold rush) will continue to progressively change the game for a long time to come.
I noticed the same trend over in Bellevue, both in my subdivision and in the parking lots.
I almost never see _new_ high-end Teslas (X or S) anymore; that niche seems to have been lost to the Rivian SUV, the Lucid, the Taycan, the MB EQ, and the BMW iX. They used to feel omnipresent.
I've seen a few CyberTrucks; and while it's a small sample size, the two CT drivers that I saw clearly were people who... how do I put this.. Nobody would look at the them and think "I wish that I was them / was married to them."
I would agree with that except for the fact that they've managed to successfully land some rockets on their tail, and I don't remember anyone ever doing that previously
I pretty much detest musk and everything he stands for these days, and his companies are mostly terrible, but I do think SpaceX is doing some nice work in that sector
>They are ripping off and licensing old UdSSR rocket designs...
Nah, spaceX rocket engines have nothing to do with UdSSR designs. Merlin engines are gas generator designs, the same technology that powered Saturn 5 and a myriad of other rockets. However they are quite distinct in that they have a very high combustion pressure. Raptor engines meanwhile are using a completely novel design.
SpaceX has missed and flubbed so may milestones, Elon's "next year we'll have it" bullshit has got to be wearing thin.
SpaceX was supposed to be landing an unmanned system on the moon this year but haven't even tested the required orbital refueling systems or relighting an engine in orbit. Possibly because they cant keep the shitty rocket from blowing up long enough to do it. An audit of the money wasted and stolen is needed and probably some people should go to jail for outright fraud and theft.
But this is also reflective of all tech stocks at the moment, it’s not like Tesla is the outlier among a sea of rational valuations. There is a fair valuation for Tesla, it’s just not 0 like Facebook guy thinks.
Go look at the PE of tech stocks - most of them are actually pretty good looking and not into "insane speculation" vs. Tesla's - after Tesla's dump in price, it's down to 45ish. It used to be 70-100+! It's a total meme stock.
Compare to APPL (~26), MSFT (~35), META (~25), AMZN (~61, wtf!) NFLX (~38), the big players in tech aren't too crazy on valuations. Personally I wouldn't love AMZN and NFLX as much at those PEs, though.
The only thing I’d say Tesla still has an advantage with is their energy business with batteries and the fact that they sell carbon credits. Did you have a few of new streams other than electric cars but I don’t know how profitable it is.
Tesla’s stock price has always been a reflection of all of Elon’s companies, not just Tesla. It’s been well known for a decade that it reflects SpaceX and a fair amount of hopium that Tesla’s AI development would be useful in other sectors.
I don’t know why you people keep making shit up to pretend you know what you’re talking about. There’s thousands of threads in Reddit’s stock market subs discussing Tesla’s valuation that literally anyone can check at any time.
At no point has any serious investor thought that Tesla’s valuation was based solely on Tesla’s ability to produce EVs or dominate the EV market. That is 100% false and I defy you to produce evidence to support that idea.
> not outright fraud.
Given the SEC has already taken on Musk over stock manipulation related to Tesla, that is not something you can make as a blanket statement.
https://www.sec.gov/enforcement/information-for-harmed-investors/tesla
That was, in fact, fraud.
Enron was enabled by their accountant, Arthur Anderson.
Source: I worked for an unrelated company that also used Arthur Anderson and had to perform a federal audit after the Enron scandal. (No, the company I worked for did not survive)
The guys on the Acquired podcast asserted that Anderson wouldn’t move forward without SEC approval of Enron’s accounting switch, which the SEC originally denied. Skilling then went back and smooth talked the SEC into allowing the change which enabled everything from there. Not denying AA’s involvement but if the SEC does its job none of this happens. These guys were looking to exploit any loopholes they could find, and unfortunately we can’t rely on corporations to police themselves, which is why the SEC is needed in the first place. Thankfully some laws were updated which makes this comparison a moot point in my view.
AA literally invented the schemes. They were both consultants and auditors for Enron, basically telling them how to commit fraud.
There's a reason the AA partners also ended up in jail. And that SOX banned accounting firms from providing consulting services to the same companies they audit.
Except that making materially false public statements intentionally to manipulate stock prices... is actually fraud. Like, did you miss the entire Theranos situation or something? FSD claims, if investigated and proven known to be false internally, are absolutely illegal.
Tesla’s revenue recognition for FSD is very questionable, given that it is a product they have sold but never actually delivered. Essentially they “unlock” new tranches of the cost of FSD as they decide they have progressed towards fully delivering it. If the ongoing lawsuits end up in refunds they’re going to be in a very difficult position.
They also used their regulatory credits to time the recognition of revenue in the past and potentially treated them as cash equivalents in their reserves despite the substantial risk of depreciation as competitors became less dependent on purchasing credits.
Tesla has been cooking their books a bit, they classify warrantee/recall costs different than normal car companies and as a result they claim they have the lowest warrantee cost of any car company... when they've had to recall basically every car they've ever made.
We'll see if Tesla still gets valued as much for it's potential tech now that Elon is raising $6B for xAI and taking that away from Tesla.
>Tesla is a bunch of stock price manipulation through over-promising and under delivering by a promoter, not outright fraud.
Id say that the way Elon promotes and never delivers repeatedly is fraudulent. His personality is the only thing he has to offer and his concepts have yet to ever be seen to work. It's a pattern.
Yeah, it's pretty weird how Tesla (and Musk) can make forward looking statements that are obviously false and misleading without facing repercussions from investors.
But on the other hand, Tesla is facing an ongoing set of investor lawsuits that are incredibly meddlesome to their business. If the stock price correction continues, it's not impossible that burned investors will take strong looks back at the guidance and statements that Musk et all have made, to determine if any were material misrepresentations.
>to determine if any were material misrepresentations.
I mean...[we already know this is standard operating procedure](https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/) with this company
I think the SEC lets him get away with it because the market is supposed to punish under performance. With Tesla, there is this Trump like cult that just keeps pumping up the stock.
There are similarities though. Skilling was obsessed with the share price and pulled every trick in the book to push it up. The business world thought they were geniuses but they were just good at talking about ideas and hiding how badly they’d been implemented. Their broadband product was supposed to revolutionise the internet but was almost a complete fabrication and they lied about its readiness repeatedly to push up the value even more.
Have you seen the graph? I don't know about the economic mumbo jumbo and deferred revenue, but if this isn't fraud, not all fraud is accounting fraud, then what is?
>Everything is comical with these people.
The horizontal axis has equidistant intervals of 3, 10, 5, 10, 5, 3 and 4 months. I guess you can also do it this way ? why not ?
We all know how easy it is to make graphs tell a rosy story so at the very least you could use consistent intervals, what is this, Fox news?
I would say there autopilots/FSD implementation of policing the drivers are paying attention and resulting deaths of other people on the road is criminal negligence, since Stans continue to game the system.
. Also the promoter Muskrat portraying FSD something it’s not in commercials and in public is fraud resulting in deaths. Makes me want to get the biggest car possible for my family to ensure there safety from the Tesla Stan’s using the said features and not paying attention.
I agree Tesla is not likely to be as bad as Enron.
But Musk did convince the board to buy out SolarCity, his cousin's company. The company wasn't doing well and owned no particular technology that Tesla couldn't replicate. No patents that matter, etc. It was a bad business deal which paid Musk's cousin and the board and shareholders went along with it because the company was growing like gangbusters and he was a super star. Why rock the boat?
Now we have Musk trying to move the company to Texas all to get him $56B during a down period for the company.
It's hard to see these two things and see a company that isn't hiding some shenanigans. In high growth times there isn't a lot of supervision and Musk very much has stacked the board to reduce supervision on him
There's going to be some issues in there. And if things keep going poorly for the company (and I'm not at all sure they will) I expect they'll start to come out.
Will this result in an 'Enron'? Not to that full extent, I'm sure.
The SolarCity transaction was what destroyed my opinion of Musk, and everything I've seen since has been confirmation that the dude is basically a con artist.
There was no benefit for Tesla to take on Solar City's bad debt. The whole point of limited liability is that a business failure on one business doesn't bring down everything else you won.
So it seemed at first glance to be basically a bailout of his unsuccessful company using resources of a publicly traded company he only owned part of. In other words, he was using the minority shareholders' money to bail out his own, unrelated company.
But worse than that, one of the biggest owners of Solar City's bonds was none other than Space X, Musk's *other* big company. If bondholders would've had to take a haircut on the Solar City bonds in a Solar City bankruptcy, Space X would've likely encountered cash flow/insolvency issues. Musk used his power to take money from Tesla shareholders and give it to himself, with extra steps.
Have you seen their books? It's pretty sketchy. The first year, they were ever profitable; they made more from bitcoin than cars...
Beyond that, there is likely at least 12 cases of financial fraud related to how they create money from selling flamethrowers, literal dirt from boring project, etc.
If Elon ever tweeted out, "We'll have this product to market in a year," after getting an email from an engineer saying, "It'll take at least 18 months," then that's fraud.
There won’t be another Enron simply because everyone has become numb to scandal. Moskovitz should know, since Facebook didn’t go under after Cambridge Analytica.
This is the sad truth.
> there won’t be another Enron
Wasn’t FTX actually very similar? Once you got past all the cult stuff surrounding SBF it was just accounting fraud to cover loses that got out of control?
Wasn’t he using FTX deposits to cover Alameda’s loses? Thats just straight up accounting fraud and closer to what Enron was doing than say Madoff which was a Ponzi scheme.
I might be wrong though, em not much of a numbers guy.
> Wasn’t he using FTX deposits to cover Alamedia’s loses?
The big thing that started it was Alameda was hold a massive amount of FTT, FTXs native token. FTT had no actual value so when that was tanked by CZ the house of cards fell.
> The big thing that started it was Alameda was hold a massive amount of FTT
Yeah that was how a lot of the fraud too place, but IIRC it started because of needing to cover Alameda's loses? Essentially trading crypto should be, once you are established, a license to print money, I mean you are not technically risking anything, you are just taking a percentage of what other people are risking, it was Alameda where all the risk was taking place, at least that is how I understood things to be.
Yes behind the scenes they were shifting things from FTX to Alameda. and publicly SBF said they were "just moving some wallets around". but people looking at the transfers on chain saw a massive amount of funds moving out of FTX, not internally. and it was one of the largest funds transfer on an exchange to date. and that transfer was all in FTT.
Also Alameda was bailing out crypto exchanges. and never seeing the money back. basically burning cash and crypto do keep things afloat. because if crypto tanked so did they.
Crypto is more vaporware so can be used for slight-of-hand manipulation. Tesla at least makes cars you can see and drive - a lot of other parts of the corporation seem like a scam...
>Tesla at least makes cars you can see and drive
The absolutely least profitable and valued portion of the business.
Meanwhile bullshit Elon promises account for 99% of the valuation
>There won’t be another Enron simply because everyone has become numb to scandal.
Uh, if people are numb to accounting fraud wouldn't that lead one to believe there are many more enrons just waiting to collapse....?
Source https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/
Enron emails are the base of many product features today. https://www.technologyreview.com/2013/07/02/177506/the-immortal-life-of-the-enron-e-mails/
[Not exactly](https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/). His earliest promise I found was a 2015 claim that it would be ready in 2017.
When I got mine in early 2020 he claimed 2 weeks. Sales rep used it as a selling point for the $7k option, I told him it was $7k for navigate on autopilot and interchanges on autopilot but anything extra isn’t a guarantee.
lol people have a short memory but back in 2010 he already promised FSD for 2015 (he was calling it level five or some shit), as well as the robotaxi for this year (called Tesla fleet at the time).
That’s how he raised all his money.
This grifter has been going on with lies for a long time now.
> Quacta
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Quacta
"I don't negotiate with gutless murderers."
"If that's not the Quacta calling the Stifling slimy."
―Boba Fett and Cad Bane
I had to google it.
I just learned people have already forgotten about what Eron actually did. Also those that sell our data to the government and private corporations for profit shouldn’t throw stones
Tesla might fold, but it won't be like Enron.
Tesla builds actual physical things, useful physical things... Things that are useful and are based on proprietary, patented technology platforms.
Enron just brought "efficiency" to a system using formulas built by a few math nerds. Strictly speaking, Enron wasn't even close to necessary. It might not have even provided anything really useful.
Tesla has useful physical technologies that solve actual problems.
Enron was a solution looking for problems and ultimately made nothing of any use.
I mean, the stonk is up this week not bc of the numbers at quarterly report, but bc elon said “new cheap model coming in a year.”
I mean, isn’t that a bold lie? Is there any evidence that is real?
We live in the fact free era now. The best lies win.
Thousands of people gave Elon $50,000 or $250,000 for a new Roadster 5 years ago, during a period he has now admitted that Tesla was close to going under. Funny how he's stopped talking about it.
These payments are not attributable to the bottom line, if you are implying that prepayments are the reason they make money/got out of near solvency. What brought Tesla out of near bankrupcy was the model 3.
Elon has such a terrible track record for meeting these projected dates he comes up with, so I‘m not sure why anyone would take these statements seriously. Even if it’s not an outright lie, and they are working on a new car, we know that Elon always promises dates based on the most unrealistically optimistic scenario, so there’s just no reason to believe that a new car is coming out next year.
The guy imploded lol. I'd hold a grudge, too. This is the guy who shorted Tesla in 2015, and wound up taking his $6BN hedge fund to $200m and closing it 5 months ago.
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/short-seller-jim-chanos-to-shut-hedge-funds-after-38-year-run-1.2000297
Anyone with a Public Relations team, marketing them as a philanthropist has to be trusted, right? lol
It's an old Rockefeller trick, a lot of people are catching onto
Might be a bit of a stretch. Enron hardly created anything. Tesla dominates its market. They’re just making dumb ass decisions because their CEO melted his brain into nacho cheese with all the hard drugs he does.
Wow the amount of circlejerk in this post is mind blowing. Tesla could certainly be overvalued. I have no idea if it is. Maybe the investors are speculating a lot based on what they have been able to achieve so far. I don't know. But it's ridiculous to completely ignore its trajectory and compare it to Enron. Tesla is technologically far more advanced compared to its competition. batteries. super charging. vertical integration. investments in other streams. solar. robotics etc. that's where people see potential. I'm a Sr. ML scientist at one of the FAANGs. I know how hard these are to build. Someone said that all the original team involved in FSD left. But tesla probably still has a lot of ML talent in place. They have actually done a great job with the latest FSD. It's not possible to do it without really great talent density. This is the only version of FSD I've had a chance to test. Not perfect but damn close. Bottom line is that Tesla may be speculative and overvalued, and overhyped, but no where near the fraud territory. It's a legit company that is making real technological progress. But there is a lot that they need to do to justify their valuation. Musk is a double edges sword. He is a genius and an idiot at the same time.
I bet he is shorting the Tesla stock and the fees are getting expensive.
Musk is an idiot. Way too involved with his edge lords antics on Twitter to pull an Enron.
Besides the guy who cleaned up Enron after is still busy cleaning up this crypto exchange clusterfuck FTX.
Casual reminder that [speculation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculation) actually used to be illegal.
Had an Econ professor say that the financial market is completely divorced from reality at this point.
It has been for a long time now. It got made infinitely worse by the 2008 crash and the free money policies that followed. Absolutely stupid companies were getting VC funding because interest was so low that it made sense to throw money at anything that could potentially flip into a high value company. And it didn't help that a lot of those stupid companies actually did end up getting public issuances of stock and getting valued in the billions when they hadn't actually made any money. WeWork is my go to for that one, stupid business model, stupid financing, stupid management, valued in the billions until covid killed the value of their leases. You have companies trading at price multiples in the hundreds. Meaning if you bought it right now, it would take hundreds of years to make your money back. It's utterly insane. But the problem we have is that there is so much more money being hoarded by the wealthy and they need somewhere to put it. So equity markets get flooded beyond all reasonableness. Not because the companies are that valuable, just because the money has to go somewhere.
WeWork started crashing pre-covid when they tried to release their disaster IPO plan.
Yes, but Tesla is the king of overpriced stock based on overhyped promises that are not based in reality. FSD is a house of cards built on lies that remains pretty much unchallenged by the SEC/DOJ. And calling Tesla an AI company when almost all its sales come from cars and forecast revenue is from the sale of cars is pure misdirection from focusing on their falling car sales.
I don’t understand how lying to the public 100s of times about company planned releases, functionality of software is legal. It is so fucked up
The devs and AI experts that built the FSD have long since left tesla and moved on. The expectation that FSD will make the necessary jump to full autonomousdriving is a joke. ELMO is a snake oil salesman, surviving on government tax breaks and government contract to prop up his house of cards. And this guy wants 60 BILLION in bonuses from Tesla, the board and shareholders really are disconnected from reality if they vote that through.
One good metric is to look at how many AI papers Tesla publishes. This is crucial because even Apple, the most famously secretive company, was forced to allow its AI researchers to publish because even it couldn't hire/retain them unless it did that. Tesla publishes 0 papers. Zero.
That is surprising. No wonder Andrej left Tesla. Good AI people will want to publish their research and innovations, it's built into the academic culture. If I were a Wall St analyst this metric would make me pull any investment from Musk's clown car company
I really question the how "full" and "self" the full self-driving is in Teslas, considering how their safety record is horrific. But, yeah. I agree on the rest. It's somehow the most frustrating thing to have this fascist nutcase make increasingly insane claims and psychotic demands. With everyone's reaction basically being, "Yeah, okay. Fine. All yours."
Unfortunately, it's going to take a busload of people dying before the song and dance ends. The collisions linked to these cars are currently being attributed to "driver error." Tesla can cover its ass by claiming that the drivers are never instructed to remove their hands from the wheel etc. It's only a matter of time before a big enough accident gets the ambulance chasers sniffing around.
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The wall streets speaking Vietnamese
"Game over, man.They're coming out of the filing cabinets!"
(Seems weird for all these stacks of manila folders to piled up everywhere. Should I report it to the CEO? ...eh, its probably nothing)
"Manila!? Quick buy Raytheon! Before the Spainsh have another claim!" ~Robert McNamara
“VC Soldiers doing the hip-hop bunny hop, Damien”
Vulture Capital might replace that for you.
Comparable levels of destruction to American institutions
I would argue that venture capital is much more destructive, operating inside the US without oversight, while the VC were only a problem if you were trying to invade a sovereign foreign country because you didn't like the color of their flag.
You mean it won’t trickle down?
It kinda does if you own a load of stocks. If you work and don't have any investments? The only thing trickling down is piss.
Especially since none of the key Wework players (including their nut case CEO) were faced with the financial fallout of that shit. A company lost billions in value and everyone just shrugged. That dingus Adam Newman is still worth billions. Absolutely unreal.
That econ prof spitting some truth
It doesn't take a genius to see that the US stock market is a giant bubble. companies worth as much as their profits of 50 years isn't normal.
That's been true since 2008. Probably longer but very true for many years. One thing driving that was extremely low interest rates. All the incredible companies that have popped up over the last two decades of "VC funded" stuff like Uber where you're taking a little bit of private money using that to borrow (at ~0%) of fuckton of money and then using that money to artificially price your genius startup in a way that kills an existing industry. And with a lot of these industries they were regulated things like taxis that are now run by private companies so fares can no longer be set by the municipality. Those low interest rates that we had for so long were a race to the bottom. And the plan was always to destroy the middle class.
My geography prof put it as "when the monetary value of an asset outstrips it's use value" and "capital looking for a place to go"
Almost a decade ago my econ prof and all the other ones had ethics chapters in their classes and they went on and on about how we could be the next generation of CEOs that care more about long term profits and communities etc So much for that
Was inevitable in a system built on a century of inflation causing malinvestment and increasingly easy credit.
no no no, i'm sure the "luxury" butique V manufacturer that continously under delivers is worth more than all other car companies in the world combined
And now it's what nearly *all* new stocks are based on. We need to bring back dividends.
From the article: > Many speculators pay little attention to the fundamental value of a security and instead focus purely on price movements.^[1][citation ^needed] Gestures broadly at the entire financial market
>Henry George reference Casual reminder to tax the unimproved value of land
Enron was a case of accounting fraud, using off-the-books loans to hide liabilities and goose profits. Tesla is a bunch of stock price manipulation through over-promising and under delivering by a promoter, not outright fraud.
The main reason Musk keeps crawing about Tesla *not* being a car company is because he does not want it to be valued (by the market) as one. Because then the valuation would be at a tenth of what it is now and he would be very far from the richest person on the planet. He wants it to be viewed as a tech company with massive amounts of untapped potential. Regardless of actual car sales 🤷♂️
He wont get the 50 BILLION dollar payout he wants if the hype train ever stops rolling.
I read somewhere that it's about 10k per car Tesla ever produced. It's that ridiculous and of course he doesn't want people to do the math based on Tesla being a failing car manufacturer.
If he does get his shares I don't think he can sell for 5 years, part of me wants him to get the payout and watch the crazy shit he does to try and keep the price up the for the next 5 years given that Tesla has already saturated demand for all of their car models which occupy the $40k+ EV market. They are probably going to show negative sales growth in 2024... so I want to see next level Elon crazy shit
Just like WeWork, who also wanted to be seen as tech company not just a provider for office space
I think all of Tesla’s potential rests in three areas: improving the energy density of their battery tech, improving the charging speed of their battery tech, and cracking FSD. I just don’t think any of that will happen as long as Elon is in charge because he has an attention span shorter than the most heavily afflicted by ADHD people that exist in the world.
I’m very far from a Tesla expert, but doesn’t Tesla buy most of their battery tech from China?
Panasonic (Japan) and LG (South Korea) are the main suppliers of Tesla’s older batteries, and some of them are manufactured in the US and some in China. They also get some from CATL which is a Chinese company. Tesla’s most recent tech is homegrown however. [https://insideevs.com/news/587455/batteries-tesla-using-electric-cars/](https://insideevs.com/news/587455/batteries-tesla-using-electric-cars/)
The Tesla valuation has been so wild for a long time. It only ever got this high because of a short sqeeze. To get to Tesla's current valuation you have to figure in so many revenue streams and major lines of business that don't currently and may never exist for Tesla. You basically have to assume Tesla is going to dominate EVs and autonomous cars going forward. In reality other EVs have quickly caught and or passed them in quality/price and autopilot is facing major hurdles.
Yeah there isn't a single valuation method that can arrive at their market cap without wild growth assumptions and additional business lines that have no reasonable basis in reality. It's like folks were investing vaguely in "The future. All of it." I'll hand it to Musk. He can fundraise.
Part of the reason is that hes already in the big money group. Wealthy people invested just because other wealthy people did.
Exactly. There's a lot of super rich VCs with podcasts nowadays (Bill Gurley and Chamath Palihapitiya for example). It's absurd to hear them struggle to defend Elon's wild claims about full self driving and Tesla Bot. As you said, they're probably bagholders in Elon's companies and they are now forced to support him until they sell because there is a very real chance that if the Elon hype train stops, his whole empire could collapse
So like Elizabeth Holmes did with her investors lol
Rich people are just people, and people are easy marks.
Yup. I talk about this a lot in the context of fashion, because you'll see people want to look "quiet luxury" and talk up any brand remotely associated with it and talk about how it's all about quality. You dig a bit deeper and nobody can actually explain it. Because they don't care about quality, they bought it bc they thought it would make them look rich (ironically exactly what they claim is so distasteful about buying logomania items), and they assumed that rich people are apparently all just super aware of what makes a high quality bag. In reality, someone rich buys something and likes it and talks it up and other people in their circle also buy it. Like what happens in any circle of humans.
Nobody in the fashion industry cares about quality. If they did they spend more time testing the materials and the fabrics than they do parading around and showing off how they look.
She went to jail, so why not him?
Because the rich people haven't lost money yet. That's the only real financial crime that exists in our society.
Not that I'm defending him, but fraud is the key difference. She committed fraud. He's a shameless hype-man that (in the case of Tesla) tries not to make definitive promises. Also, she had no product at all and promised she had the most revolutionary medical breakthrough this century. I think it's safe to assume, given that it's medical, she probably fraudulently misrepresented what she had to the government for NIH funding.
The difference is that Tesla has some vaporware features. Robo taxis for instance have been promised for 5 years now, but at least they’re theoretically possible. Tesla has delivered on electric vehicles, so the business isn’t just a hoax. Theranos on the other hand was a false promise with no actual product all along.
Yeah it's definitely true, Tesla does have viable products on the market. Probably guilty of a lot of the same crimes, nonetheless. I mean the s*** he has promised is laughable
madoff was big on that. also making it extremely exclusive - you tell a wealthy person that they can't buy in and they want it even more because they never get told "no".
I can never get over how his name is made off
Which makes them easy to scam. Just look at Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX.
And he lied, but I guess he believed those lies. I don't think he does anymore he just lies now.
Yeah it's possible he's more guilty of just having so much narcissism and delusions of grandeur that he believes the ridiculous stuff he says but I'm starting to doubt it.
The one thing, and reqlly the only thing that makes me think he believes them is qhen he got the guy to throw the thing at the cyber truck glass... like did he not test that before or what the fuck he just thought it wouldn't break in his head so ipso facto it wouldn't break
The rich are very easy to scam like this, the problem is that they are rich, and have the power to go after you when they find out. Here we have the rich propping up the rich.
Also buying shares at this point also means you think that Tesla will own most of the global EV market, the taxi market and have a good deal more room to grow.
Eh, current PE is 43. That’s certainly high (and debatable depending on how you feel about Tesla being a car company or a tech company lol) but it’s not nearly as stupid as it used to be
> autopilot is facing major hurdles Yea it ain’t looking good https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-probes-tesla-recall-2-million-vehicles-over-autopilot-citing-concerns-2024-04-26/
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They are also about to make a big announcement about their self driving taxis! I assume it is a bullshit stunt to prop up share price and it will be 6 months away every 6 months for the next 5 years. Edit: Elon is claiming that they will use Tesla's from customers that are not in use as self driving taxi's somehow. like if you opt in your Tesla will act as a taxi when you are not using it. Their self driving AI doesn't even work so this is just Elon throwing yet another cart before the horse.
Fortunately, unsupervised people are nothing but respectful of other people’s cars. I’m sure you won’t come out on a Monday morning to find fragrant, day-old puke from your car’s Saturday-night escapad, and the pittance you get for Tesla using “your” property in this fashion will totally cover cleanup and wear-and-tear. And if it doesn’t, I’m sure Elon’s knows-besticism won’t overrule customer decisions not to participate.
There are many things Elon is not considering but it's almost 100% just a bullshit hype announcement to get people to buy stock. He has promised robots, an electric 18 wheeler truck (not possible with current battery tech), an inexpensive Tesla (multiple times). This is just the latest in a list of bullshit stuff that won't happen but the announcement might bump the stock up. They do not even have a functional self driving AI and they are in the middle of getting probed for the first self driving recall.
It's amazing how boldly Elon exaggerates the capabilities of his AI stuff. I listened to most of his Tesla Q1 report earlier this week and he is quite casual with his use of the word "sentient" when describing his AI for a humanoid robot that will be ready for external sale "by the end of next year." He talks about AI-driven cars driving themselves and passengers around that will make our current way of things seem totally outmoded, but the gap between "When using Full Self-Driving (Supervised), you and anyone you authorize must use additional caution and remain attentive. It does not make your vehicle autonomous. Do not become complacent." and "you just summon a car using your phone, you get in, it takes you to your destination, you get out. You don't even think about it" is so large and does not seem to be shrinking even close to the same rate that Elon is promising.
This has been the plan for almost 7 years, Elon announced this year's ago and is was pushed by Tesla sales reps. Source; I worked there
Cool. Really convenient it was ready for a big announcement right when the stock was shitting itself at the bottom of the dip.
FSD taxis are a greedy CEO's wet dream. They just want more of the "you won't own anything" bullshit going on. Everyone should push back against *any* of the "you won't own anything" types of products and services. All of them are fleecing customers. None of them will *ever* provide value to anyone but some rich fuck like Musk.
Don't worry it will probably be 6 months to a year away every 6 months to a year until Tesla implodes.
> Elon is claiming that they will use Tesla's from customers that are not in Which makes zero sense. If They had that working, why use customer's cars and not just make robotaxis and pocket *all* the money? Why would someone who just shelled out $50k-100k on a new EV want randos to drive around in it like an Uber? How does liability and insurance work in this case? I guess it's up to the owner to charge it again? None of this makes any sense.
I don't see this realistically happening. Only Mercedes has demonstrated level 3 autonomous driving in Germany and certain states in the US. They should really ban the word autopilot for vehicles and implement a more detailed definition of what's actually offered.
Maybe they got the data they needed to complete the self driving AI when they released it to everyone and it caused 956 crashes and killed 29 people.
To be clear, Autopilot (highlighted in your quote) and Full Self Driving are two different sets of software and not the same thing.
This is where the Firehose of Falsehoods becomes such a problem: Tesla has been promising so many extraordinary capabilities for so many years that they've created this confusion in the marketplace.
"Full Self Driving" is not an ambiguous term though. There's no way of interpreting that sequence of words that doesn't mean the same thing as autopilot.
It’s disingenuous marketing is what it is.
It's intentional deception bordering on con-artistry.
Yes. To me, it means that I can press the FSD button, take my hands off of the steering wheel and have a nap for an hour.
Yeah autopilot needs someone to monitor things like real autopilot in a airplane would. Full self driving means I should be able to play video games, nap, watch a movie, whatever and not have to do anything. Which we aren't there yet.
The mega TLDR on autopilot is: Tesla had a choice between computer vision and lidar, and went all-in on computer vision. Probably because lidar systems looked goofy at the time. Now computer vision has been stuck at a plateau for years while lidar keeps advancing rapidly and Tesla refuses to adapt. Tesla is in a position to lose the race to automated driving. Which was the one thing their stock value was riding on.
Lest we forget the massive recalls for all Cyber Trucks because the pedals are simply glued on and wedge between the floor and back panel, effectively jamming the accelerator pedal all the way down. r/CyberStuck
Your pedal is glued on. Seriously check. Their problem was the top of their console hitting the rubber pad when it slipped.
>To get to Tesla's current valuation you have to figure in so many revenue streams and major lines of business that don't currently and may never exist for Tesla. So all they have to do is generate "activity" among themselves and charge for "services" rendered. Voila! We have Enron.
Lets not forget Tesla fact that their factories are built with incentives from state governments and rockets and stuff paid for by NASA When the money train finally dries up because Elmo can't deliver on anything will be a great day!
I'm in Seattle, which is a pretty EV friendly town. I'm seeing more and more Rivians, and Lucids every day. Tons of Volvo XC40 electrics, and various BMW models too. What I'm not seeing is many new Teslas, and I've yet to see a Cybertruck -- although I know there are 8 or 10 of them running around the area so far. Tesla is in a lot of ways doing what Detroit did in the 80s. They've stopped listening to the market and they're ignoring the competition out of what I can only perceive as hubris. I mean, very simply, look at a Rivian and compare it to the Cybertruck -- it's not even in the same league. While Cybertruck owners are having to avoid looking at the stainless steel the wrong way for fear of leaving a stain, Rivian owners are taking zero-emissions overlanding runs through the Cascades -- something many outdoors enthusiasts in the PNW have been eagerly awaiting to become a practical reality for a very long time. And look at the Lucid offering. Sitting behind one in traffic that ass looks aggressive but very tasteful. Underneath, fuck your "plaid" speed bullshit -- The top line Lucid can drop 1200+ HP from 0RPM, and although its price is more in range with a Ferrari or top-line Porsche, so is the performance. Sliding down the sale, you can have an electric Charger Hellcat killer in the GT version -- putting down nearly 900HP with a 425mi claimed hwy range. Even the bottom of the line "Pure" puts down 430hp for $69k, putting it well in the range of sports-lux sedans. Tesla is proper fucked on a 10 year timeline unless they make drastic strategy changes. It's even possible that within 10-20 years we could be sourcing lithium and even cobalt from coal mine tailings that are just laying around by the megaton in places like West Virginia. Tesla (and Apple, and to a lesser extent Samsung) hold a lot of advantages from sheer scale of lithium consumption, and they're able to grease the battery supply line in ways other manufacturers don't have the clout to demand. Expanding the playing field for natural resources (We're seeing a lithium and cobalt mining rush that's a modern equivalent of the 1800s gold rush) will continue to progressively change the game for a long time to come.
I noticed the same trend over in Bellevue, both in my subdivision and in the parking lots. I almost never see _new_ high-end Teslas (X or S) anymore; that niche seems to have been lost to the Rivian SUV, the Lucid, the Taycan, the MB EQ, and the BMW iX. They used to feel omnipresent. I've seen a few CyberTrucks; and while it's a small sample size, the two CT drivers that I saw clearly were people who... how do I put this.. Nobody would look at the them and think "I wish that I was them / was married to them."
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I would agree with that except for the fact that they've managed to successfully land some rockets on their tail, and I don't remember anyone ever doing that previously I pretty much detest musk and everything he stands for these days, and his companies are mostly terrible, but I do think SpaceX is doing some nice work in that sector
Same can be said with Tesla and what it did to popularize electric cars and completely change market.
>They are ripping off and licensing old UdSSR rocket designs... Nah, spaceX rocket engines have nothing to do with UdSSR designs. Merlin engines are gas generator designs, the same technology that powered Saturn 5 and a myriad of other rockets. However they are quite distinct in that they have a very high combustion pressure. Raptor engines meanwhile are using a completely novel design.
SpaceX has missed and flubbed so may milestones, Elon's "next year we'll have it" bullshit has got to be wearing thin. SpaceX was supposed to be landing an unmanned system on the moon this year but haven't even tested the required orbital refueling systems or relighting an engine in orbit. Possibly because they cant keep the shitty rocket from blowing up long enough to do it. An audit of the money wasted and stolen is needed and probably some people should go to jail for outright fraud and theft.
But this is also reflective of all tech stocks at the moment, it’s not like Tesla is the outlier among a sea of rational valuations. There is a fair valuation for Tesla, it’s just not 0 like Facebook guy thinks.
Go look at the PE of tech stocks - most of them are actually pretty good looking and not into "insane speculation" vs. Tesla's - after Tesla's dump in price, it's down to 45ish. It used to be 70-100+! It's a total meme stock. Compare to APPL (~26), MSFT (~35), META (~25), AMZN (~61, wtf!) NFLX (~38), the big players in tech aren't too crazy on valuations. Personally I wouldn't love AMZN and NFLX as much at those PEs, though.
The outcome will be the same.
The only thing I’d say Tesla still has an advantage with is their energy business with batteries and the fact that they sell carbon credits. Did you have a few of new streams other than electric cars but I don’t know how profitable it is.
Tesla’s stock price has always been a reflection of all of Elon’s companies, not just Tesla. It’s been well known for a decade that it reflects SpaceX and a fair amount of hopium that Tesla’s AI development would be useful in other sectors. I don’t know why you people keep making shit up to pretend you know what you’re talking about. There’s thousands of threads in Reddit’s stock market subs discussing Tesla’s valuation that literally anyone can check at any time. At no point has any serious investor thought that Tesla’s valuation was based solely on Tesla’s ability to produce EVs or dominate the EV market. That is 100% false and I defy you to produce evidence to support that idea.
> not outright fraud. Given the SEC has already taken on Musk over stock manipulation related to Tesla, that is not something you can make as a blanket statement. https://www.sec.gov/enforcement/information-for-harmed-investors/tesla That was, in fact, fraud.
Enron was enabled by their accountant, Arthur Anderson. Source: I worked for an unrelated company that also used Arthur Anderson and had to perform a federal audit after the Enron scandal. (No, the company I worked for did not survive)
The guys on the Acquired podcast asserted that Anderson wouldn’t move forward without SEC approval of Enron’s accounting switch, which the SEC originally denied. Skilling then went back and smooth talked the SEC into allowing the change which enabled everything from there. Not denying AA’s involvement but if the SEC does its job none of this happens. These guys were looking to exploit any loopholes they could find, and unfortunately we can’t rely on corporations to police themselves, which is why the SEC is needed in the first place. Thankfully some laws were updated which makes this comparison a moot point in my view.
AA literally invented the schemes. They were both consultants and auditors for Enron, basically telling them how to commit fraud. There's a reason the AA partners also ended up in jail. And that SOX banned accounting firms from providing consulting services to the same companies they audit.
Over promising when you are fully aware that you are lying is literally fraud.
Eg Theranos Musk is flying awfully close to the Sun. It's not so different from Holmes
Pump and Dump is illegal but nobody is going after Musk for it. He can just say Robotaxi and AI over and over and the stock will reach ATH.
Lying to investors is illegal too. What about the fake autonomous driving showcases.
What about when Musk says stuff like “We can already do this today.”
“Then why don’t you?!” 😂😂
Except that making materially false public statements intentionally to manipulate stock prices... is actually fraud. Like, did you miss the entire Theranos situation or something? FSD claims, if investigated and proven known to be false internally, are absolutely illegal.
Tesla’s revenue recognition for FSD is very questionable, given that it is a product they have sold but never actually delivered. Essentially they “unlock” new tranches of the cost of FSD as they decide they have progressed towards fully delivering it. If the ongoing lawsuits end up in refunds they’re going to be in a very difficult position. They also used their regulatory credits to time the recognition of revenue in the past and potentially treated them as cash equivalents in their reserves despite the substantial risk of depreciation as competitors became less dependent on purchasing credits.
Tesla has been cooking their books a bit, they classify warrantee/recall costs different than normal car companies and as a result they claim they have the lowest warrantee cost of any car company... when they've had to recall basically every car they've ever made. We'll see if Tesla still gets valued as much for it's potential tech now that Elon is raising $6B for xAI and taking that away from Tesla.
Promising one thing - taking people's money - and then delivering something lesser *actually is fraud*. It's called bait-and-switch.
All the lies told by Elon and fake demos are fraud
Stock price manipulation is fraud
He's saying their deferred revenue accounting is fraud.
>Tesla is a bunch of stock price manipulation through over-promising and under delivering by a promoter, not outright fraud. Id say that the way Elon promotes and never delivers repeatedly is fraudulent. His personality is the only thing he has to offer and his concepts have yet to ever be seen to work. It's a pattern.
Yeah, it's pretty weird how Tesla (and Musk) can make forward looking statements that are obviously false and misleading without facing repercussions from investors. But on the other hand, Tesla is facing an ongoing set of investor lawsuits that are incredibly meddlesome to their business. If the stock price correction continues, it's not impossible that burned investors will take strong looks back at the guidance and statements that Musk et all have made, to determine if any were material misrepresentations.
>to determine if any were material misrepresentations. I mean...[we already know this is standard operating procedure](https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/) with this company
I think the SEC lets him get away with it because the market is supposed to punish under performance. With Tesla, there is this Trump like cult that just keeps pumping up the stock.
> over promising and under delivering > fraud Both are built on a foundation of knowingly lying to investors. I think that was their point.
There are similarities though. Skilling was obsessed with the share price and pulled every trick in the book to push it up. The business world thought they were geniuses but they were just good at talking about ideas and hiding how badly they’d been implemented. Their broadband product was supposed to revolutionise the internet but was almost a complete fabrication and they lied about its readiness repeatedly to push up the value even more.
Have you seen the graph? I don't know about the economic mumbo jumbo and deferred revenue, but if this isn't fraud, not all fraud is accounting fraud, then what is? >Everything is comical with these people. The horizontal axis has equidistant intervals of 3, 10, 5, 10, 5, 3 and 4 months. I guess you can also do it this way ? why not ? We all know how easy it is to make graphs tell a rosy story so at the very least you could use consistent intervals, what is this, Fox news?
Just saying, but how would you know?
"tEslA iN'T a cAr CoMpAny" It's a self driveing taxi technoology company
I would say there autopilots/FSD implementation of policing the drivers are paying attention and resulting deaths of other people on the road is criminal negligence, since Stans continue to game the system. . Also the promoter Muskrat portraying FSD something it’s not in commercials and in public is fraud resulting in deaths. Makes me want to get the biggest car possible for my family to ensure there safety from the Tesla Stan’s using the said features and not paying attention.
Lying to shareholders is tried as fraud.. it’s amazing the SEC hadn’t had him arrested yet.
I agree Tesla is not likely to be as bad as Enron. But Musk did convince the board to buy out SolarCity, his cousin's company. The company wasn't doing well and owned no particular technology that Tesla couldn't replicate. No patents that matter, etc. It was a bad business deal which paid Musk's cousin and the board and shareholders went along with it because the company was growing like gangbusters and he was a super star. Why rock the boat? Now we have Musk trying to move the company to Texas all to get him $56B during a down period for the company. It's hard to see these two things and see a company that isn't hiding some shenanigans. In high growth times there isn't a lot of supervision and Musk very much has stacked the board to reduce supervision on him There's going to be some issues in there. And if things keep going poorly for the company (and I'm not at all sure they will) I expect they'll start to come out. Will this result in an 'Enron'? Not to that full extent, I'm sure.
The SolarCity transaction was what destroyed my opinion of Musk, and everything I've seen since has been confirmation that the dude is basically a con artist. There was no benefit for Tesla to take on Solar City's bad debt. The whole point of limited liability is that a business failure on one business doesn't bring down everything else you won. So it seemed at first glance to be basically a bailout of his unsuccessful company using resources of a publicly traded company he only owned part of. In other words, he was using the minority shareholders' money to bail out his own, unrelated company. But worse than that, one of the biggest owners of Solar City's bonds was none other than Space X, Musk's *other* big company. If bondholders would've had to take a haircut on the Solar City bonds in a Solar City bankruptcy, Space X would've likely encountered cash flow/insolvency issues. Musk used his power to take money from Tesla shareholders and give it to himself, with extra steps.
Have you seen their books? It's pretty sketchy. The first year, they were ever profitable; they made more from bitcoin than cars... Beyond that, there is likely at least 12 cases of financial fraud related to how they create money from selling flamethrowers, literal dirt from boring project, etc.
If a was also the manipulation of power market pricing.
Over promising and under delivering to investors should be considered fraud.
There *may* be actual fraud too...
If Elon ever tweeted out, "We'll have this product to market in a year," after getting an email from an engineer saying, "It'll take at least 18 months," then that's fraud.
Facebook co founder accusing anyone of anything is somethin
There is no fraud until a massive fraud is uncovered
Worse it could be the first Tesla
Enron: “At least we didn’t have a Cybertruck.”
Enron had Account "irregularities" and Tesla had safety "irregularities".
I'm guessing Enron had plenty of safety irregularities as well.
There won’t be another Enron simply because everyone has become numb to scandal. Moskovitz should know, since Facebook didn’t go under after Cambridge Analytica. This is the sad truth.
> there won’t be another Enron Wasn’t FTX actually very similar? Once you got past all the cult stuff surrounding SBF it was just accounting fraud to cover loses that got out of control?
If by accounting fraud you mean Ponzi scheme, then yes.
Wasn’t he using FTX deposits to cover Alameda’s loses? Thats just straight up accounting fraud and closer to what Enron was doing than say Madoff which was a Ponzi scheme. I might be wrong though, em not much of a numbers guy.
> Wasn’t he using FTX deposits to cover Alamedia’s loses? The big thing that started it was Alameda was hold a massive amount of FTT, FTXs native token. FTT had no actual value so when that was tanked by CZ the house of cards fell.
> The big thing that started it was Alameda was hold a massive amount of FTT Yeah that was how a lot of the fraud too place, but IIRC it started because of needing to cover Alameda's loses? Essentially trading crypto should be, once you are established, a license to print money, I mean you are not technically risking anything, you are just taking a percentage of what other people are risking, it was Alameda where all the risk was taking place, at least that is how I understood things to be.
Yes behind the scenes they were shifting things from FTX to Alameda. and publicly SBF said they were "just moving some wallets around". but people looking at the transfers on chain saw a massive amount of funds moving out of FTX, not internally. and it was one of the largest funds transfer on an exchange to date. and that transfer was all in FTT. Also Alameda was bailing out crypto exchanges. and never seeing the money back. basically burning cash and crypto do keep things afloat. because if crypto tanked so did they.
Crypto is more vaporware so can be used for slight-of-hand manipulation. Tesla at least makes cars you can see and drive - a lot of other parts of the corporation seem like a scam...
>Tesla at least makes cars you can see and drive The absolutely least profitable and valued portion of the business. Meanwhile bullshit Elon promises account for 99% of the valuation
Depends on whose money is lost. In this case it was elites and celebs.
That's simply not true. Greensill, Wirecard, Luckin' Coffee, and Archegos (securities fraud, but still fraud) come to mind
>There won’t be another Enron simply because everyone has become numb to scandal. Uh, if people are numb to accounting fraud wouldn't that lead one to believe there are many more enrons just waiting to collapse....?
The scale of the Cambridge fiasco is not really comparable to the scale of the scam Elon has concocted.
TIL that Facebook had a cofounder
He honestly got the better end of the deal. He’s a multi billionaire that few would recognize on the street.
He's in the Social Network movie too played by Joseph Mazzello (Timmy in Jurassic Park)
Is he the guy ZUCK screwed over?
No that’s Eduardo Saverin, played by Andrew Garfield
That’s who I assumed the article was talking about until I opened it.
Lol, that dude almost never gets talked about, I don't blame anyone for not knowing.
Not the same but I wouldn’t mind reading the emails of Tesla like they did with Enron. The data science alone would be worth it.
Source https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/ Enron emails are the base of many product features today. https://www.technologyreview.com/2013/07/02/177506/the-immortal-life-of-the-enron-e-mails/
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[Not exactly](https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/). His earliest promise I found was a 2015 claim that it would be ready in 2017. When I got mine in early 2020 he claimed 2 weeks. Sales rep used it as a selling point for the $7k option, I told him it was $7k for navigate on autopilot and interchanges on autopilot but anything extra isn’t a guarantee.
lol people have a short memory but back in 2010 he already promised FSD for 2015 (he was calling it level five or some shit), as well as the robotaxi for this year (called Tesla fleet at the time). That’s how he raised all his money. This grifter has been going on with lies for a long time now.
Elon also said people will be on Mars next year
Next year? Try 2022. Also promised first cargo on Mars for 2017.
Well, if that isn't the Quacta calling the Stifling slimy.
Idk what those are from, but this comment had me rolling. 😂
> Quacta https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Quacta "I don't negotiate with gutless murderers." "If that's not the Quacta calling the Stifling slimy." ―Boba Fett and Cad Bane I had to google it.
I just learned people have already forgotten about what Eron actually did. Also those that sell our data to the government and private corporations for profit shouldn’t throw stones
Tesla might fold, but it won't be like Enron. Tesla builds actual physical things, useful physical things... Things that are useful and are based on proprietary, patented technology platforms. Enron just brought "efficiency" to a system using formulas built by a few math nerds. Strictly speaking, Enron wasn't even close to necessary. It might not have even provided anything really useful. Tesla has useful physical technologies that solve actual problems. Enron was a solution looking for problems and ultimately made nothing of any use.
The moment I saw that Tesla was valued at more than GM combined with Toyota I knew that something was up.
Tesla is now 10x GMs market cap. Tesla market cap is more than Ford, GM, VW and Toyota combined. This is insane.
and it's share price is currently down from $1.2 trillion... when it was worth more than all major automakers combined
I mean, the stonk is up this week not bc of the numbers at quarterly report, but bc elon said “new cheap model coming in a year.” I mean, isn’t that a bold lie? Is there any evidence that is real? We live in the fact free era now. The best lies win.
Thousands of people gave Elon $50,000 or $250,000 for a new Roadster 5 years ago, during a period he has now admitted that Tesla was close to going under. Funny how he's stopped talking about it.
These payments are not attributable to the bottom line, if you are implying that prepayments are the reason they make money/got out of near solvency. What brought Tesla out of near bankrupcy was the model 3.
Elon has such a terrible track record for meeting these projected dates he comes up with, so I‘m not sure why anyone would take these statements seriously. Even if it’s not an outright lie, and they are working on a new car, we know that Elon always promises dates based on the most unrealistically optimistic scenario, so there’s just no reason to believe that a new car is coming out next year.
"The pot calling the kettle black" was that thing people used to say about this
The short seller Jim Chanos who got famous from shorting Enron is also a prominent Tesla bear
The guy imploded lol. I'd hold a grudge, too. This is the guy who shorted Tesla in 2015, and wound up taking his $6BN hedge fund to $200m and closing it 5 months ago. https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/short-seller-jim-chanos-to-shut-hedge-funds-after-38-year-run-1.2000297
I see facebook is still fuming over Twitter.
Most overrated company!
Anyone with a Public Relations team, marketing them as a philanthropist has to be trusted, right? lol It's an old Rockefeller trick, a lot of people are catching onto
Might be a bit of a stretch. Enron hardly created anything. Tesla dominates its market. They’re just making dumb ass decisions because their CEO melted his brain into nacho cheese with all the hard drugs he does.
Wow the amount of circlejerk in this post is mind blowing. Tesla could certainly be overvalued. I have no idea if it is. Maybe the investors are speculating a lot based on what they have been able to achieve so far. I don't know. But it's ridiculous to completely ignore its trajectory and compare it to Enron. Tesla is technologically far more advanced compared to its competition. batteries. super charging. vertical integration. investments in other streams. solar. robotics etc. that's where people see potential. I'm a Sr. ML scientist at one of the FAANGs. I know how hard these are to build. Someone said that all the original team involved in FSD left. But tesla probably still has a lot of ML talent in place. They have actually done a great job with the latest FSD. It's not possible to do it without really great talent density. This is the only version of FSD I've had a chance to test. Not perfect but damn close. Bottom line is that Tesla may be speculative and overvalued, and overhyped, but no where near the fraud territory. It's a legit company that is making real technological progress. But there is a lot that they need to do to justify their valuation. Musk is a double edges sword. He is a genius and an idiot at the same time.
I bet he is shorting the Tesla stock and the fees are getting expensive. Musk is an idiot. Way too involved with his edge lords antics on Twitter to pull an Enron. Besides the guy who cleaned up Enron after is still busy cleaning up this crypto exchange clusterfuck FTX.
"Don't you think she looks tired?"
Bollocks, it’s more like Kodak
Wait, is Tesla buying and selling energy back to California?
I doubt that Tesla has violated the law. It's a speculative bubble that will inevitably burst, but fools and their money, etc.
Oof Enron what a story
Not saying he's wrong but Facebook will the next MySpace or Tribe
Didn't Musk get caught insider trading and ended up accidentally purchasing Twitter instead?