@nealboudette@earcos@elonmusk For every robotaxi projection that turned out to be too optimistic (during a pandemic year...), there's a dozen improbable feats Musk already accomplished:
✅ landing rockets,
✅ a million Teslas,
✅ launching astronauts,
✅ Space Internet,
✅ fastest production car, etc.
Why are you writing almost exclusively negatively slanted articles about Tesla, the leading clean-tech company in the world, while your salary is in significant part paid by fossil fuel advertising?
Isn't that a glaring conflict of interest you should disclose?
The New York Times published a shameful article about Tesla in 2013 by John Broder, where according to Tesla telemetry he made half a dozen fraudulent statements to smear Tesla.
NYT never apologized & Broder is now member of the Editorial Board...
Tesla's all-time record deliveries of 184.8k vehicles is extremely impressive, given the countless Q1 headwinds:
❌ Q1 seasonally weakest (winter) quarter for auto sales: a 10-20% headwind
❌ Tesla had no Model S/X production due to the Plaid refresh: ~15k units missing
❌ China: the quarter was 10 days shorter due to the Chinese New Year and the calendar quarter being 2 days shorter. That's 10 days of missing sales & production days.
❌ US: some buyers were possibly waiting for the new federal EV incentives
❌ Samsung Texas factory shutdown
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❌ Europe: many key markets are in partial or full Covid lock-downs, such as the Netherlands which was on a hard lock-down for the whole quarter.
❌ Tesla had a 2-day production shutdown at Fremont, due to parts shortages.
❌ Model 3 cannibalized by ramping Model Y
Tesla has yet to disclose details about their "Dojo" training chip, here's the CPU die layout of their inference chip.
The large integrated SRAM cells & the single-clock 96x96 matrix multiplicators allow Tesla HW3 boards to run large NNs at unmatched power efficiency.
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Power efficiency is the primary limit of consumer grade, mass-adopted autonomy (self-driving in every car): while current top of the line GPUs are able to perform inference computing at a performance comparable to Tesla's FSD chip, they do it while drawing ~10x more power.
Why the leak of record Tesla Q1 European deliveries is authentic IMO:
✅ figures internally consistent
✅ record EU Q1 ships
✅ awkward April 1 timing
✅ fake leak would avoid typos in business email
✅ fake leak would leak global numbers
✅ reliable source of @RandyVegetables
✅ "Tesla authentic" language & non-obvious internal details a fake one with typos wouldn't know to replicate
✅ Timing of April 1 and AM European time is correct for the final figures to be summarized, and a rushed congratulatory email by a clearly proud EMEA team lead.
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Individually these details are all circumstantial evidence, but in combination they give me high confidence that this leak is probably authentic.
Why many Tesla investors are frustrated over Tesla's Bitcoin experiment.
@elonmusk describing money as "avoiding the inconvenience of barter" is a rare case of him misunderstanding the first principles of something utterly important: the history & role of money.
I realize that I'll lose followers over this - but this had to be said.
It is a commonly told story to economics students all over the world: money and coinage was created to replace unwieldy barter. Instead of exchanging goods, people exchanged valuable gold coins.
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This is a convenient story that, just like the story Tesla cars being inconvenient & "dirty", is utterly false.
There's literally 𝒛𝒆𝒓𝒐 evidence in the rich archaeological record of humanity suggesting high functioning barter economies who simplified barter with coinage.
I have Gbit fiber Internet, yet I pre-ordered Starlink:
✅ Planned speeds 1-10 GBit/sec
✅ Cells are valuable, limited real estate, 𝙚𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙞𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙮 in populated areas
✅ Independent
✅ Full constellation much lower latencies than terrestrial Internet
✅ To support SpaceX
Especially the "Starlink cells are a first-come-first-served limited resource" is poorly understood.
Starlink receiver's high-tech phased array antennas, consisting of ~600 ASICs, allow very tight radio beams - but beam size is still a few kilometers wide on the ground.
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This physical property puts an upper limit on the number of subscribers per Starlink cell.
Each Starlink cell is roughy 4km × 4km currently, which suggests a beam size of 2-4 km.
Effects on Tesla/TSLA of today's US Senate runoff elections in Georgia.
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Polls are showing razor thin margins and the results won't be known for days: initially Republican incumbents are likely to lead, because in-person votes are counted first, which votes lean Republican.
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But once mail-in votes are counted too we'll know the final result - possibly within the next 2-3 days. The election is still (way) too close to call.
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"Conventional wisdom" is that if Democrats win both senate seats and take control of the Senate, then there will be a market-wide selloff, TSLA included, because of more taxes.