Posted on 08/10/2018 11:43:51 AM PDT by Moonman62
Tesla is the only company truly advancing AI in its vehicles. Musk made the decision to invest in real-world data analytics early. This leap in technological advancement has left competitors like Alphabet's Waymo, Uber, BMW and GM scrambling in vein to keep pace, and there is a long lineup of companies wanting to partner, including Toyota and Mercedes-Benz.
Tesla's early investment and resulting tech have put the company firmly ahead of the pack. To understand how Tesla is unique with AI, you need to understand that Tesla has been collecting billions of miles worth of real-world driving data since 2012, through Model S, X and 3 drivers. Both Tesla and Waymo have been attempting to collect and process enough data to create a car that can drive itself. Waymo and Uber by comparison use inferior simulations, not real-world driving data.
Tesla is the only autonomous vehicle company to have designed its own proprietary AI chip, bottoms-up, designed from scratch and custom-built for autonomous driving. Musk said on the recent Tesla earnings conference call that the chip is almost ready.
This is not a cult stock. Tesla stock is dramatically undervalued based on its leadership role in self-driving cars, including a superior amount of real-world driving data, the only proprietary AI autonomous driving chip and the fact that it is now self-funding on a go-forward basis.
— By Keith Wright, Villanova University instructor of accounting and information systems
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
Its foolish to believe anything Musk sez.
AI vaporware will fail to deliver, just as his hype-mobile crash-crematorium currently is.
Tesla delivery and order cancellations abound -
https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/ridiculous
Well, that was kinda vain.
Perhaps the most idiotic statement in CNBC's history - and it's up against massive competition. :)
Anything Musk can do, BMW can do better and cheaper. And they know how to manufacture and deliver products on time. This is just another case where the first mover will get squashed by the larger competitor who knows how to execute.
Saint Elon is the biggest Grifter and con man this world has seen since Charles Ponzi. Anyone that can get out should get out now. This deck of cards is gonna fall. And when it does I will be laughing my ass off.
So we can be assured that you’re backing up your beliefs by heavily shorting Tesla stock?
Sounds like there’s killing to be made . . . if you’re right.
...
I don’t think many here short the stock, but you can see they hate any good news or opinions about Tesla or Musk.
At SpaceX, especially, and to some degree, Tesla, Musk has greatly lowered costs using two strategies, vertical integration and what he calls first principles thinking (designing and engineering based on physics rather than analogy). This new AI chip reflects both strategies.
I agree. As I like to say, nobody flies Wright Brothers airplanes.
Elon Musk and Crony Capitalism
Link: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/elon_musk_and_crony_capitalism.html
Crony capitalism – the close alliance of big business with government – leads not to free enterprise, but to its opposite, in which government, not the market, chooses winners and losers, through subsidies and other forms of largesse.
Adam Smith, the great philosopher of capitalism, understood that businessmen want to maximize profits, and how it is done is of secondary interest. Indeed, he once said that when two businessmen get together, the subject of discussion is how to keep the third out of the market. Adam Smith and more recent philosophers of the free market such as Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman believed deeply in capitalism. Many businessmen, sadly, do not.
Consider the example of Elon Musk, the billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur, who may be a modern poster-boy for this phenomenon. His ambition is unbounded. As Norm Singleton of Dr. Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty wrote in The American Conservative, Musk has an agenda to do everything from “sending Men to the moon and Mars, to creating a 700-miles-per-hour tunnel transportation system, to turbo-charging human brains by implanting computers.”
The problem is that he relies on the levers of government to fund his ideas.
In the view of Veronique de Rugy, senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, Musk is “perhaps the most prominent case of cronyism in modern times,” especially due to his use of “friendships in government, as well as some high-priced lobbyists, to keep the spigot of government money going his way.”
As is often the case with “private-public” partnerships, his ideas often do not come to fruition despite his receipt of all this government money.
Take Tesla Inc., for example. With the help of over $1 million in lobbying expenditures annually, Musk’s “go green” vision has been funded by billions in government support, including a $7,500-per-electric vehicle tax break, a $465-million discounted Department of Energy loan, and billions of state-level subsidies.
As recent news has shown, Tesla’s results have been anything but good. The company burns an average of $1 billion per quarter and fails to meet production targets, which in part caused Moody’s to downgrade its credit rating and has made Tesla the most shorted stock on the entire U.S. stock market. Despite this, Musk’s government money shows no sign of ceasing.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that in a seeming effort to reverse this gloomy financial situation, Musk recently sent out a memo to Tesla’s suppliers requesting partial refunds on purchases his company has made since 2016 – a de facto subsidy that could seemingly fool investors and government officials by artificially inflating its financial outlook.
Costing taxpayers and investors billions of needless dollars is bad enough, but these subsidies may be a threat to national security as well.
SpaceX, for example, has received plenty in federal funds to launch rockets and satellites for NASA and the U.S. military. Its record thus far has been questionable.
In June 2015, a Falcon 9 rocket exploded on the launchpad. The loss included 4,000 pounds of food and supplies bound for the international space station. A government report released this year blamed poor quality control at SpaceX, and the company followed suit with another rocket explosion just a year later.
Recent reports from the Defense Department’s inspector general and NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel show, among other concerns, that SpaceX has more significant security nonconformities than its leading competitors. Worry was expressed about SpaceX’s ability to carry astronauts into space without causing harm.
Meanwhile, after receiving assurances of government money, SpaceX raised its commercial resupply contract prices by 50 percent. These cost increases, coming despite SpaceX already costing more than aerospace contractors Orbital ATK and Sierra Nevada, will ultimately weaken America’s security by forcing the government to do less for more.
Most recently, Musk also exhibited his emotional instability by launching what the Washington Post called “one of the nastiest attacks yet,” in connection with the rescue of 12 Thai schoolboys from a flooded cave. He attacked Vernon Unsworth, a British diver who played a key role in the rescue, who said Musk’s idea of dispatching a miniature submarine for the rescue “had absolutely no chance of working.”
Professor Zeynep Tufekci of the University of North Carolina provides this cautionary note: “Mr. Musk, indeed Silicon Valley as a whole, can perhaps see the Thai operation as a lesson[.] ... The Silicon Valley model for doing things is a mix of can-do optimism, a faith that expertise in one domain can be transferred seamlessly to another and a preference for rapid, flashy high-profile action[.] ... But what saved the kids out of the cave was a different model: a slower, more methodical, more narrowly specialized approach.”
Sometimes it takes a crisis to recognize a problem. In due time, perhaps the government will take Professor Tufekci’s words to heart and demand more certainty and reliability before doling out anything on the taxpayers’ dime. The practice of picking winners and losers in the marketplace has gone on for long enough.
I don't have a problem with good news in that regard. But nothing about Musk impresses me other than his apparent adeptness at getting freebees. I think that without the all out support of the envirotards in DC who want to shove electric cars up our butts and the vast sums of OUR money they have been funneling to him FOR YEARS, he and Tesla wouldn't be a dot on the screen.
Now, if he was making and selling quality cars (they aren't) and showing a legitimate profit (he isn't) and doing it without burning through $5 billion a year of money that our government has confiscated from us, then I'd have a different attitude.
Performance counts - and that isn't happening.
Musk and Bloomberg.com recommended this video for TSLA short sellers everywhere.
A Tesla Short Seller Gets Q2 Results...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=24&v=wxEClGh6Mus
A lot of yappers, a few tire kickers and not so many actually short sellers around here?
If you have a hunch, short a bunch!
The guy who wrote the article is billed as an INSTRUCTOR of Accounting and Information Systems. So he is not a Professor, or Assistant Professor, or even a real faculty member. Shows how low CNBC is reaching to come up with these opinion pieces.
While Tesla has done some cool stuff, they are not the slam-dunk that this writer says. Innovation and competition are good for the consumer.
Maybe Tesla will become a real player in the next 10 years. But customers are fickle.
I think a lot of us hate having our tax dollars stolen from us (at the point of a gun) to be given as federal subsidies to entitled rich people for their crappy “status symbols.”
...
Why don’t I see as much hate for Boeing, GM, and Ford who all get more tax dollars?
When GM was getting bailed out by the feds, Musk was using his own money to keep Tesla out of bankruptcy.
Now, if he was making and selling quality cars (they aren’t) and showing a legitimate profit (he isn’t) and doing it without burning through $5 billion a year of money that our government has confiscated from us, then I’d have a different attitude.
...
Really? According to this site Tesla’s “subsidies” are over 90% state and local, and nowhere near $5 billion a year. I’d be more impressed if Musk’s detractors used facts.
https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-motors
maybe because they aren’t making products aimed pretty exclusively at leftist elite.
...
Really?
Have you read much of the Tesla Reddit forum?
Most comments I see on there are about performance, handling, seat comfort, interior aesthetics and features like Autopilot. Mentions about environmental topics are rare.
Many Tesla owners have some fairly thick skin. The poster to the Tesla forum doesn’t. He will blow a gasket if the car arrives with defects after spending $60K. $50K if he gets full tax credits.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.