Surprisingly, I saw similar posts about Musk on the Thailand rescuer tweet and the price too high tweet. You are not betting against the fundamentals or the realities of the stock, you are betting against these people.
It's not like if without Nikola all of this money would have gone to one other thing. Sure some of it might have got wasted, but realistically most of it would have gone to productive uses.
But, I'm convinced the stock brokers at pension funds are also playing the market a lot, because better results is better for them.
A wise investor reduces volatility by diversification, rather than by concentrating on low-volatility assets.
That’s not how laws and society work — theft is theft, no matter who the victim is.
And for that matter, not everyone agrees what theft even is. Leftist will say that wage labor is theft, and the far right will tell you taxation is theft. It's all relative.
To me robbing someone of 1% of their capital doesn't look worse than CEOs throwing around their social weight and followers against random people for fun.
The real world consequent of the latter might actually be worse, like whole life ruined levels of worse.
Aug 7, 2018 "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." Elon Musk
Aug 7, 2018 "Shareholders could either to sell at 420 or hold shares & go private"
After paying 20 million dollar fine referring to the Securities and Exchange Commission tweets:
"Just want to that the Shortseller Enrichment Commission is doing incredible work," "And the name change is so on point!"
2018
"I want to be clear: I do not respect the SEC, I do not respect them,"
2019
“By the middle of next year, we’ll have over a million Tesla cars on the road with full self-driving hardware, feature complete, at a reliability level that we would consider that no one needs to pay attention,”
October 21, 2019
"Next year for sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road," "The fleet wakes up with an over-the-air update. That's all it takes."
2020
"All Tesla cars right now have everything necessary for self-driving available today. All you need to do is improve the software."
Technically all cars have a proper GPU (Tesla's "GPU") and 360 cameras, the reliability is probably in the 90%-99% (which, yes, is pretty terrible to be considered fully autonomous, but impressive from a technical standpoint). Technically is correct to say that all they have to do is to "improve the software". That will be a lot of work, sweat and tears, but still correct.
> "All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver."
Yet the original "HW1" computer was replaced by "HW2", which was replaced by "FSD Computer 2.5", which was replaced by "FSD Computer 3".
If you want to activate the Full Self-Driving package today on a Tesla you just bought in early 2019, they'll tell you that your "FSD Computer 2.5" is not capable enough for even today's level 2 autonomy features, you first have to replace it with "FSD Computer 3". And if your car's a bit older, but still sold as "has the hardware needed for full self-driving", you have to pay $1000 for that upgrade before you can pay for the "full self-driving" that isn't self-driving.
How many times does Tesla have to claim the hardware is good enough, but then change their minds a year later, before any reasonable person stops believing them?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28002731
It's verbatim from Elon Musk on Autonomy Day 2019, per this article:
https://www.engadget.com/2019-04-22-tesla-elon-musk-self-dri...
This is the same event where he promised a million Tesla robotaxis on the road by 2020.
No, that was NOT a verbatim quote. Here is the exact quote with me adding emphasis on the critical (but oft omitted) qualifier:
"All Teslas being produced right now have this computer. We switched over from the Nvidia solution for S and X about a month ago, and we switched over the Model 3 about ten days ago. All cars being produced have the all the hardware necessary, compute and otherwise, for full self-driving. I'll say that again. All Tesla cars being produced right now have everything necessary for full self-driving. All you need to do is improve the software."
https://youtu.be/Ucp0TTmvqOE?t=5663
> This is the same event where he promised a million Tesla robotaxis on the road by 2020.
That is, in my opinion, not a contextually correct reading of what Elon said. Within the context of the speech it's clear (to me) that for him, "robotaxi" is used as shorthand for "vehicles with the hardware capable of being a robotaxi." Obviously I cannot prove this, and I recognise that responsibility ultimately lies with Elon to be clear.
I do agree Elon did say multiple sentences that are absolutely misleading when read in isolation, but his actual words in context (and with some recognition that this is a forward looking statement made with optimism) were far less egregiously wrong than the snipped quote implies on its own. You can watch him say it in context and make up your own mind:
Same thing with the robotaxi quotes. Elon was very clear on autonomy day and the days surrounding it. The promise was not shorthand for "vehicles capable of being a robotaxi", it was Tesla vehicles, and I quote again, "operating robotaxis next year with no one in them", and "I feel very confident predicting that there will be autonomous robotaxis from Tesla next year — not in all jurisdictions because we won’t have regulatory approval everywhere.". You don't need regulatory approval for hardware alone.
In another investor presentation Elon Musk made in 2019, per a reporter covering it, they were promising the Tesla Network to allow Tesla owners to send their functioning robotaxis out to pick people up for money would launch in 2020.
> Starting next year, owners will be able to flip a switch inside the Tesla app, and send out their car to pick up and drop off passengers autonomously, earning an estimated 65 cents per mile in fares. By Tesla’s estimates, owners might be able to earn $30,000 in gross revenue from their cars per year, or more than $300,000 in revenue over the 11-year lifespan of their car.
Not included in your response, I should note, was any acknowledgement that you misrepresented a quote as being verbatim was in fact not verbatim. This makes me entirely disinterested in further interaction.
To give you an example, ImageNet for image classification required for many years a descent computer and GPU to run inference. Today, an improved version called MobileNet, runs in phones with no GPU from advancements in AI training with half-precision and why not.
So, how can we be so sure that FSD can't EVER be ported back to HW1?
It doesn't matter whether it can't ever be ported back. It doesn't work today, and that's all there is to it. Musk lied. And it isn't the first time he does so either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_Vista
Windows Vista and software in general are not even remotely comparable: they are not sold today with the promise of features tomorrow - they are generally sold when they're ready. Even pre-order games are usually refunded if they incur too huge delays or ship with significantly altered features (see Cyberpunk 2020).
Just like you can't be a little bit pregnant you can't have a little bit of FSD. You either have it or you don't. It's a boolean, and it's embedded in that word 'full'.
Okay, compare accuracy of MobileNet to ViT. ViT has 90.45% accuracy and 1.843Bn parameters and MobileNet has 79% with 5.47M parameters (2020, v3 is 75% with 5.4). [0]
These two networks are nowhere near equal. If you could put ViT on a phone and run real-time inference you would. But you can't, so you take a major cut in performance to get what you can.
There are multiple metrics you need to look at when evaluating networks. "Being able to perform on a dataset" is not even that useful of one.
[0] Have fun https://paperswithcode.com/sota/image-classification-on-imag...
Are you saying that the possibility is enough to prove they didn't cheat people?
If, some day, Tesla hypothetically says "we have determined it is technically possible to backport FSD, but we aren't gonna, because we like making money, not spending it" is that enough in your mind to demonstrate they didn't defraud anyone way back when?
Or do they actually have to make it run to fulfill the original promise?
That said, if it doesn't happened this year, it doesn't mean it will never happen.
The first problem they need to solve is FSD. If they can't solve FSD even with latest hardware, then well, that would be bad on its own.
The question is, what happens once they solve FSD, do they port? Maybe, I don't think it will be nearly as hard. Now realistically, it's probably cheaper to give free upgrades to everyone and not have to do the port. To me that feels fair, is like "hey, I promised you FSD on HW1, is gonna be a pain to port, but here, take this free HW upgrade", I'd be OK with that.
Now if they don't compensate HW1 users to some degree once FSD is solved, I do feel that would not be cool.
But my point here is that, we are jumping to conclusions, we don't know yet. We can't claim (yet) that FSD will or will not happen.
So it's a bold claim given what we know. It's also clear that next generation hardware will be safer regardless of if the previous generation "works."
Training is the process of generating the parameters for the neural network, it usually takes significant resources to train and is a very hard process.
Inference is the process of using a pre-trained neural network to perform predictions.
Tesla's car have hardware to perform inference. From working on the field for several years, I do believe that they have hardware capable of performing inference (driving a car).
However, the hardware that trains the neural network is comprised of hundreds, if not thousands or tens of thousands of GPUs, that hardware lives in Tesla's data centers (or some other cloud provider).
The really hard part of this project is on training, not inference. So while there is some risk that the car (inference) hardware might require an upgrade, this seems very unlikely to me.
While you're right, inference is not training but accuracy and inference speed is still important and hardware dependent. YOLO still can be faster and more accurate. Everything I said still holds true. You want to do inference on larger images because larger images have more information. More information helps you get better accuracy. You want bigger networks because bigger networks correlate strongly with higher accuracy. If you read any object detection paper you will see different sized models showing these tradeoffs. You want faster hardware because you still want your algorithms to be fast. Inference is still done in the car. Better hardware still makes all that perform better.
> The really hard part of this project is on training, not inference.
If you pay attention to the YOLO series or other real time object detection you will know that inference is still something being worked on. Inference speed matters. Throughput (different metric) matters. Hardware helps with both even if we use the same pretrained network. A network will have faster inference and higher throughput on an Ampere card than on a Kepler. So I'm not sure what you're debating here, it really feels like you're just trying to tell me you know machine learning but missed strong clues that you're talking to someone else who is aware.
TLDR: hardware still matters.
From the outside I’ve wondered if the missed schedule targets around autonomous driving is because we’ve conflated “solving” the perception problem with solving self-driving. Just curious what your take is on that
Since it has never been done we still don't know what's needed, so even if you worked in the field that's only intuition, a bit light for big commercial claims IMHO.
So what's wrong with the statement is it fits a pattern of statements with reckless disregard for the truth.
Going back to AlexNet, while GPUs helped the training process, it included significant software improvements that made a huge difference: training with dropout, convolutional neural networks, using rectified linear units, etc.
Also, training hardware is much more relevant than hardware for inference. Tesla's cars do not include hardware to train the neural network but just for inference. The training hardware is actually a server cluster that Tesla owns. So if hardware is insufficient, Tesla might have to buy a larger training cluster, but not necessarily upgrade the inference hardware.
That say, I do agree that there is some risk in requiring a hardware upgrade for inference, but to me that seems very unlikely.
However, I'm NOT stating that this won't ever work. I do believe that FSD will work in the future. Are there risks? For sure. But I'm very optimistic.
I'm trying to communicate that, even with current in-car hardware, this should be sufficient. Why? Cause driving the car with a neural-network is actually quite trivial. Now, training the neural-model is actually REALLY hard. But the training does not happen in the car, car just collects data and sends it to a data center with GPUs that trains the network. If any hardware will need upgrade, is the data center were training happens, not the actual in-car hardware.
Are you really saying that FSD will never work? Cause that's a pretty bold claim.
This claim is quite obviously true, because despite the claims of Tesla's people, we don't know of any vision system that works without relying on general intelligence. Human/animal vision in particular is only accurate because we inherently use our knowledge of the world and physical intuition to resolve ambiguity. Put a human (or other mammal or a bird) in a fully artifical environment, without recognizable objects and without shadows, and you'll see that they are about as bad at vision and navigation tasks as many current algorithms. The effect will be even worse if you recreate realistic objects but with unrealistic proportions and behaviors.
Since we can't hope that computers will gain animal level intelligence in understanding the world (no one is even really working on the necessary problems), the only path to self driving is through more advanced sensors, as everyone but Tesla has realized for a long time. This is why Waymo has self-driving cars on the road today (in perfect ideal conditions), and Teslas can sometimes barely navigate an empty intersection without a human driver intervening.
This is an extremely bold claim. You're also ignoring the fact that driving is an extremely heavy tailed distribution. We know that both processing heavy tailed distributions is difficult (not training, but pre-processing) as well as we see a strong correlation between larger networks and performance on heavy tailed distributions (more normal like distributions can get away with substantially smaller networks). But larger networks means more MACs. More MACs means slower inference. There's still a tradeoff between accuracy and speed. In driving you need both.
> Are you really saying that FSD will never work?
No one here is saying that. Everyone here is calling you out on your BS that we _know_ that FSD will work on _current_ hardware. We don't _know_ that. Maybe it will, but it's not a pony I'm willing to put money on.
Elon Musk's repeated fake-it-till-you-make-it behavior and the unwillingness of regulators to crack down on it spawns Trevor Miltons.
They also went after him for a lot of other stuff.
Note that they haven't gone after folks for failure to deliver issues on sales which is usually caused by shorting stocks such as Tesla's and others. Even though you'd think the basics of a regulated market is that folks selling shares actually own and will deliver them if someone buys them.
Like lying about a buyout offer for his company. Which he received a incredibly small punishment for.
His blog post on the rationale for his potential move is here: https://www.tesla.com/blog/taking-tesla-private
Anyone who bought in at this news would have been buying in for < $84 per share (split adjusted). Current stock price is 600 per share+.
The problem the SEC has had in trying to charge him is that folks feel like the SEC really ignore some of the clear scam behavior by big players. Fail to deliver? No issue. Broker bad behavior and theft? Light FINRA slaps on the wrist. Complaints about Madoff? Investigate the complainers. CEO talking about potential to take a company private publically - all out WAR by SEC!
He said he is considering something. It was not definite. Stock price didn't jump to the "buyout" price the way it normally would on a real buyout. So we have clear market data that folks didn't not consider his tweets a statement that a buyout was occuring.
Yes - people want to make this into a huge crime. But he explained in his tweets pretty transparently to most what his thinking was.
And they did go after him for this and everything else. Hey says Stock price too high in his opinion - BAM - they were on him. And they went after him for this.
if you read between lines - the contempt court case got a bit of an eye roll from the judge involved.
$420 funding secure indicates he already had financing ready. Why has this mystery funder never materialized.
> Anyone who bought in at this news would have been buying in for < $84 per share (split adjusted). Current stock price is 600 per share+.
This is hugely problematic as a response. Elon Musk's behavior is unethical whether Tesla stock went up or down. The stock price should not be used as justification for previous lies. If we accept that, then we accept markets where people can gamble on a lie and things are fine if their gamble works out. That's not the business culture I want to create. People should be honest about risks so that they can be properly evaluated.
> The problem the SEC has had in trying to charge him is that folks feel like the SEC really ignore some of the clear scam behavior by big players.
Elon Musk is literally the second biggest player! Ignoring his malfeasance creates more people willing to emulate him.
> Fail to deliver? No issue. Broker bad behavior and theft? Light FINRA slaps on the wrist. Complaints about Madoff? Investigate the complainers. CEO talking about potential to take a company private publically - all out WAR by SEC!
You won't find me giving a kind word to the SEC's currently regulatory practices, but we need to recognize that corporate culture is made from examples. When someone like Elon Musk publicly flouts all responsible corporate behavior, and doesn't have an example made of him, then that is going to breed people willing to make the exact same decisions.
> He said he is considering something. It was not definite.
"Funding secured" is definite.
> Yes - people want to make this into a huge crime. But he explained in his tweets pretty transparently to most what his thinking was.
It is a huge crime. In the middle of trading, he decided to fraudulently claim he had a buyout offer for his company. That screws over not just short sellers, but any one who had calls above the $420 a share price. There is no universe where that is healthy for our markets.
> if you read between lines - the contempt court case got a bit of an eye roll from the judge involved.
He's currently in a court case for his buyout of Solar City, where he announced a fake product, used it as reasoning for his one public company to buy a company that he, his brother, and his cousin's had the largest stake in, and he, his brother, and his other companies (Tesla and SpaceX) were the largest bondholders in. This is a cartoonish set of conflicts of interest here. But apparently that shouldn't matter, because "stock price."
The short sellers around tesla have been pathetic. Note I don't own any tesla stock, but the short seller hype train is just ridiculous around tesla. How there has been no action there is mind boggling.
He's a crazy guy willing to take crazy risks - look at SpaceX -> they are operating COMPLETELY outside all norms.
Despite these "huge crimes" - no prosecutor anywhere is prosecuting. The SEC efforts basically fell pretty flat - their contempt attempts also fell flat.
The conflicts with solar city were crazy - they were also public. I thought it was a terrible deal - but that was public too. If you think Elon is bad for tesla and you own stock vote him out by running your own board slate. But he has a vision for a fully integrated solar and powerwall type product no barriers. You get an app, the sun charges the battery. They had and have ideas around charging cars mixed into that. Not sure if it's a good idea - plenty of competitors coming for Tesla, but they may be able to deliver something here with their solar / energy AND car companies. And the trend is towards this type of integration - so he gets to take a crack at it.
And a heads up, if these solar city folks win their case - guess who is going to get the money. Yes, TESLA! I've followed the case a bit. Not super impressive (aside from the plaintiffs attorneys vomiting in court! What was going on!).
Importantly, you are Elon, you own 22% of two companies - Tesla and SolarCity with highly overlapping missions. You want to integrate solar / energy / cars. I mean, what would YOU do. Go do a deal with some company in China the way others have tried? These folks saying it's such a bad idea / deal - what was their much better proposal? Elon already knew the Solarcity board and management etc etc. I really am curious what was the amazingly better option to get where Elon wanted to go. Easy to criticize, harder (much) to do.
The Battery-Solar-Car angle is such an obvious integration for Tesla. I guess on paper it is frustrating it was a family connection, but their alternative was for Tesla to start building their own Solar capability when they had a significant stake in one already.
SEC is a joke - chasing Elon is like a weird hobby for them... meanwhile things like 2008 happen and they shrug and go "Sorry, we missed that one"... What's their mission again?
Elon already owned basically 22% of both companies. After they did the stock deal he owned 22% or whatever of the combined company. He already knew the folks / board / management of both companies.
Can you name the company he "should" have purchased?
So I can obviously see the self dealing side… but there is also an equally “it just made sense” side. Do billionaires need to self enrich with crazy side deals?
Clearly options traders didn't, since all options above $420 went to zero.
> The short sellers around tesla have been pathetic. Note I don't own any tesla stock, but the short seller hype train is just ridiculous around tesla. How there has been no action there is mind boggling.
I disagree. I think the behavior of the stock holders have been pathetic. The short sellers demands for greater transparency and a company not entirely based on smoke and mirrors are easily met. The company itself has refused to meet those minimal standards.
> He's a crazy guy willing to take crazy risks - look at SpaceX -> they are operating COMPLETELY outside all norms.
So? This shouldn't be an excuse for fraudulent behavior. Everytime I bring up a specific problematic behavior of Elon Musk, someone wants to reframe the conversation around the totality of his behavior, rather than the single criticism. I don't know about rockets, but from what I hear, Elon has done a great deal for him. Good for him. That doesn't make any of his behaviors faking a buyout ok, his behavior in the SolarCity merger, or his behavior with the Boring Company.
If we want better businessmen, we have to hold the ones we have accountable. Continuing to refuse to do that for Elon is spawning generations of people like Trevor Milton who assume laws don't apply if you're charming enough.
> The conflicts with solar city were crazy - they were also public. I thought it was a terrible deal - but that was public too. If you think Elon is bad for tesla and you own stock vote him out by running your own board slate. But he has a vision for a fully integrated solar and powerwall type product no barriers. You get an app, the sun charges the battery. They had and have ideas around charging cars mixed into that. Not sure if it's a good idea - plenty of competitors coming for Tesla, but they may be able to deliver something here with their solar / energy AND car companies. And the trend is towards this type of integration - so he gets to take a crack at it.
He lied to shareholders about both SolarCity's financial state and faked a product in order to secure the merger. You can say, "these are public companies" all you want, but the public companies voted for the merger purely on Elon's word, which apparently isn't worth much.
> Importantly, you are Elon, you own 22% of two companies - Tesla and SolarCity with highly overlapping missions. You want to integrate solar / energy / cars. I mean, what would YOU do. Go do a deal with some company in China the way others have tried? These folks saying it's such a bad idea / deal - what was their much better proposal? Elon already knew the Solarcity board and management etc etc. I really am curious what was the amazingly better option to get where Elon wanted to go. Easy to criticize, harder (much) to do.
Not fake a product and lie about the financial status of my company. You know, the bare minimum.
These funds are looking to diversify away from oil - so for them a play in EV space makes sense.
The Saudis in particular planned to do an IPO in oil industry - but that ended up not happening which really changed their decision making. If it had they were explicit about desire to diversify (smart in my view).
It wasn't a $100B deal. Many larger investors would rolled their holdings into the private entity - Elon alone would have. $40 - $50B. If debt is in mix equity portion even smaller. It would have been the deal of the century.
"Saudi’s Public Investment Fund built the undisclosed stake of between 3 and 5 per cent of Tesla’s shares this year, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
At Tesla’s current share price the position is worth between $1.7bn and $2.9bn. The stake, which is below the 5 per cent threshold that requires public disclosure, makes the PIF one of Tesla’s eight biggest shareholders, according to Bloomberg data.
The PIF, which has more than $250bn in assets, initially approached Tesla and chief executive Elon Musk to express interest in purchasing newly issued shares in the electric vehicle company.
However, Tesla did not act on the interest, one person informed on the matter said. Instead, the Saudi state fund acquired the position in secondary markets with the help of JPMorgan."
- Financial Times.
Someone's just chased down $2B of your stock on SECONDARY market - yeah - that's actually more interest than many deal talks even get to.
And yes - discussions like this happen with some frequency - and it's not a scandal if the deal doesn't close - you just don't usually read about them. Elon says he wanted to talk to Apple about buying tesla as well, he's on twitter more than most. That said, folks on the deal side - there tends to be movement in stock prices 3 days before deals are announced - so someone is making money on the normally secret considerations.
He was "thinking"? That's not funding secured. Why have all of these institutions specifically denied having discussed it at the time too? Either it wasn't these institutions, or funding was very far from secure at the time he claimed it was.
> It wasn't a $100B deal. Many larger investors would rolled their holdings into the private entity - Elon alone would have. $40 - $50B. If debt is in mix equity portion even smaller. It would have been the deal of the century.
If you are going to get investors for something like this, you're also going to roll over all the debt/options that you have on your books as well. It would have been close to ~100 billion, the largest LBO ever done.
> And yes - discussions like this happen with some frequency - and it's not a scandal if the deal doesn't close - you just don't usually read about them.
You don't read about them because the CEO doesn't announce they secured funding for one in the middle of trading. You know, the responsible thing to do.
Trust is fundamental part of markets and is basically its own interest rate. The more people can trust one another, the riskier investments people are willing to partake in.
"The fraud triangle is a framework commonly used in auditing to explain the reason behind an individual’s decision to commit fraud. The fraud triangle outlines three components that contribute to increasing the risk of fraud: (1) opportunity, (2) incentive, and (3) rationalization."
https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ac...
Companies that are "saving the world" are rife with people willing to rationalize their behavior. That's why it is imperative they are scrutinized properly so that the other elements don't also become rampant. We've failed completely with that on the latest wave of greentech companies.
People have stopped talking about Google's famed "Don't be Evil" thing.. But hey, it served a purpose for Google when it mattered.
There's a website you loved, but you forgot the URL? Good luck ever finding that again. Want to watch a video? Hope you've got an updated QuickTime plug-in and a lot of time to wait for the shitty webhost to serve a 240p video at 80B/s. Your daughter just emailed you a few photos of your grandchildren? Better delete the last 5 years of your conversation history to make space for it - Hotmail and Yahoo! only offered 10MB of storage before Gmail launched with 100x that. Want to monetise your blog? Hope you're happy with your readers getting malware, because every ad service out there is insanely shady.
Do whatever you want and while claiming the opposite. If it blows up, hire a specialized PR company and pretend nothing happened.
Nikola looked like fraud from the start (no Silicon Valley funds invested iirc - money came from Detroit).
Elon Musk is obviously different.
It can be hard to tell the difference between big ideas and bullshit, they can often sound similar. Con-artists will mimic the people that actually know their shit.
In order to tell the difference you need to actually look at the underlying tech for yourself.
Ah yes. A certain billionaire promises robo-taxis and full Level 5 autonomy by 2020, and then in 2021, admits self-driving is hard as FSD is still Level 2, after duping their own customers on buying ahead of their 'promises'.
This billionaire in 2019, surely knew what he was talking about. /s
> In order to tell the difference you need to actually look at the underlying tech for yourself.
Like the deceptive advertisement of FSD (Full Self Driving) auto-pilot software in Tesla cars that has tricked many Tesla drivers into paying for a product that not only doesn't work as advertised, but puts the safety of drivers and others at risk.
The worst part is that they continue to market it regardless of the missed deadlines, the safety risks and the fact that the software is still 'safe' for usage, which that is complete bullshit.
The FSD feature in Tesla cars (along side the robotaxis) was deceptively advertised as 'safe' and promised as 'Level 5' with lots of customers buying into it; and some have lost their lives over the software getting confused. If FSD is not regarded as 'actual fraud' or 'deceptively advertised', then I don't know what is.
I mean seriously, if the Tesla owners club was crying and planning class action on this, we would have a different conversation but I don't really see that happening as FSD is just vapor ware at the moment.
They've continued to make progress towards it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6bOwQdCJrc
Autopilot is different and isn't advertised as level 5 - 'autopilot' implies fancy lane keeping not turn by turn point to point autonomy.
Elon's FSD timelines were wrong - that isn't fraud. People say everything he's trying to do won't work constantly, just because they're occasionally right doesn't validate all of the times they're wrong (e.g. Model 3 is vaporware will never ship, the company is bankrupt and will close in two weeks, the Model S will never ship, gigafactory is a mistake, roadster means Musk only cares about EVs for the rich etc. etc.)
If you can't tell the difference between Elon Musk and the success of Tesla and SpaceX or think it's equivalent to something like Theranos or Nikola I'm not sure what to say about that, there's just not much point in further discussion. Your pejorative use of billionaire also suggests some political element.
Trevor does have some 30+ million dollar ranch in Utah though so I guess he did a better job of it.
In Holmes case I genuinely think it didn't start as a fraud, but became one when they started lying. Not sure about Nikola.
Anyone thinking you can do statistically accurate blood testing from one drop of dirty fingertip capillary blood without having already made a major scientific breakthrough is certainly not thinking straight, if not outright being fraudulent
So the software that is called 'FSD' (Full Self Driving) doesn't actually mean what is says or was advertised then? You're telling me that it doesn't mean 'Full Self Driving' or what was meant to be 'full Level 5 autonomy' which that was advertised for completion in 2019 and 2020? [0]
We are in 2021. Where are the robotaxis then? [0]
> If you can't tell the difference between...
Irrelevant. Stay on point. I have only criticized Tesla's deceptive advertising of FSD where that poses a great safety risk of life to both the driver of the car and other drivers on the road. No where did I mention anything generally about Tesla, SpaceX or anything else since the last sentence you said was completely irrelevant.
FSD does not work as advertised neither it is reliable to be used on the road and it puts the safety of the Tesla driver and others drivers at risk, even especially as it is beta software. I would not use such software in a car that confuses the moon as a yellow traffic light. [1]
> Your pejorative use of billionaire also suggests some political element.
?
I don't always listen to everything that they say whether if it is Milton or Musk.
[0] https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-autonomous-driving-lev...
[1] https://twitter.com/JordanTeslaTech/status/14184133078625853...
You're telling others to stay on point yet your pointing out that Musk and Milton are billionaires is just as much beside the point.
> Elon Musk is obviously different. [0]
> Con-artists will mimic the people that actually know their shit. [1]
When it comes to how the FSD system works, should I listen to a billionaire CEO or multiple leading experts in the field?
Unfortunately, the influence of any billionaire CEO (especially one with a rare cult of personality) is far more greater than someone who is simply an 'expert' or 'researcher' in their field. I would rather verify the claims of the CEO to check if what they are claiming doesn't conflict with what the experts and researchers are showing.
Otherwise, the customers will trust anything they say and if not done with proper research, well it goes straight back to [1].
There is no FSD today the capability you're paying for is a future update, it used to be entirely that - now they include some extra features under FSD that aren't in base autopilot (lane changes, etc.).
They've always been pretty explicit about this - the language on the site today reads:
> The currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous. The activation and use of these features are dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions. As these self-driving features evolve, your car will be continuously upgraded through over-the-air software updates.
They've also shipped more features toward this goal over time which is what they said they'd do (including a free hardware update if you had paid ahead for FSD).
> We are in 2021. Where are the robotaxis then? [0]
I already conceded he was wrong about timelines.
> Irrelevant. Stay on point.
Not irrelevant - this is the comparison we're talking about the nature of the difference between Trevor Milton and Elon Musk. If you ignore contradictory evidence because it doesn't support your position that's just cherry picking.
> So I am not allowed to say they are billionaires?
>> Ah yes. A certain billionaire promises...
>> This billionaire in 2019, surely...
Do the above quotes sound like some neutral descriptor to you?
FDS is beyond a difficult problem. The margin of error so low that you simply don't get there by tweaking some settings.
What they have today isn't FSD (which they state explicitly), but I'm happy to give them extra money early given the work they're doing on the chance that it works in the future. I think they have the best chance of success of actually shipping something real.
You're a good mark, FSD is a mug's game.
What difference? Unless of course, the case of Tesla's deceptive advertising of its beta FSD system putting the lives of drivers at risk and killing them or others [0] is 'far more serious' than Nikola's deceptive advertising of their whole business. Then yes, I agree on that difference and both must be under very close investigation by the regulators.
More specifically, I'm sure you should also realize that I was criticizing both of them from the start and not 'cherry picking' or siding with any company or person, unlike you mentioning Musk's other companies which that is completely irrelevant.
> They've also shipped more features toward this goal over time which is what they said they'd do.
Despite this, it is still unreliable [1] and the safety risks still stands, even when the driver is behind the wheel and is attentive of what is in front of them.
Highlighting these risks is extremely important such that it is the difference between life or death and it can be from a malfunction in the software that controls the car.
> Do the above quotes sound like some neutral descriptor to you?
Excuse me?
It is an objective fact. Isn't it? [2] [3] Why do you feel offended of this fact? I'm sure the customers will listen to them because they think they know what they are talking about? Don't they?
>>> Con-artists will mimic the people that actually know their shit. [4]
Remember this?
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/05/business/tesla-autopilot-...
[1] https://twitter.com/JordanTeslaTech/status/14184133078625853...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
It is both as I have always said. So you think it's worth putting the lives of other drivers at risk whilst using beta software that was deceptively advertised as "Full Self Driving" (FSD) by Tesla Inc. even when it is shown to be still not ready, than a company (Nikola Motors Corp.) and their CEO that is also deceptively advertising their entire products and technologies to investors?
What is the difference exactly on the lies and fraudulent claims made by both of them? There are none.
So your claim that:
> Elon Musk is obviously different. [0]
Is false. There are no exceptions.
Perhaps the only difference is that one involves a risk of death which that is irreversible and 'far more serious' than the other which I believe that both companies and their CEOs should be under serious investigation over their claims in their products.
Read all the comments again, since at this point you have ignored all of them since you are still defending the indefensible.
> None of your stuff is in good faith though so there’s no point to more discussion.
Are you now able to admit that the advertising of the FSD system and the fact that it is no where near 'Full Self Driving' capability which was bought in by Tesla customers also does not work or function as advertised?
On top of that, using a beta product that may get confused of malfunction poses a serious risk of death and has killed drivers or other passengers in the past, needs to be under through serious investigation by the regulators?
might not have been valley insiders, but if you look at theranos bizarre board selection, they were certainly not just random joes and certainly had the wherewithal to know they needed do proper due diligence before attaching themselves to the fraud, unless of course they were also party to it...
We also should not let Elon Musk's actions only be evaluated in their totality. We can argue about the net sum of his contributions, but it should be fundamentally irrelevant to evaluating any individual one. He shouldn't lie or allow fraud. His actions with the Solar Roof launch, Boring Company, Self Driving, and funding tweets all cross ethical lines that we as a country need to make clear are not what we want from our business leaders.
Heck, Japanese very rarely need a pronoun at all, yet they can somehow infer meaning just fine.
If thou dost not agree, thy children may.
Perhaps my rudeness at using the familial second person with a stranger was lost. I hope so. I didn't mean to be rude. Rather to demonstrate that the English language is better for having not preserved that unnecessary distinction.
Sure, I guess it is less ambiguous on average..
Hm.
Weren't there VCs who put money into this? What were they thinking? Were they being amoral and hoping to ride this pump and dump or did they actually buy into this shit?
Bonus point for the ethical similarities between J. T. Marlin and Nikola.
A second company then copying exactly the same association? Different thing entirely.
There are times I'm glad to have misjudged someone.
Well, in the words of Batman when asked about his superpower, "I'm rich".
It's OK to simultaneously believe that "Elon Musk is very effective at growing engineering businesses to the point that they disrupt entire industries" and also that "Elon Musk is not as smart as he thinks he is, and his tweets are embarrassing".
https://fortune.com/2018/12/09/tesla-name-faraday-elon-musk/
Definitely, but worse than that, real companies that really should have known better.
GM associated themselves. For what reason I can’t figure out. It must have been high up because the GM engineers I know all knew it was a 100% scam.
It’s like anything else that confuses me in business. Some idiot made a mistake, sure, but then their boss approved that, and all the other people required approved it, and at no point did anyone say “Hey, wait, no, stop”.
They got cash from Nikola whether they ended up manufacturing anything for them or not, and had to put up nothing up front.
So long as the public are willing to believe they’re essential, they’ll remain too big to fail and don’t need to worry about their reputation.
If all there is, is a memo saying ‘just buy it, and don’t look too hard’, or it looks like they fell for an obvious scam, then the execs can be on the hook for negligence to the shareholders
GM is none of those. (And they were not proposing to acquire NKLA, for "due diligence" to apply for that reason.) They are a car company. Their execs' duty to GM shareholders is to not stupidly squander GM's money. The contract was a "win or wash" situation for GM - so that duty was fulfilled. They don't have to even do - let alone produce - a written analysis. The same goes for GM's contracts with the supplies of tires, floor mats, wiper blades, etc. for the cars they assemble.
Certainly one can accuse GM of acting rather uncaring and sleazy with regard to NKLA. Nothing special about that - most older people (at least from parts of the U.S. where the auto industry is concentrated) could tell you that all of the big auto makers got over their "Don't Be Evil" idealism many, many decades ago now.
Also, individually they have duties to not commit crimes (like conspiracy to defraud, or whatever).
If there is evidence they conspired with someone to commit securities fraud, even if it had nothing to do with GM, then regardless of their duties to GM, then they can go to jail for that.
If they knowingly were irresponsible/negligent as officers of the company in how they approved deals, they could be fired or sued, depending on how blatant it is.
Since it didn’t seem to hurt GM’s bottom line, seems like the latter is unlikely.
I can feel the lawyers yachts being built.
It's just, this time the pyramid collapsed faster than it should have. Due diligence is for losers.
Matt Levine wrote a section on this, about how Elon said good-bye to earnings calls since his funding is coming mostly from retail investors, to whom he speaks via Twitter and memes, they don't listen to the call anyhow so why bother :)
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-07-27/matt-l...
[1] Well unless (unless! unless!) it eventually turns out that Tesla is a fraud and you're copying that too.
A lot of EV startups like NKLA are going to come and go but very few if any will be able to replicate Teslas success in the long term. Retail investors are not always stupid, many of the same Tesla investors have been shorting NKLA since it came on via a spac offering.
Personally I don’t always love everything Elon does but I view him in many ways as a modern day Edison. It’s always funny to me to go back and read stuff said about Edison while he was alive. I very much color my view of Musk by historical perspective and try not to get lost in present day minutia.
I'm not sure why that's interesting or important. The Tesla fanboys had no special insight into Tesla, Elon or anything. They are part of a cult of personality that bought the marketing hook, line, and sinker.
Only about a year ago there were hundreds of Trevor Milton fanboys all over HN, Reddit and elsewhere just sure that Nikola was the next Tesla and anyone that didn't agree was just "bitter" or had no vision. Where are they now?
There's no difference between either group of fanboys, really. Other than one got lucky and their cult leader delivered on some of his claims.
Matt Levine has also struck me as more amused-- and perhaps confused-- than bitter about this.
BTW, you can subscribe to the email newsletter for Money Stuff, then you can access it without paying for a subscription to Bloomberg.
Matt Levine wrote an article mocking them for buying Hertz stock, then a bit later another one saying "wait no that was actually a very smart thing".
Nikola was building barely functional prototypes of their trucks years before Tesla was building barely functional Semi truck prototypes, for the record.
>What were they thinking? Were they being amoral and hoping to ride this pump and dump or did they actually buy into this shit?
Fundamentally, what have they done that's so evil compared to, say, the multitude of things Tesla has claimed over the past few years?
For example, Tesla claimed door-to-door cross country self-driving tests, oh, about 5 years ago. At what point is it aspiration versus indictable fraud?
If by "barely functional" you mean a metal skeleton on wheels that rolled down hills, then yes.
I'm not a shill for Tesla as they definitely have made very questionable claims in the past, but to claim that Nikola's semi is in any way similar to Tesla is a bit of a stretch.
And in 2022 it will be 2024. And you will continue to think that doesn't matter. If deadlines don't matter why can't Nikola claim the same thing? "It doesn't work yet, but it will?"
Tesla and Musk do many bad things, but I'm sure if their truck was just a shell - they'd be in deep trouble too.
They demonstrated fake Solar shingles though. Then bailed out a related party and did a fundraise on it.
That's a baseless accusation, where are the mods?
>They have been spotted driving all over the place and doing real world testing on actual highways and in cold weather.
Prototypes, with zero evidence they can achieve the claimed specifications. If you know otherwise, please, show us all. They are dependent on 4680 cells, which do not exist. They don't even have a factory, and they claimed the trucks would be ready for production 2 years ago. They will probably build something that works at some point in the future. Maybe Nikola could have as well? That is my point, where do you draw the line?
Now, what about FSD? And the solar shingles that "print money" that were faked on the set of Desperate Housewives and don't exist to this day? You know, they ones that Tesla shareholders are currently suing for? The ones that Tesla employees claim were fake in the deposition of said lawsuit? The ones you now buy are generic versions from China. What about the boring car tunnels; bit different from the old renderings, aren't they?
There is zero evidence Tesla has a semitruck that with the range the claim at the price they claim to be able to produce it.
So at most the price is wrong. That's nothing compared to offering a completely fake product.
I cannot wrap my head around this mindset.
So the truck doesn't exist in any manner in which they claim, be it speed, hauling capacity, range or price. But what they claim also isn't "fake"?
Let me spell it out, again: Tesla has raised money off of technology for which there's is no evidence they can or will ever achieve. FSD, solar shingles, the Semi's specs/price, the Cybertruck's spec/price (it's likely the Cybertruck as demonstrated isn't even street legal).
The fact that they have an unproven prototype roaming the streets is a long way from what they are selling. Why does the fact that they have one-off prototypes absolve them of this?
I've asked these questions multiple times, but the Tesla shareholders/astroturfers refuse to answer them:
1) had Nikola put their Semi cab on top of a golf cart frame to film the video (or better yet, a Model X frame ie no real underlying tech to match their claims), would that have been fine, because it "drove"? Sounds like it.
2) what about the Solar shingle demo? Employees involved in it claimed, under oath, that it did not function. It still doesn't exist today. The Buffalo factory is practically idle and shingles are generically sourced from China. Is that something you would consider "fake"?
Where did all those come from? You just said range and price before, and range is easy to fix.
And if a product costs more than expected to build, it still exists.
> shareholders/astroturfers
Shove off.
> solar shingles
They installed a couple dozen roofs, didn't they? Based on my existing knowledge I'd call it garbage but not fake. How long was this demo before those installations, and did any of the parts work?
Who cares "what I said before". These are claims they've made that have no basis in reality. Claiming "we have a truck that can do all this" and can't is not that far away from claiming "we have a working truck" when you don't.
>They installed a couple dozen roofs, didn't they?
So you don't even know, you're guessing. They literally installed fake roofs that didn't function on a Hollywood neighbourhood set piece, then bought the company who claimed to be able to make these (a related party) within days. Is that much different than rolling a truck down a hill to raise money?
This information is free on the internet, people have been reporting on it for years. But the Tesla PR machine is strong. Try reading the law suit deposition, and then go try to order the shingles they advertised during the event. Then go visit the Buffalo factory where they were to produce these shingles (received hundreds of millions in subsidies for it). Then go look at what they are actually installing, years later, at jacked prices (generic shingles anyone can order from Chinese producers). And if you're still keen, you can read the reporting on the lawsuit happening right now about how all this came together to bail out Solar City.
Here is an opinion piece about some of it:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-07-30/nikola...
Not sure about you, but slapping an inferior product together, years later at a higher price, that isn't what you demonstrated when you took the money, is fraudulent:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/30/22410075/tesla-solar-roof...
"We can't actually deliver the product for the price we told you". Huh.
We can also talk about the "Paint it Black" FSD video, which was heavily edited to demonstrate full self driving capabilities which still don't exist today (and may never, but for which they have received billions in revenue) as a marketing piece. After that, maybe the battery swap (earned millions in subsidies from California), which also was not a feasible technology with a faked demonstration. Here's a little read on that one:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/21/the-tesla-battery-swa...
>Based on my existing knowledge I'd call it garbage but not fake.
I guess one could argue the Nikola truck was "garbage" because it had no drivetrain, but not "fake" because it existed? We did see it roll down the hill, after all.
Nikola was a fraud. Other companies are doing the same thing, because it works.
>Shove off.
Boy, you were pretty quiet when people were accusing me of trolling and being a shortseller above, eh. Why is that?
I'm going to let you in on something cool: I'm not a shortseller, I have no financial stake in Tesla other than what I own, long, in S&P500 ETFs. Meanwhile, there are Tesla shareholders and owners in this thread and others, who don't offer any disclaimer when they praise the company.
Interesting how your preconceived biases can lead you to conclusions that are in fact the opposite of reality. Fancy that.
Because it's really hard to talk about whether a product is fraudulent or not if the list of problems keeps changing.
> Claiming "we have a truck that can do all this" and can't is not that far away from claiming "we have a working truck" when you don't.
To an extent, yes. With the huge caveat that production cost is not something a truck 'does'.
> So you don't even know, you're guessing.
I'm going by the best news articles I could find on short notice. If you have better, link it. I don't think it's reasonable to demand I go do physical tours before I can talk about the subject.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-solar-insight/insid...
"In California, the nation’s leading solar market, there were twelve Tesla roof systems connected to the grid as of May 31"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFWKVraGI1E
"Tesla Solar Roof - 100 Days After Installation"
> They literally installed fake roofs that didn't function on a Hollywood neighbourhood set piece, then bought the company who claimed to be able to make these (a related party) within days. Is that much different than rolling a truck down a hill to raise money?
So with this I was able to find some info. It's true, there was a fake demo of a particular kind of tile.
But the product does exist now. Your claim that it still doesn't exist is just wrong.
It's also important to note that they had different-looking tiles that already worked, and by the time they took preorders it looks like things were working.
So that's bad, but it's not on the same level as nikola.
> Not sure about you, but slapping an inferior product together, years later at a higher price, that isn't what you demonstrated when you took the money, is fraudulent
If you charge more than you promised, yes. That's different from being unable to meet the originally planned production cost on something. If you let people cancel orders, which tesla appears to be doing, it's not fraud.
> the battery swap (earned millions in subsidies from California), which also was not a feasible technology with a faked demonstration
Wow, that's pretty bad! Thanks for the info, I'll bring it up to people in the future.
Still not on par with a fake product though.
> Boy, you were pretty quiet when people were accusing me of trolling and being a shortseller above, eh. Why is that?
I don't respond to every comment that is rude to a third party. Almost none of them, really.
> Interesting how your preconceived biases can lead you to conclusions that are in fact the opposite of reality. Fancy that.
You're making wild assumptions about what I believe and getting them wrong. Fancy that.
And you do/did come off a bit like a troll in some of your comments.
what's that about generics from China? I'd love a link
Okay, how much of a stretch? If they would have stuck a nowhere-near-production ready battery and drivetrain system into the Nikola trucks and pretended it was complete, that would have been fine? That probably wouldn't have been difficult, but equally fraudulent.
Tesla was run by a technical founder (Stanford PhD pedigree fwiw) that knows his shit (though a bit crazy and prone to exaggeration and hyperbole) and the company has some of the best engineers in the world employed there.
Nikola was founded by a dude with zero technical background who as far as anyone can tell had no serious engineering expertise in-house. He even hired his brother--a guy who used to install carpets--to run Nikola's hydrogen infrastructure.
These two companies aren't even in the same league imo
Musk was not a Stanford PhD nor a founder, if that's who you are referring to. If you can point me to any evidence of either that doesn't come from him, I'll be happy to stand corrected.
>He even hired his brother--a guy who used to install carpets--to run Nikola's hydrogen infrastructure.
Can you tell me what Kimball's qualifications are for sitting on the Tesla board?
I mean, I agree, the Nikola story is hilarious and stupid. But somehow other companies get away with what is the same thing. Milton didn't get to claim "aspiration", or that the trucks will "eventually" work.
Musk was accepted and enrolled into a Material Science PhD at Stanford. He dropped out to be an entrepreneur. Really not sure why you are being pedantic here. The point is he has the technical chops as evidenced by being in a Stanford engineering PhD program. Trevor had absolutely nothing.
>Can you tell me what Kimball's qualifications are for sitting on the Tesla board?
It's spelled Kimbal, as long as we are being pedantic and all.
And board members of large public companies, and even startups, generally have ZERO operational control within the company.
This seems, quite different than Trevor's Fuck-up brother literally running hydrogen infrastructure for his company.
I really don't see why you are so obsessed with shitting on Tesla or defending Nikola here. There is a big fucking difference between Tesla and the Nikola fraud, and it was obvious from the start.
No comment on the Stanford piece, though it seems believable…
Kimball doesn't run part of the infrastructure.
You sound like someone who writes SeekingAlpha FUD articles.
I suppose the HN rules go out the window when we are defending Musk.
>Kimball doesn't run part of the infrastructure.
He's on the board. What are his qualifications.
>Legally he is a founder
Yes, a billionaire paid money so that people like you could claim he's a "founder". Is that what founder means to you? Laughable.
Oh I've heard. Great story. Is it true? There's a lot of finely crafted mythology around the man.
you're clearly just a deranged person with some weird obsession about Elon.
Basically the polar opposite of the Elon Cultists.
So if you sell cars and land rockets, you can lie about other things?
Especially as Tesla has done a great job of going right up to the border on misleading claims, and even stepped its toes over the line a bit, but not in a way that would be as easy to prosecute as the more blatant Nikola.
The only thing the stock price reflects is how valuable the stock is. Nothing more, nothing less.
If each person of earth decided that their life goal was to own 100 nikola shares "to feel alive" or "own a piece of their failure" or whatever, their stock price would skyrocket, and stay high as long as everybody holds.
Those who value stock in terms of a company fundamentals, are making the assumption that at least most other participants in the market will value the stock in terms of its fundamentals as well.
That assumption might be true for some stocks. It isn't true for stocks that "people ""just"" like" (or dislike) and are willing to pay a premium to buy, because it has some other value to them.
The disliked ones tend to get valued kind of fairly as even if you hate them they pay dividends or similar.
One startup I happened to follow was uBeam; their former VP of engineering had a great blog called Lies, Damn Lies, and Startup PR that tracked what was going on there. Whether or not it was legally fraud is a matter of debate, but it was certainly dodgy: https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/search/label/ubeam
I'd be curious to hear about other startups folks here think were somewhere near the borderline of fraud. There must be a lot of stories out there!
Is this whole shebang very different from Tesla FSD claims?
Tesla has provided FSD beta access to two thousand real people who are showing the system's capability, warts and all, to anyone who cares to watch on YouTube or elsewhere.
They’re coupled to speculative gamesmanship. Whoever can generate statistics to captivate the masses who do not understand them, via press releases, and media blitzes.
That sounds cynical, but I “hob nob” with people invited to Davos, and run depts at Ivy League schools.
Behind closed doors these are the conversations I’ve been privy too. How to captivate the “market” which is a euphemism created years ago to replace the religious concept of “flock”.
Mirror neurons really challenge the correctness of any wisdom to come from business leaders. It’s a pantomime, ingratiate ourselves before the socially rich
People see taxation as theft of property. I see it as reminding people there are no Gods or kings.
Now you go into subreddits like /r/superstonk, bitcoin, GME, Dogecoin, etc. And the cultish religiosity is palpable in these echo chambers too.
So I'm not really surprised by this, if what you've shared is true.
Hell, much of the same "speculative gamesmanship" was going on in the tech bubble of the late 90s. Just completely irrational valuations detached from reality. We ended up in a big correction.
As Benjamin Graham said several decades ago and Warren Buffett Repeats constantly "over the short-term the market is a voting machine, over the long-term it's a weighing machine"
If it's going to be good or bad for society I don't know.
I personally have most of my money on low risk stuff, and when volatility spikes I sometimes sell options in the morning before starting my day.
Is it easier to raise money for risky endeavors or for "hot" endeavors. I'm not sure this no structure to how a lot of people are now allocating capital is actually contributing anything positive, just pure malinvestment.
AMC is a perfect example. It's a company that raised hundreds of millions at valuations 10x of what it had months ago. Is AMC a "risky investment" we should be allocating capital too? Box office receipts and still down 50% and may never fully recover. Why is AMC a good use of that capital rather than institutions that can replace it completely?
You can read about it, but actually doing it is not that hard. Although, given the inflated stock prices and US equity options being 100 sized lot - you do have to keep an eye to roll it out if market is getting really exuberant.
But yeah sure, I am not a lawyer or a fiduciary and this is not legal or fiduciary financial advise.
It talks about not allowing "hedging Google stock".
To me it means "you can't short Google stock", which is reasonable. It would be really fishy for an employee to bet on failure of the company he works for.
It doesn't mean "you can't buy call options on Google stock", which would be unreasonable.
> You should familiarize yourself with Google’s Insider Trading Policy. It describes company-wide policies that address the risks of insider trading, such as a prohibition on any Google employee hedging Google stock; and periodic blackout windows when no Google employee may trade Google stock.
The quotes gives hedging as an example of prohibited conduct and recommends reading the internal policy. The parent comment is from someone who read the internal policy. What more do you want, the internal policy to be leaked in full?
Employees of tech companies with a somewhat open culture can often make inferences about the company’s performance before financials are released. The SEC investigates when people make suspicious gains from options trades. Companies don’t want that kind of attention. Rather than try to define the exact parameters of what kind of trade is risky, it’s easier to just ban them as a rule. This may seem unreasonable to some, but it appears to be a common practice.
Most investors seem to have been valuing that aspect and completely discounting the engineering/tech.
A person is a particle and their influence is a wave.
I’m not so sure light is both, but our cognition enables seeing it as both.
Mirror neurons fire when we engage a behavior or see it performed.
Our culture is built upon a meme repeating protectionist like chants for the rich, deflation for the middle class, and stagnation of the poor.
Repeat, fire mirror neurons.
It’s not perfect mind control though cause once you know how the sausage is made, why give that particle (rich person) reverence?
https://ips-dc.org/the_self-made_hallucination_of_americas_r...
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/02/nikola-admits-to-making...
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/12/nikola-stock-craters-af...
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/09/nikola-patented-a-stole...
And many more...
The speculation around this stock has been insane for many years now:
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/11/nikola-stock-soars-afte...
Top quote: "The market can remain irrational longer than you can roll your eyes at it."