11 ms·

Since this came out as part of the Tesla earnings, here's my recap from their earnings release and call.... - Tesla will be late getting up to 5,000 units a we

Since this came out as part of the Tesla earnings, here's my recap from their earnings release and call.... - Tesla will be late getting up to 5,000 units a week of Model 3. It will happen at the end of Q1 instead of the end of this year. The bottleneck is batteries. - Some lines are at only 500 cars a week. Namely the battery pack assembly, body shop welding and final vehicle assembly. - The $2.92 a share loss was much bigger than the $2.27 analysts expected. - The company burned $1.4 billion and has $3.5 billion in cash. Raising money shouldn't be necessary. - Automotive gross margins fell from 28% to about 18% and will slip to 15% next quarter. - Auto revenue grew 10% to $2.4 billion as sales of Model S and X grew. Revenue is at risk, though. Tesla will divert resources from Model S and X to the Model 3. - Tesla didn't say much about China. The company added a supercharger station with 50 chargers in Shanghai, but no word on a new plant. - Musk expects to spend $1 billion on capital expenditures next quarter. That's consistent with expectations for ramp up for Model 3. - Tesla installed 109 megawatts of ``energy generation systems'' in the third quarter. It acknowledges this is an underwhelming figure: ``the lower deployments are in large part a result of deliberately de-emphasizing commercial and industrial solar energy projects with low profit and limited cash generation.'' As to the battery delay.... Tesla says it's the suppliers fault. "key elements" of the battery module assembly had to be taken over and redesigned, Musk says. EDIT - most importantly, Elon has moved his desk to the giga factory as that is where the largest bottleneck is.

williamscales 9y ago
"key elements" of the battery module assembly had to be taken over and redesigned, Musk says. Tesla seems to be taking the opposite approach to Apple here. In my observation, Apple drives its suppliers extremely hard to achieve the quality it requires. Tesla, on the other hand, is too eager to bring any sundry part in house (e.g. car seats). Apple's approach appears to work in that it pushes suppliers to do what's necessary. I worry that Tesla, having already bitten off a large bite to chew, is inviting too much distraction that will, in the long run, not put Tesla in a stronger position (there is a reason most automobile manufacturers outsource their seats after all).
- btian 9y ago
  Then how do you explain Apple making their own SoC?
  - lttlrck 9y ago
    Perhaps that is their secret sauce?
  - DiabloD3 9y ago
    Because they bought an entire company to do it with, because the value proposition of doing that was better than continuing to pay the Qualcomm tax, or conversely siding with Samsung to bring Exynos LTE to the US (and they already have too much of a complex relationship with Samsung; to the point that even on the iPhone 8 and X, if you bought an iPhone instead of a Galaxy S, Samsung still makes a profit).
    - davrosthedalek 9y ago
      As in: they earn more if an iPhone X is bought than if a S8 is bought? If not, do you know the relative size of the profit?
      - DiabloD3 9y ago
        Not more, afaik, although some headlines seem to have reported it. All I know is Samsung is happy no matter if you buy an S8 or an X.
  - williamscales 9y ago
    Well, I guess it's apparent now that it fell outside of my immediate observation. I would be curious what the risk calculus on that decision was. I think it still fits in to the same narrative that I was building though: Tesla seems like they want to bring everything in house while Apple has only brought one piece, the jewel of the system, in house.
  - dzdt 9y ago
    It is a part of their core product differentiation. They can get better performance and longer battery life by owning the hardware design and OS design and being good at it. Apple in particular understood lomg before competitors that battery life is an extremely important real world metric. Doing their own SOC helps them optimise that.
RayVR 9y ago
The bottleneck is absolutely not batteries. From the document, they specifically state that they have multiple steps which are only able to operate for short periods at 500 cars per week, which basically means 500 cars could be produced if you take how things went for two hours and assume that rate can be maintained for a week.
- chollida1 9y ago
  Ummm > Some lines are at only 500 cars a week. Namely the battery pack assembly, body shop welding and final vehicle assembly. of those, the battery pack is the big issue. From Gabrielle Coppola, bloomberg's auto analysts: > The biggest production constraint by far is the battery module assembly. A systems integration contractor dropped the ball, and Tesla only realized they dropped the ball until very recently. Tesla had to rewrite all the software from scratch, Musk explains. That's what he and CTO J.B. Straubel have been focused on.
  - makomk 9y ago
    So basically, the whole thing about Tesla being more a battery company than a car company that was supposed to help justify their valuation was bullshit. They don't even have the in-house capabilities to tell that the company that they contracted the work out to had screwed up until well after they were supposed to be shipping.
    - detaro 9y ago
      Not necessarily. If making battery cells is going to be the global bottleneck, having some issues making battery packs out of them is likely a lot easier to fix than not having the cells.
11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
The most worrying is the slowing production of models S and X, coupled with what I'd call a collapse in the gross margins of those products. Why is the margin declining so drastically?
- opportune 9y ago
  The gross margin changing is fine and natural, I think. The Model 3 is a lower-priced good, so by being able to sell more of it, they can deal with somewhat lower margins. By that I mean, 100 cars * $12,000 gross margin each is definitely worse than 5000 cars * $4,000 gross margin (for Tesla at least, I suppose branding could come into play with other brands), even though the gross margins drastically collapse. It's just a different business model, and it's what Tesla wants to happen so they can get into the more regular-consumer market.
  - 11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
    But the ratio of Model 3 to S+X units sold in Q3 does not support a 10% drop in Gross Margin for Q3, unless the cost of manufacturing the 3s they did ship was way higher than the associated revenue (significantly negative gross margins on the 3s). Maybe there are costs associated with the gigafactory that are getting assigned as cost of goods for the model 3s and throwing the margins out of kilter until the volume gets up? Or perhaps depreciation on the stamping equipment and fixtures that are largely idle? I'm fine with the gross margin trending towards, say, 20% over the next few quarters since GM for example is at 12% (I'd expect Tesla's gross margin to be higher than GMs because Tesla keeps the revenue that GM has to give to its dealers).
    - sliken 9y ago
      Man hours aren't free. Nor is a huge amount of your production facility running idle because one of your parts is constrained. The parts that aren't automated are being done by hand for now. So sure they might well be making a loss at the current rate of sales of the model 3, but will be quite profitable once the production rate increases.
- 9y ago
RayVR 9y ago
Tesla will also need to raise cash. Look at accounts payable.
- fancyfacebook 9y ago
  Their bond prices are plummeting on this earnings release. The rope may be running out.
  - paulpauper 9y ago
    then the stock should be at $3 instead of $300 if insolvency is such an issue. obviously there is more than meets the eye here. or this is the short of the decade, more than even 2008.
    - Hypx 9y ago
      Quite a few short sellers are making that very case. In fact, one of them said something to the effect that every shorter seller should short Tesla before any shorting other company.
    - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
      In my general experience, bond traders tend to be a savvier (if more jittery) lot than stock buyers.
      - tomatocracy 9y ago
        What's interesting is that at the level of rating that Tesla has, most bond investors are active traders of one form or another rather than "buy and hold" investors. The most common strategy is to look for credit migration (ie buy the bond when it's B-, sell it when it relatively quickly moves up to BB and benefit from the capital appreciation as the yield or spread drops in consequence). A lot of them are 2+20 hedge funds. The people who play in that market are all professional investors and if they play in enough size they have good access to management. So yes, they are probably more savvy than the average equity investor; the bonds falling doesn't mean they think a default is neccessarily on the horizon, just that a ratings upgrade is not (and potentially also that the company will come back for more money sooner rather than later, as that implies more supply vs demand which may not scale equally). This would all seem to make a good case for the equity being overpriced, but to short the equity you need a conviction that the rest of the market will realise this sooner rather than later.
Someone 9y ago
”Some lines are at only 500 cars a week.” That sounds better than what Tesla claims. http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ABEA-4CW8X0/5492937854x0x962149/00F6EB90-2695-44E6-8C03-7EC4E06DF840/TSLA_Update_Letter_2017-3Q.pdf http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ABEA-4CW8X0/549293785... (emphasis added): ”Other lines, such as battery pack assembly, body shop welding and final vehicle assembly, have demonstrated burst builds of about 500 units per week and are ramping up quickly.” If you can do burst runs of 15 km/hour, that doesn’t mean you can run a three hour marathon. ”The company burned $1.4 billion and has $3.5 billion in cash. Raising money shouldn't be necessary.” To get that $1.4 billion in revenue, they will need to sell 40k Tesla 3s at $35k each, or 3,000 a week. To get it in margin, even assuming the average model 3 will sell for $50k, they will have to sell 12,000 a week or so (at 20% margin) => If things go as planned, I guess they will need about half their money in half a year or so before turning a profit. That doesn’t leave very much in case things go worse than planned (for example, they plan for 25% margin on model 3, but currently don’t have that on their more expensive models, and they plan to sell more of their expensive models, but can decrease production, so, presumably, they have quite a few of them in inventory) Tesla may have a fantastic future ahead of it, but it also may fail spectacularly fairly soon, or just have a decent future ahead of it that doesn’t warrant its current share price.
- asdfasdfasd333 9y ago
  "Tesla may have a fantastic future ahead of it, but it also may fail spectacularly fairly soon, or just have a decent future ahead of it that doesn’t warrant its current share price." lol. "it might go up, might go down, or might stay the same!"
  - ant6n 9y ago
    Hey at least you know it's not certain to be only one or two of those options.
- kristianp 9y ago
  "To get that $1.4 billion in revenue, they will need to sell 40k Tesla 3s at $35k each, or 3,000 a week. To get it in margin, even assuming the average model 3 will sell for $50k, they will have to sell 12,000 a week or so (at 20% margin)" It seems like you're assuming that the cash burn will stay at 1.4billion. Expenditure should go down once the production line tooling is complete.
gordon_freeman 9y ago
> "The company burned $1.4 billion and has $3.5 billion in cash. Raising money shouldn't be necessary." Just curious -- If they need to raise money afterall, how easy or difficult it would be for them to get the money cheaply?
kbenson 9y ago
I don't want to be that guy, but there are specific Unicode characters for opening and closing quotes now, so we don't need to deal with the weird usage imposed by limited typesets anymore.[1] For some reason, the two separate backtick characters are really bugging me visually. That's all I wanted to say. Thanks in advance for bearing gracefully with my nitpicking, letting me express that makes me feel better. 1: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17695/any-reference-on-the-usage-of-a-backtick-and-single-quotation-mark-like-this https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17695/any-refere...
- lyk 9y ago
  That's a LaTeX habit for a lot of people, chill out.
  - kbenson 9y ago
    Using backticks seems like an anti-pattern to me, where you want to be correct, but are only going half-way. If you want to be correct, you can use the Unicode characters that specifically denote beginning and ending quotations, in both single and double tick versions. If you don't care about being correct, just using the default ASCII single or double quote suffices. I wasn't sure why someone would purposefully use backticks in that way in what appears to be an attempt to accurately express themselves, and not appreciate the knowledge that there is a more correct way to do so. That it's a LaTeX habit does provide an explanation, but then the information that there may be a better way when using Unicode might also be appreciated for someone that does not know. I would appreciate being informed of that if I wasn't aware. In any case, I tried to be informative and relay that it was my own problem that compelled me to reply, but I wasn't aware I was being excitable enough to need to "chill out". I tried to word it in a way to avoid people thinking I was getting worked up, and show that I just felt compelled to contribute. Unfortunately that didn't seem to come across.
    - throwanem 9y ago
      They do kern oddly, but smart quotes are too hard to type.
phkahler 9y ago
>> - Auto revenue grew 10% to $2.4 billion as sales of Model S and X grew. Revenue is at risk, though. Tesla will divert resources from Model S and X to the Model 3. This is curious. If the S and X are profitable, why divert resources from them? Not enough? Well maybe they should not have just canned a bunch of people? Yeah I know, the ones they let go may not be the ones they needed for the 3. But it still seems strange all these things taken together.
dilemma 9y ago
>Elon has moved his desk to the giga factory as that is where the largest bottleneck is. Elon is the bottleneck
- avs733 9y ago
  This is they type of figureheadism that I absolutely do not understand and which makes me very nervous about the future of a company. Great, the boss is in house...now I spend more of my time telling the boss why it isn't fixed yet and less of my time actually fixing it. I'm not saying those things are inherently at odds but they are definitely in tension with each other.
mandeepj 9y ago
> but no word on a new plant production could begin in three years. Source - https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/01/elon-musk-says-teslas-china-factory-could-begin-production-in-roughly-three-years https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/01/elon-musk-says-teslas-chin...
zackangelo 9y ago
> - most importantly, Elon has moved his desk to the giga factory as that is where the largest bottleneck is. apparently he sleeps there sometimes too: https://www.gearbrain.com/elon-musk-sleep-tesla-factory-2502241359.html https://www.gearbrain.com/elon-musk-sleep-tesla-factory-2502...
_pmf_ 9y ago
> "the lower deployments are in large part a result of deliberately de-emphasizing commercial and industrial solar energy projects with low profit and limited cash generation." Euphemism for government funding running out.
pasta 9y ago
Last week I saw a Model 3 where the back door thought something was in the way and just opened a little bit so the passenger had to squeeze out. Those 'bugs' are a big problem for a company already behind in production. I hope for Tesla this was just a single event. But new cars with new tech always have issues. You don't want that when you are already behind.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rsynnott 9y ago
> most importantly, Elon has moved his desk to the giga factory as that is where the largest bottleneck is. Ah, the Kim Jong Il approach. The presence of Dear Leader will surely inspire the peasants as they work towards the Juche Ideal.
- nradov 9y ago
  Genchi Genbutsu

williamscales 9y ago

"key elements" of the battery module assembly had to be taken over and redesigned, Musk says. Tesla seems to be taking the opposite approach to Apple here. In my observation, Apple drives its suppliers extremely hard to achieve the quality it requires. Tesla, on the other hand, is too eager to bring any sundry part in house (e.g. car seats). Apple's approach appears to work in that it pushes suppliers to do what's necessary. I worry that Tesla, having already bitten off a large bite to chew, is inviting too much distraction that will, in the long run, not put Tesla in a stronger position (there is a reason most automobile manufacturers outsource their seats after all).

btian 9y ago
Then how do you explain Apple making their own SoC?
- lttlrck 9y ago
  Perhaps that is their secret sauce?
- DiabloD3 9y ago
  Because they bought an entire company to do it with, because the value proposition of doing that was better than continuing to pay the Qualcomm tax, or conversely siding with Samsung to bring Exynos LTE to the US (and they already have too much of a complex relationship with Samsung; to the point that even on the iPhone 8 and X, if you bought an iPhone instead of a Galaxy S, Samsung still makes a profit).
  - davrosthedalek 9y ago
    As in: they earn more if an iPhone X is bought than if a S8 is bought? If not, do you know the relative size of the profit?
    - DiabloD3 9y ago
      Not more, afaik, although some headlines seem to have reported it. All I know is Samsung is happy no matter if you buy an S8 or an X.
- williamscales 9y ago
  Well, I guess it's apparent now that it fell outside of my immediate observation. I would be curious what the risk calculus on that decision was. I think it still fits in to the same narrative that I was building though: Tesla seems like they want to bring everything in house while Apple has only brought one piece, the jewel of the system, in house.
- dzdt 9y ago
  It is a part of their core product differentiation. They can get better performance and longer battery life by owning the hardware design and OS design and being good at it. Apple in particular understood lomg before competitors that battery life is an extremely important real world metric. Doing their own SOC helps them optimise that.

RayVR 9y ago

The bottleneck is absolutely not batteries. From the document, they specifically state that they have multiple steps which are only able to operate for short periods at 500 cars per week, which basically means 500 cars could be produced if you take how things went for two hours and assume that rate can be maintained for a week.

chollida1 9y ago
Ummm > Some lines are at only 500 cars a week. Namely the battery pack assembly, body shop welding and final vehicle assembly. of those, the battery pack is the big issue. From Gabrielle Coppola, bloomberg's auto analysts: > The biggest production constraint by far is the battery module assembly. A systems integration contractor dropped the ball, and Tesla only realized they dropped the ball until very recently. Tesla had to rewrite all the software from scratch, Musk explains. That's what he and CTO J.B. Straubel have been focused on.
- makomk 9y ago
  So basically, the whole thing about Tesla being more a battery company than a car company that was supposed to help justify their valuation was bullshit. They don't even have the in-house capabilities to tell that the company that they contracted the work out to had screwed up until well after they were supposed to be shipping.
  - detaro 9y ago
    Not necessarily. If making battery cells is going to be the global bottleneck, having some issues making battery packs out of them is likely a lot easier to fix than not having the cells.

11thEarlOfMar 9y ago

The most worrying is the slowing production of models S and X, coupled with what I'd call a collapse in the gross margins of those products. Why is the margin declining so drastically?

opportune 9y ago
The gross margin changing is fine and natural, I think. The Model 3 is a lower-priced good, so by being able to sell more of it, they can deal with somewhat lower margins. By that I mean, 100 cars * $12,000 gross margin each is definitely worse than 5000 cars * $4,000 gross margin (for Tesla at least, I suppose branding could come into play with other brands), even though the gross margins drastically collapse. It's just a different business model, and it's what Tesla wants to happen so they can get into the more regular-consumer market.
- 11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
  But the ratio of Model 3 to S+X units sold in Q3 does not support a 10% drop in Gross Margin for Q3, unless the cost of manufacturing the 3s they did ship was way higher than the associated revenue (significantly negative gross margins on the 3s). Maybe there are costs associated with the gigafactory that are getting assigned as cost of goods for the model 3s and throwing the margins out of kilter until the volume gets up? Or perhaps depreciation on the stamping equipment and fixtures that are largely idle? I'm fine with the gross margin trending towards, say, 20% over the next few quarters since GM for example is at 12% (I'd expect Tesla's gross margin to be higher than GMs because Tesla keeps the revenue that GM has to give to its dealers).
  - sliken 9y ago
    Man hours aren't free. Nor is a huge amount of your production facility running idle because one of your parts is constrained. The parts that aren't automated are being done by hand for now. So sure they might well be making a loss at the current rate of sales of the model 3, but will be quite profitable once the production rate increases.
9y ago

RayVR 9y ago

Tesla will also need to raise cash. Look at accounts payable.

fancyfacebook 9y ago
Their bond prices are plummeting on this earnings release. The rope may be running out.
- paulpauper 9y ago
  then the stock should be at $3 instead of $300 if insolvency is such an issue. obviously there is more than meets the eye here. or this is the short of the decade, more than even 2008.
  - Hypx 9y ago
    Quite a few short sellers are making that very case. In fact, one of them said something to the effect that every shorter seller should short Tesla before any shorting other company.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    In my general experience, bond traders tend to be a savvier (if more jittery) lot than stock buyers.
    - tomatocracy 9y ago
      What's interesting is that at the level of rating that Tesla has, most bond investors are active traders of one form or another rather than "buy and hold" investors. The most common strategy is to look for credit migration (ie buy the bond when it's B-, sell it when it relatively quickly moves up to BB and benefit from the capital appreciation as the yield or spread drops in consequence). A lot of them are 2+20 hedge funds. The people who play in that market are all professional investors and if they play in enough size they have good access to management. So yes, they are probably more savvy than the average equity investor; the bonds falling doesn't mean they think a default is neccessarily on the horizon, just that a ratings upgrade is not (and potentially also that the company will come back for more money sooner rather than later, as that implies more supply vs demand which may not scale equally). This would all seem to make a good case for the equity being overpriced, but to short the equity you need a conviction that the rest of the market will realise this sooner rather than later.

Someone 9y ago

”Some lines are at only 500 cars a week.” That sounds better than what Tesla claims. http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ABEA-4CW8X0/5492937854x0x962149/00F6EB90-2695-44E6-8C03-7EC4E06DF840/TSLA_Update_Letter_2017-3Q.pdf http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ABEA-4CW8X0/549293785... (emphasis added): ”Other lines, such as battery pack assembly, body shop welding and final vehicle assembly, have demonstrated burst builds of about 500 units per week and are ramping up quickly.” If you can do burst runs of 15 km/hour, that doesn’t mean you can run a three hour marathon. ”The company burned $1.4 billion and has $3.5 billion in cash. Raising money shouldn't be necessary.” To get that $1.4 billion in revenue, they will need to sell 40k Tesla 3s at $35k each, or 3,000 a week. To get it in margin, even assuming the average model 3 will sell for $50k, they will have to sell 12,000 a week or so (at 20% margin) => If things go as planned, I guess they will need about half their money in half a year or so before turning a profit. That doesn’t leave very much in case things go worse than planned (for example, they plan for 25% margin on model 3, but currently don’t have that on their more expensive models, and they plan to sell more of their expensive models, but can decrease production, so, presumably, they have quite a few of them in inventory) Tesla may have a fantastic future ahead of it, but it also may fail spectacularly fairly soon, or just have a decent future ahead of it that doesn’t warrant its current share price.

asdfasdfasd333 9y ago
"Tesla may have a fantastic future ahead of it, but it also may fail spectacularly fairly soon, or just have a decent future ahead of it that doesn’t warrant its current share price." lol. "it might go up, might go down, or might stay the same!"
- ant6n 9y ago
  Hey at least you know it's not certain to be only one or two of those options.
kristianp 9y ago
"To get that $1.4 billion in revenue, they will need to sell 40k Tesla 3s at $35k each, or 3,000 a week. To get it in margin, even assuming the average model 3 will sell for $50k, they will have to sell 12,000 a week or so (at 20% margin)" It seems like you're assuming that the cash burn will stay at 1.4billion. Expenditure should go down once the production line tooling is complete.

gordon_freeman 9y ago

> "The company burned $1.4 billion and has $3.5 billion in cash. Raising money shouldn't be necessary." Just curious -- If they need to raise money afterall, how easy or difficult it would be for them to get the money cheaply?

kbenson 9y ago

I don't want to be that guy, but there are specific Unicode characters for opening and closing quotes now, so we don't need to deal with the weird usage imposed by limited typesets anymore.[1] For some reason, the two separate backtick characters are really bugging me visually. That's all I wanted to say. Thanks in advance for bearing gracefully with my nitpicking, letting me express that makes me feel better. 1: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17695/any-reference-on-the-usage-of-a-backtick-and-single-quotation-mark-like-this https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17695/any-refere...

lyk 9y ago
That's a LaTeX habit for a lot of people, chill out.
- kbenson 9y ago
  Using backticks seems like an anti-pattern to me, where you want to be correct, but are only going half-way. If you want to be correct, you can use the Unicode characters that specifically denote beginning and ending quotations, in both single and double tick versions. If you don't care about being correct, just using the default ASCII single or double quote suffices. I wasn't sure why someone would purposefully use backticks in that way in what appears to be an attempt to accurately express themselves, and not appreciate the knowledge that there is a more correct way to do so. That it's a LaTeX habit does provide an explanation, but then the information that there may be a better way when using Unicode might also be appreciated for someone that does not know. I would appreciate being informed of that if I wasn't aware. In any case, I tried to be informative and relay that it was my own problem that compelled me to reply, but I wasn't aware I was being excitable enough to need to "chill out". I tried to word it in a way to avoid people thinking I was getting worked up, and show that I just felt compelled to contribute. Unfortunately that didn't seem to come across.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    They do kern oddly, but smart quotes are too hard to type.

phkahler 9y ago

>> - Auto revenue grew 10% to $2.4 billion as sales of Model S and X grew. Revenue is at risk, though. Tesla will divert resources from Model S and X to the Model 3. This is curious. If the S and X are profitable, why divert resources from them? Not enough? Well maybe they should not have just canned a bunch of people? Yeah I know, the ones they let go may not be the ones they needed for the 3. But it still seems strange all these things taken together.

dilemma 9y ago

>Elon has moved his desk to the giga factory as that is where the largest bottleneck is. Elon is the bottleneck

avs733 9y ago
This is they type of figureheadism that I absolutely do not understand and which makes me very nervous about the future of a company. Great, the boss is in house...now I spend more of my time telling the boss why it isn't fixed yet and less of my time actually fixing it. I'm not saying those things are inherently at odds but they are definitely in tension with each other.

mandeepj 9y ago

> but no word on a new plant production could begin in three years. Source - https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/01/elon-musk-says-teslas-china-factory-could-begin-production-in-roughly-three-years https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/01/elon-musk-says-teslas-chin...

zackangelo 9y ago

> - most importantly, Elon has moved his desk to the giga factory as that is where the largest bottleneck is. apparently he sleeps there sometimes too: https://www.gearbrain.com/elon-musk-sleep-tesla-factory-2502241359.html https://www.gearbrain.com/elon-musk-sleep-tesla-factory-2502...

_pmf_ 9y ago

> "the lower deployments are in large part a result of deliberately de-emphasizing commercial and industrial solar energy projects with low profit and limited cash generation." Euphemism for government funding running out.

pasta 9y ago

Last week I saw a Model 3 where the back door thought something was in the way and just opened a little bit so the passenger had to squeeze out. Those 'bugs' are a big problem for a company already behind in production. I hope for Tesla this was just a single event. But new cars with new tech always have issues. You don't want that when you are already behind.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

rsynnott 9y ago

> most importantly, Elon has moved his desk to the giga factory as that is where the largest bottleneck is. Ah, the Kim Jong Il approach. The presence of Dear Leader will surely inspire the peasants as they work towards the Juche Ideal.

nradov 9y ago
Genchi Genbutsu