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Tesla designs chips, builds software, sells solar panels and home batteries, operates a global charging network, sells insurance, etc in addition to just manufa
by omarforgotpwd 6y ago
Tesla designs chips, builds software, sells solar panels and home batteries, operates a global charging network, sells insurance, etc in addition to just manufacturing cars. It also sells and services its own cars, as opposed to the franchised dealership model under which most other OEMs operate.
Therefore to make a fair comparison you'd have to add in the rest of the global automotive supply chain, not just the OEMs. Add in the valuations of all the dealers and retailers on Earth (some of which are publicly traded), add in Nvidia and other chip makers' automotive businesses, add in the market cap of Waymo, Cruise, Zoox and all those major hardware and software players that plan to compete with Tesla's Autopilot / FSD software. Add in the market cap of all the charging networks in China. In an apples to apples comparison Tesla's market cap would be less than one third of the global market.
- option 6y agoI think they make their own chips only for deployment/inference, not for training.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- omarforgotpwd 6y agoYeah, only the inference chips are in production in the car. They have a chip team in Austin which is lead by Pete Bannon, formerly of PA Semi (which Apple acquired to build their A series chips, and now their M series chips). The chips they designed are fabricated by Samsung in Austin. The "FSD Computer" that they have in their cars now has an Intel Atom board to run the user interface, and then dual arm SoCs to run the Autopilot stack. Each arm SoC has a special ASIC to hardware accelerate certain common neural net inference functions (I.e. dot products and other matrix math).
- xiphias2 6y agoThey are working on training chip as well codenamed Dojo. Elon is thinking of offering it as a cloud service, just like Google’s TPU service.
- caymanjim 6y agoYou're misunderstanding what market cap is and trying to equate it with sales and other real-world metrics. The market cap is simply the number of TSLA shares times the price per share. Full stop. Tesla manufactures, sells, and maintains vastly fewer cars than even any single one of their competitors, nevermind all of them put together. None of that matters or has anything to do with market cap.
- jliptzin 6y agoNo, he’s not.
- foota 6y agoWhat's your point? Market cap is a forward looking measure of perceived future revenues and profitability, for which their current situation and the overall markets they're in are very relevant (not to mention very much relevantly for TSLA, expectations of how well they can execute).
- Retric 6y agoNo, he’s saying judging Tesla’s market cap based on car manufacturers is like measuring Apple relative to other watch manufacturers. Ford doesn’t do direct to consumer sales, own a charging network or even gas’s station etc. Yep, they happen to build cars but if that’s the kind of analysis you’re doing the market will eat you alive. I don’t think it justifies their current market cap, but plenty of companies looked over priced 10 years ago yet ended up being great investments. Hell, I remember thinking Bitcoin was pricy at 30$, watching it crash etc.
- mgh2 6y agoIn addition to the hype, the current 10x market cap increase may be partly due to all the short sellers being squeezed out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_squeeze#:~:text=A%20short%20squeeze%20is%20a,covering%20(liquidating)%20their%20positions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_squeeze#:~:text=A%20shor.... https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/tesla-stock-most-shorted-us-beats-apple-highest-short-interest-2020-1-1028823046 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/tesla-stock-...