Tesla

“Last week, I did a post on Tesla, a story in pictures, which was kind of a brutal and cruel assessment of everything you're going on at Tesla, including, by the way, a chart on CEO compensation that shows how much Elon Musk gets paid for a loss-making enterpri…”

“On scope one and two, for example, Tesla has the same or even more emissions per unit volume than do GM and Ford.”

“And we had owned the largest electric vehicle fast charging network here in the U S other than Tesla.”

“So like Tesla was one of our first customers, parts of the U S intelligence community. We had a relationship with In-Q-Tel started using it”

“To give you an example, when we started investing in InfoMark, I remember the first day it had a market cap of sixty million dollars. And I couldn't understand for the life of me, like, what is this? It's like a series B round in the valley. This is a profitab…”

“And then I think Elon, there's really a dynamic around Tesla's purchase, where if you were your typical board a few months ago, you were saying, do we really need to consider Bitcoin? This seems like a fringe dynamic. When Elon buys, it becomes, why aren't we …”

“I own a Tesla. It's a wonderful car. I think they're a spectacularly interesting company, but are they four times the company they were before COVID? I don't think so.”

“I think, wherever Tesla is now, 500 plus a share, 600. It's probably, in our brains, I'd pay 40 or 50 bucks a share, but as a multiple Of the cash flow.”

“When I first came to Bowdoin, they had asset class committees. So they had a hedge fund committee, a core equity, private equity. And it was interesting because there were overlaps, but they're also like on the long, short funnel. Say they're a short Tesla, wh…”

“And you forget Tesla's now taken off in such an incredible way, but you forget there were moments there when it was really his genius and fortitude that kept that company alive and let it go on and thrive.”

“And Elon put out his infamous tweet around four, 20 funding secured. Then he called the bankers, which was slightly out of order.”

“So we started there and Jan led an investment in Tesla.”

“And then on top of that, there is what Tesla did in the OEM industry overall, which is it effectively brought forward The plans of all the other large automakers by likely 10 or 20 years.”

“The greatest product that Elon Musk has ever made is not a Tesla car. It's not a SpaceX rocket. It's Tesla stock. It's the ticker TSLA. Because what he has done is he has told a more effective story about what Tesla might become in the future than maybe any ot…”

“And at the firm wide level, we own five of the seven across our various different portfolios. But two of them, in this case, Apple and Tesla are companies that we have not embraced.”

“At this valuation, we think that you need much more than just car volumes, time, price, equal revenue, and earnings. You have to bake in a lot more for many of the adjacencies, including its autonomous fleet, and depending on where you are on those expectation…”

“Tesla was not investment grade that even it was approaching a trillion dollars in market cap.”

“When we first bought Tesla at the end of 2019 and 20 20, when the EV S curve really took off because Elon got the price Of the model three down to 40,000. And then we saw they had very good competitive advantages. We said, wow, they can do two million cars at …”

“Tesla and the EVS curve was amazing, and they had a great competitive advantage, and they had underappreciated earnings power. But then that S curve went from being a 10 out of 10 to a zero out of 10 because it was mature in the USA. And the underappreciated e…”

“And there are a lot of electric vehicle companies that tried to be Tesla or BYD, and they're all very likely to Either fail or not generate any profits.”

“Hertz had a problem coming out of their restructuring that they had too many Teslas. It wasn't only that people didn't want to rent Teslas. I think people found Tesla's interesting to rent. They're great cars. The problem was the residual value was much worse …”

“You can't be long a stock like GM and be short Tesla. From a quantitative perspective, that makes no sense. If you're long growth and short value, that's equally painful. If you're long value and short growth, that means you're just levered value. If you're lo…”