"As a parent, choosing the right school for my child was a big decision. I wanted a school that would help her reach her full potential. A school that is rigorous, but loving. A school that would prepare her to excel in college, career, and life. Fortunately, we found Rocky Mountain Prep. With 12 tuition-free pre-K to 12th grade schools across Denver, Rocky Mountain Prep may be the perfect choice for your child, too. The DPS school choice round-to enrollment window is now open. At U.S. Customs and Border Protection, we go beyond to protect more than borders, from ship to shore, air to ground, cities to local communities, CBP agents and officers are keeping people safe. Join U.S. Customs and Border Protection and go beyond for something far greater than yourself. Learn more at cbp.gov/careers. Hey, everybody, I'm Zach, and I'm Jesse. You're watching the Tesla Q1 2024 Ernie's Call on Disrupting Investing. So of course, this quarter was the big, bad quarter to ruin Elon Musk's day. And you can look at it that way if you want to, or you can look at all the amazing stuff that's coming, and we're going to be talking a lot more about that. Yeah, it's more about looking out the windshield and not looking through the rear windscreen. But thanks to MooMoo for sponsoring this episode. April is the start of the new earnings season. Data shows it's one of the best performing months for the U.S. stock market. So MooMoo can help you take advantage this year. Yeah, it's a one-stop-shop investment platform powered by advanced data and pro-level tools to help you understand financial status and expectations. After the release of the earnings report, the main thing to look for is whether the financial data exceeds the market's expectations or not. With MooMoo, you don't need to spend time collecting large amounts of information. Just click on the company's stock directly and check the financial forecasts, including operating profit and earnings per share. 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After comparing, I found them to have the lowest fees in all categories, including no subscription fees, no minimum deposit requirements, and no account maintenance fees. Right now, new users can get access to a portfolio of fractional stocks from the magnificent seven stocks in the US stock market, just by opening an account and making a deposit using our link. Thanks again to MooMoo for sponsoring this episode. Alright, let's get into it. Elon Startoff, as he usually does, he talked about the EV adoption rate being under pressure that other automakers are pulling back. And it's not the right strategy to make hybrids, guys. I don't... Sorry, VW and GM, but that's not the right strategy, he said EVs are the right strategy. It's just that there's been a little dip in the demand. What was really interesting is that this actually tied into a question that came up at the very end of the call. One of the analysts who wasn't really prepared to speak, because there was another big financial analyst. This is his one job, right, to like show up and unmute his microphone, it's time to ask his question. He didn't do that, so this other guy gets to ask the question. He asked about 4680 cells and whether Tesla should sell 4680 cells to competitors. And Tesla was talking about how because all these other automakers had originally gone like we're going to make a ton of EV cars, battery prices soared, and so Tesla started making the 4680s. And then now that they're all pulling out, battery prices have dropped, but because Tesla has come in on 4680 production, they've inserted themselves in the supply chain, Tesla's able to sell battery materials to the suppliers that make the batteries for them and lower the cost of their batteries. It's like a jiu-jitsu move, it's really fun to watch. Yeah, Tesla takes advantage of every misstep that the other auto manufacturers make. This pullback in EV sales, while it sounds really scary, it can really be attributed to a bit of an economic pullback. We've seen car sales go down recently in addition to this, so it does make sense that EVs would finally start to catch up. Well, also there were supply chain issues. There was also problems at Fremont where they were ramping up the new Model 3. So there's a bunch of things that happened all at once, and Elon said, yeah, every now and then you get these kind of things that happen together, and that's not going to happen in Q2. But I do want to point out something really strong that no other financial analysts seem to talk about, which is energy storage. And if we look at this chart for Main Street data, you get to see that energy storage deployed was at an all time record high, and they said it's just going to continue. They can see 12 to 24 months out, and they can see that this is just going to keep happening. But let's just talk about the cars and the delivery of the cars. By the way, by the way, while we were sitting there listening to the earnings call and having my mind melted by such boring, analyst, stupid, boneheaded questions, I got an email on my telephone. Well, you should have been paying attention to the earnings call, but it was so boring. I was zoning out, and I got an email, Tesla Model 3 performance refresh. What? So, while all this stuff was going on, Tesla just rolled out the Model 3 refresh. It costs $52,990. It will qualify for the $7,500 tax credit. That's a lot. Which means that it costs $45,000, which I would like to point out is what I paid for my mid range Model 3 in 2018 in 2018. So this isn't a make, I mean, but that was also with 2018 money. I know. That's incredible. Like the value that Tesla is able to bring. So I just want to tell you a little bit about the car, 296 miles of range, 163 mile an hour top speed, zero to 60 and 2.9 seconds. I'm sorry, you probably meant 3.9. 2.9 seconds, baby. This thing's a frickin' rocket. Wait, did I just see that it said over 500 horsepower? Yeah. 510 horsepower. Wow. That's huge news, and it didn't even get brought up on the earnings call. Didn't even get brought up on the earnings call. That is huge news. That's also, people have been waiting for this. Yes. Let's also talk about that the Model 2 is going to be coming out in early 2025 or later this year, according to Elon. They've moved it up. They definitely are putting all the pressure they can to bear on getting it out sooner. They said they're going to be able to use existing lines. They're just going to have to make some tweaks to get that car out. That is huge news. Why? Why are they doing this? Because... Let's talk, let me ask a question about your car sales. No, let's shut the f*ck up about car sales for a minute. Let's start talking about RoboTaxi. Why would Tesla move up the production of the Model 2, the RoboTaxi cheaper car? Why would they do that? Because they are so sure that FSD is working. Why would they be so sure? Because have you tried it? This is... Elon said this. He took a minute. Well, there was a pause in the call, and he said, "Listen. You shouldn't be invested in this company." He didn't say this. I'm going to say something else. He said... You're going to say that. He said that everyone should try version 12, full self-driving. I am going to say, "You better go out and try version 12, full self-driving." Now, maybe you don't own a Tesla. That's fine. That's fine. We're coming up to National Drive Electric Week, which means that there are going to be lots and lots of EV shows that are going to be happening. It's springtime. People are happy to be outside. All you have to do is be really nice to any Tesla owner. You can mess up like 40 times. There's going to be 40 Model 3s and 1s parked in somebody's parking lot. Look, I completely agree with you, but you can also just go to a Tesla showroom. But what I want you to do is, however you do it, get the experience of version 12, ask very politely and kindly and say, "I'm thinking of investing in Tesla. I can't afford a Model 3 or Model Y right now, but I knew that I needed to test out version 12. I had to try it out for myself. You don't have to sit in the driver's seat, right? That doesn't necessarily matter because the car is going to be driving itself. You just have to sit in the car and experience it for yourself because... Here's a cheap way to do it, if you want. Join our Patreon for a buck a month. We put out a video where we showed ourselves driving around for an hour. Yes. That was two versions ago. We're not even up. I want you to experience it for yourself. It's so important. Elon said they strongly urged you to try it out. He said it's profound, but he also said, "Look, you really shouldn't be a Tesla investor unless you understand what this company is about, and it is about full self-driving and is about the robo-taxi network." All of this talk about how many cars you sell this quarter of that, that is such a stupid way to look at this company that I really don't want to focus this earnings call on what we traditionally do, which was to talk about little graphs of numbers. The numbers that are about to happen to this company, in my opinion, and disclaimer, we're not financial advisors. I'm not urging you to buy the stock or whatever. I'm just telling you what's going to happen with this company is going to be so profound that you're going to laugh later when you look at how many cars were sold in that quarter of this because they're going to change, as Elon said, it's going to go from driving a horse and buggy with a flip phone to being in an electric vehicle, autonomous vehicle, to the smartphone. It is like that smartphone moment. It really is. He's so sure of it now, and you can get that sense from his voice, and there's so much else we want to talk about about this call. Let's keep going here. Did you know that they've driven 3 billion miles so far on version 12? It's in 1.8 million vehicles right now, so they're just getting a ton of data, and they said they're no longer compute limited. They've got 35,000 H100 computers. They think they'll have 85,000 by the end of the year for training, so they're really not worried anymore when they get 10 million clips of video data, because they can now process it. So there's changes coming out just in a matter of days. When we talk about miles driven on full self driving, there's been all these miles that were driven in Teslas. Now we're actually able to get miles driven on full self driving. And because it's so good, you have people like me who was, I've been optimistic about full self driving this entire time, but I haven't loved some of the versions of full self driving. They were a little bit too stressful for me as a supervisor of the car, that a lot. With this version 12, I will very, very frequently go, let's see if the car can get us there. And it can. And that means that all those, oh, that 20 miles that I drove, that's being sent to Tesla. And that's multiplied over basically everyone that has a Tesla right now is sending that data to Tesla and, and lots and lots of people are trying it out. Lots and lots of people are going to be signing up for the $99 a month. I'll tell you that. So let's go to Tesla CFO, Vipob, Tunisia. He talked about something very important here. If you are kind of a traditional investor, you talk about margins a lot. And everyone's talking about auto margins that Tesla have declined. Okay. Well, first of all, they've gone from 18.9% in Q4 to 18.4% in Q1. But if you exclude Cybertruck, and I think you should, because they're just ramping it. And if you exclude the Model 3, which is the refresh at Fremont, which I also think you should exclude because they're ramping that too, then auto margins actually improve slightly. And if you want to see that visually, here's three of their different margins shown to you visually on mainstreetdata.com. Now you can only get data like this if you're a premium user, but if you use our link down below, you can get a discount on that. So go check that out. Also you can just go on mainstreetdata.com for free and see lots of cool data that is free. And visually, because here you can see that all this talk about their margins are dropping isn't really true. They've had fantastic margins. Tesla has had historically and till today, really good margins. Do you know who would kill to have this 18.4% margin every other OEM? Any OEM would, they would commit horrible acts of violence to get those kinds of margins. Now you know what Tesla CFO also pointed out is that while these other auto manufacturers are kind of pulling back on their EVs, there's still these little nagging things called, oh, emissions laws, right, where you have to have certain fleet emissions and they are failing on those. So what do they have to do? Oh yeah, they either have to pay a fine to the government or they have to buy credits. And who's about the only player in town you can buy the credits from? Tesla. So you have to fork over millions of dollars to Tesla for their credits. And the CFO said the appetite is increasing for those credits. So the failure by these other OEMs to make the right cars is actually helping Tesla as well. They are paying Tesla because they are still putting out stinky cars. This is like if you had the T-Mobile store across from the Verizon store and every week the guy who owned the Verizon store would have to walk across the street to the T-Mobile store and just fork over. All right. Well, here's your mom come just because I just because I have that barbecue on the roof. Like that's what we're talking about to their competition. Also, no one talks about this but Tesla's energy margin. So selling their batteries as grid storage, their margins are going up and the CFO said they will start contributing significantly to the overall margin. So for now we just ignore them like, oh, well, it's not a car. So let's not talk about it. But because they're selling so much in the energy department and those margins are going up because it's a pretty simple machine. You don't need wheels. You don't need all this other fancy stuff. It just sits there and so they're getting better and better at it as those mega factories come online and they're making gobs of money. No, but you don't understand Tesla is just a car company. Oh, I forgot. I'm sorry. Yeah. Right. I forgot. I forgot. I forgot. I forgot. I predicted it. I said no one would ask a question about robots. If you watch our other district. Say.com ask questions about robots but that is because they are retail investors. I said no institutional investor would ask and I was right. We'll go back to our video just a day ago on the same channel and you'll find that. They also said that Q1 was difficult because of this mismatch of builds and deliveries and it should reverse in Q2 to positive. So going from negative cash flow and Q1 to positive, not because there was something built into Tesla that was wrong. It just was a bad quarter. Companies do experience those by the way. Next was the reduction in headcount by 10%. That was the big layoff. And this accounts for about a billion dollars on an annual basis. And you know, Elon talked about this later in the call. I think we'll just talk about it now, which is that this wasn't because they're failing and they need to save money. This is because he said every few years you need to restructure your company. It's like pruning a tree. The CFO talked about and you come back stronger. Elon brought up probably the most complicated analogy but it was a very good analogy and I want to talk through it. He said, take humans for example, we restructure ourselves when we're being born. So when you've all had health class, I'm assuming, the birds and the bees thing, you start off with one or two cells, then it multiplies. So you're a blob. At one point, you were a blob of cells. Then you kind of turn into stuff. At one point, you have a tail. You absorb the tail. That your tailbone is the bottom of what used to be your tail. All of this stuff, you've restructured yourself and then you were born and you couldn't put your arms over your head because your head was so big compared to the rest of your body and your arms are so small. You've constantly been changing and restructuring and at no point could you have simply stayed the same shape but gotten bigger and bigger and bigger or you would have tremendous health problems. So what he's talking about here is that as Tesla grows and as Tesla becomes more profitable, they need to restructure as well. But he would estimate that about every year they had about 5% inefficiencies that would be added to the company. So today they're at like 25 to 30% inefficiencies, and he said they make corrections over time but you do need to reorganize things and restructure it. It's scary for the little fish that are now getting schooled around into different nets and to do different stuff but it is ultimately going to benefit Tesla. And we called this, we said basically a lot of this might have to do with their sales department and Elon said it's just gotten way too complicated to buy a Tesla. It should take under a minute online and so now it does. And so they said for a while you were going online and there was inventory cars and there's all his choices and he's like no, that's not how we were going to do it. And so he's restructured. Yeah. And I think that it's really smart because instead of the answer to how much is a Tesla cost being like, well it depends. Well, you get an inventory car and then people's eyes are just glazed over because what the hell is an inventory car, I just want to buy a car. They want to know a price, right? They are used to hearing on the TV that you can get this with a 0% APR. That is what people want to hear. They want to hear some kind of price. And so now you go on to Tesla's website. There's the price. There it is. And you know, CFO brought up another really good point, which I know goes over the heads of most of these analysts because they don't even know what AI means when it comes to Tesla. But he said the savings from cost reductions that they've been getting, they put that into increased investments in AI. Now, I have all these other car companies would be like, why would we invest in AI and not cup holders? But Tesla is working on a full self driving, robo taxi network. You may not understand that now. But as Elon said, very near future, you'll take out your phone, you will call for a Tesla, it will show up and pick you up and you will go on your merry way. He brought up another really good analogy, which was elevators. And you might be saying, that's really, really boring, I can Jesse and Elon and you'd be right. Elevators, you get in them, you press the button, takes you to that floor, you get out. Do you think about how it works? No, no. He used this analogy for good reason. It used to be you'd have an operator in the elevator and they would be in charge of going up and down and making sure that they leveled with the floor a lot harder than it sounds. And you might be saying, oh, right. In fancy establishment, still have an elevator man or elevator boy and they'll press the button. No, no, no, no. It used to be a guy who had to actually, with relays, make the elevator work. And it wouldn't automatically level to a particular floor. And he said that there were accidents. Elevators would cut people in half because it has to lift you and 15 other people up 17 stories. So of course, it has enough energy to cut somebody in half and it used to happen. We don't have that anymore because we have an automated system. It's just that elevators are a lot more simple. You get, you can close doors, you can have some light sensors, you can have a couple of switches. Well, anything is most of us have been born with this system. So we don't, we're not afraid anymore. But if you had been born before this and then you got into one with just buttons, you would have been afraid. Yes. Just wrapping up here with the CFO. He said, our future Tesla is extremely bright. Does that sound like he's worried? No. Also, I want to point out that Elon was in an excellent mood. Yes. I, here's a little hack, listen to Elon's mood during the earnings calls. There were some earnings calls where you could tell that he was stressed out. This one, he's pretty jovial. Yeah, he's excited. So on some of the say questions, and these are ones that you as retail investors can vote up or down or even ask the question, which is great. Really good ones. The question was, what is the status of the 4680? What is the current output and large gave you the answer? There's been an 18 to 20% increase. So there are up to a thousand a week. That was a couple of weeks ago or seven gigawatt hours a year. And they're staying ahead. Their whole goal here is just stay ahead of the Cybertruck ramp. So whatever Cybertrucks put now, we got to make a few more batteries than that so that we don't fall behind. That's what they're worried about at the moment. They're not trying to get so far ahead that they can sell them to other people or whatever. It's just for now, it's just keep up with Cybertruck, which is really interesting. And they're hoping to beat the price from nickel based cell providers by the end of the year. So even other manufacturers who just do this for a living, they're hopefully going to get to the point where they're making them cheaper. The next question from say was, what is the current status of optimus? Are they currently performing any factory tasks? When do you expect to start mass production? I think this is one of the most exciting questions other than things to do with full self-driving. Elon said they're actually doing simple factory tasks in the lab with optimus right now. They expect to have optimus in limited production with simple tasks again in the factory before the end of the year. So actually putting them in the factory and having them probably do, I don't know, I'm guessing move things around or very simple tasks. And they think they'll sell optimus to people like you and me. Maybe there'll be one right here by the end of next year. So that's really exciting. And of course, Elon said optimus should be more valuable than everything else combined at Tesla. But Tesla's just a car company. Yeah. That's just Elon, Benny, he's a goofy guy. He once said he could really unrock it. He said there's no meaningful limit to the size of the economy once optimus is released. So watch out economy because that's what's going to happen. And he said that's what's going to happen. Yeah. And he said Tesla is the best positioned of any humanoid robot manufacturer. So if you just watched that new video that came out from Boston Dynamics and hey, we're from Boston, we're all for them except that that's not the company that's going to make it. Okay. That thing was just pre-programmed whereas optimus is using a neural net to learn. And Elon went on to say Tesla AI inference and efficiency is the best that there's no company even close and it will pay dividends in many ways. Next question from say was from an institutional investor. They asked what is Tesla's current assessment of the pathway toward regulatory approval for unsupervised full self-driving in the US? And how should we think about the appropriate safety threshold compared to human drivers? And they talked a lot about this. This went on and on and on. But we can cut this down. I think one cool thing here was that Elon said that it's been helpful that other autonomous auto companies like Cruz and Waymo have been cutting a path through the regulatory jungle. So kind of doing the work for Tesla of getting, having problems, solving problems and having the regulators learn how to deal with them. He was basically dunking on them because they were going through all of these hurdles when they didn't have a product that was necessarily ready for that because they were trying to skip to the end with what I think. Want to get smarter about investing? And tune in to the Capital Ideas Podcast from Capital Group, home of American funds distributors Inc., one of the world's leading asset managers. Learn from portfolio managers with decades of experience by listening to the Capital Ideas Podcast today. As a parent, choosing the right school for my child was a big decision. I wanted a school that would help her reach her full potential. A school that is rigorous, but loving. A school that would prepare her to excel in college, career and life. Fortunately, we found Rocky Mountain Prep. With 12 tuition-free, pre-K to 12th grade schools across Denver, Rocky Mountain Prep may be the perfect choice for your child, too. The DPS school choice round-to enrollment window is now open. Apply online at rmp.org/enroll. Every day we rise, challenging ourselves to work for what we believe in. At U.S. Border Patrol, protecting our borders is more than a job. It's a calling. Let's answer the call, working together to keep our country and communities safe. If you're ready for a new mission, join U.S. Border Patrol and go beyond. Learn more at cpp.gov/careers. It's really interesting and reading between the lines here, Tesla has been working on full self-driving cars without having to anger the world of the regulatory people. When cruise automation runs over somebody and gets themselves kicked out of California for not disclosing information to the appropriate authorities, that's something Tesla doesn't have to worry about, but all the steps that these other companies take are basically forging the path, so to speak, as he says, for Tesla to just follow in their footsteps. Many people don't know, as Lars pointed out, is that there are many states where autonomous cars are already permitted, so it's not like they have to get regulatory approval. Elon mentioned LA. Very interesting to me that of all the places he could have mentioned, he mentioned LA as one of the first places that they'll be able to open the autonomous network. Now, he said that when there's significant data that shows that autonomous cars have half the accident rate of human-driven cars, and that's a significant data point, it will be very easy for regulatory approval at that point, because you really can't argue if something is twice as safe as a human to keep it off the road. It's in fact the opposite. People are going to be saying, "Why are we not allowing them on the road if they're twice as safe as humans?" And why are we allowing humans to drive? Look, people will get freaked out by this, and they'll go like, "That's my car! That's my freedom!" I think that what will happen is stricter testing for you as a driver. I think that that is going to be one of the ways that regulators are going to say, "Okay, look. We've had to let everyone drive because that's how we've structured our country with interstates and highways, and it's hard to walk places, and you can't ride your horse." So we've had to let everyone drive, and it's killed people. Millions of people have died because of this. Right. Sorry, terrible, horrible drivers. You see them on the roads, I know that you do. You aren't allowed on the roads anymore, and so they're going to test. It's going to, instead of going to the driver's test, and it's being like, "Okay, now take a left turn, it's going to be a lot harder." There are countries where they have harder tests, and they have higher safety. I think that that's something that will happen in the United States, and when that person can't pass a driver's test, they either need to educate themselves and become a better driver, or they're just going to have to take an autonomous car. It's not a big deal. It's not the same as having to take the bus. There's two other important things that came out of this, which you had to kind of wake yourself up to get to because there was some boring sh*t in there. But the first thing is that we don't get this at all. None of us get this at all, but please bear with me. When Amazon first started, it was just a bookstore online, right? That's all it was. But a little thing started happening. They had to have all these computers running all the time, and racks and racks. So someone at Amazon one day, maybe it was Jeff, said, "Hey, could we sell all this compute time that we're not using to others?" These computers are just sitting here, and so they started AWS, which has now become more valuable than all the rest of whatever Amazon does, right? And so we didn't think of it that way, but that's what it became. That's what Elon says is going to happen with Tesla. You're going to have a hundred million Teslas with a one kilowatt of inference compute just sitting there in your driveway while you're not using it. It has to be powerful enough to autonomously drive the car around, but a lot of the time it's going to have to be either being cleaned, charged, maintained, or just parked, right? So he said for about a hundred hours a week, it's sitting there not being used. If we use that compute, we will have a hundred gigawatts total of distributed inference. That's more than any other company. And so you might not care about that, but that's a lot of money. A lot of people are going to pay a lot of money for that compute, and they're going to have the biggest of it. So that's another thing that, you know, but how many cars did you sell last quarter? That's why we should stop thinking about that number so importantly. The other thing that they talked about is that with full cell driving, they actually have insight into how well the cars are going to drive three or four months from now, even though we have not seen those cars on the road yet. And so they already know that there's a big step change improvement coming, but Elon says there's a few little quirks that they have to iron out first before they can release it. So they're doing a little tweaking to the training and then major changes are about to come. And Elon's already said this on X. He said 12.4 should be called version 13. It's going to be a big deal. All right. We get a question from say.com saying, can we get an official announcement and timeline of the $25,000 vehicle? And Lars again said we are accelerating the launch of that, but we will talk about this more on August 8th. And so that means we know it's going to be the robo taxi car. Stay tuned. What are they going to call it? I don't know. Who cares? We all can call it the model too. But yeah, I don't know. Who cares? I call it money. Next question was, what is the progress on Cybertruck ramp? And Lars said again, they're at 1000 Cybertrucks a week. That was a couple of weeks ago. So costs are dropping, supplier limitations are kind of keeping them a little bit stuck, but they're focused on quality and cost efficiency. And there's no one more than Jesse and I either wants them to ramp up because our truck is still not here. Nice question here. Have any of the legacy automakers contacted Tesla about possibly licensing FSD in the future? And Elon said there's been conversation with one major automaker regarding FSD. Later in this earnings call, he said he wouldn't be surprised if they signed that deal this year and maybe even two deals this year, but what they said is important to remember. When you sign a deal with a big OEM, it takes at least three years and they said that's being very nice. Three years before that is going to even, you're going to see that appear. So don't expect that you're going to see this probably before the end of the decade. And so, but who do you think it is? If we're going with historical, it would be Ford. I think so too. They did Knack's first. Yeah. So, him and Jim Farley are a little bit tighter now that Jim kind of knows that Elon has some stuff that Jim doesn't have. And I think that maybe with all this full self-driving 12 stuff, he perked in ear a little bit higher than most other OEMs to it. And I think that he, maybe it could be any other car company, but probably not Honda. That's a good guess. I'm going to go with not Honda. I'm going to go with not Toyota. They skipped a bunch of say questions because essentially, they already answered that question and most of those answers were that they weren't going to be telling us those answers. We got a question about what is the timeline for scaling the semi-truck. And Lars says that they're finalizing the engineering of it. They're going for efficiencies of scale. They've already started the construction of the factory in Reno. So they're going to start. I don't know what he meant by start, but I think start the ramp in 2025, but customers will get them in 2026. And again, we're on that list. I think we're number 85. So we've been dying for this truck. But I'm glad that they're going to get it right. Not the Cybertruck. The semi-truck. Yeah. We're going to have a semi-truck. We put down a reservation for it. And I can't wait to drive it. I'm surprised that actually the Cybertruck is coming before the semi because remember, the semi was supposed to come out years before. And it has come out. Right. But only for Pepsi. And I think that's smart. It is smart. Why sell it to people if it's going to be trouble? Yep. Great question here. Can we make FSD transfer permanent until FSD is fully delivered? And Elon said, no. Why would he say no? Why would if this were some kind of other company and full self-driving was going to be a while or they weren't, they didn't understand it, they might go, well, whatever our customers want, Elon flatly, no, that was the end of his answer. Yep. A question from Jason. What is gating the production ramp at Lathrop? So that's what they make the megapacks. What do you see the megapack run rate by the end of the year being? And they said that Lathrop is ramping as planned to 20 gigawatt hours. And they're going to get to 40 gigawatt hours by the end of the year. There's nothing limiting the ramp. They have order visibility 12 to 24 months out. So they have nothing but blue skies ahead. And you're just going to see that grid scale batteries from Tesla is just going to keep on increasing. What a great business to be in. When I order something, whether it be on Amazon or I order a car, I want that thing like right now. You know what I mean? Why? Why would you ship it? If you're selling something to a grid, they're going to go, um, and like two years, we're thinking of doing this thing and we need a large battery. Will you be able to provide and Tesla's like, sure, we will, we will ramp up to that point and we will make you that battery in two years. And yes, we will take your money in two years. See you then. That is so what a nice customer base for Tesla to have in that, in that space. It is, it is not people going like, where's my power wall? It's people going like, so that's what we're talking about. Tony Sakinaji from New Street Research asked about new models. Elon didn't want to answer, but then he did a follow up, a personal follow up asking Elon about, you know, you're leading a lot of companies. Where's your heart at? Um, you know, are you lessening the amount of work you want to do at Tesla? Elon, this is just the setup for a bunch of funny news articles. Can I just tell you, I haven't read them yet. We just got off the call. Jesse, how did you know that they wrote a bunch of funny news articles based on, on Elon's answer here? But I thought his answer was great. He said, look, Tesla constitutes the majority of my work time. I work every day of the week. It's rare that I take time off. I make sure Tesla is quite prosperous. And quote, but it appears that he tests the name, Elon is doing this and that and Elon tweeted this on Saturday and I don't care. I don't care. Any I can't believe. So first of all, they took off Peter Fairview, who used to do the questions for new street research and they put in Tony to ask this one. I think because they knew that Tony isn't going to get asked back to ask any more questions, because both of his questions were completely boneheaded. I am convinced more than ever that this is a dog and pony show for them in terms of trying to get Elon trapped into some kind of thing so they can lower the stock price. Why? Probably so they can buy it at a lower stock price. Look, again, we're not financial analysts, but how could the stock price be this low? What the hell is going on? I may not be a financial analyst, but I certainly am a conspiracy theorist on this. Yes. When you go into a store and you see everything on sale, do you walk out going, why just don't think that's very nice for them to lower the price so much? Now I don't really think it's what I gotta feel like Tony Suckenage is the guy going into the store going like I found a razor blade in the onions and then going like I'm going to make some French onion soup when they lower the price of the onions. That's what I. Are you kidding me? I know Adam Jonas from Morgan Stanley asked about like how can you be sure that the growth rate in 2024 will be better than 23 and will you have lower sales year over year and Elon said we'll have higher sales than last year. So stupid. Then he has to dumb question about well if you nailed the model to and even forgetting that it's a robo taxi, how long will it be before your Chinese competitors can copy you? And there's like a pause because Elon is like did I just ask you to ask this question? He's like, I don't know what our competitors can do. We've done relatively better than they have. We're doing well. And as Kathy Wood said, we should be thought of as an AI robotics company thinking of us by an auto framework is the wrong way to think about us. If you ask the wrong question, then giving the right answer is not possible. So he said, if you don't believe in autonomy, then you shouldn't be an investor in the company. And I want to reiterate that. If you think of Tesla as an EV company period, go find someone else to invest in. This is not the company for you. Then you don't get it. And also, if I may add you're a moron, okay, I get it. It can be scary, maybe you tried it one time and it's scared the sh*t out of you. I understand that. Believe me, that happened to me multiple times that would have been a T-bone. I look, I don't know what the and I subjected myself to it because I am a youtuber and a and a good youtuber, one who's there for the content. And it scared the sh*t out of me multiple times. But here's the thing. It changes and they have updated it. And if you haven't tried version 12, like I said earlier, you are doing yourself a disservice. You should not call yourself an investor. And you shouldn't certainly be on disruptive investing. No. How dare you? Elon said, we're putting the auto in automobile. Yes. I think that's the mic drop moment right there. Yes. Next question that we're going to cover, we skipped a bunch of boring ones is from Colin Rush from Oppenheimer. He asked, what is AI unlocking in the vehicle? I feel like, I feel like when you're a fella sleep during part of class, you're like, well, I'm sorry. Can you repeat the question? He heard it. He heard it. He didn't understand what was being talked about. So he asked it and if you wanted to, you could go back and listen to it. You're not going to. He used all this flowery language to be like, what is the AI unlocking in the vehicle? So again, this is what we previously already talked about that Tesla could take all the parked Teslas in the world and run compute on them. And if you're like, I don't know what run compute means, AWS is a perfect example. Bitcoin mining, kind of like that. Not Bitcoin mining. But anything. But anything. Any app when you pull it open, you're using a server somewhere. Yes. You need compute. So this is what it is. That's the compute. So basically Tesla could send compute to the cars. The cars could do the compute and then send back. Also, if you heard of thing called AI, you need very powerful computers to do AI. And so, you know, open AI, like all these companies need AI compute and they're going to need Tesla for that. So right. And AI doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Even the like dumb chat GPT, we put chat GPT on the website where you order pizza. It's like, thanks, I could have handled it myself, but even them, they need compute to run the enormous amount of compute to run this AI. Jesse, Apple, I forgot about Apple. Apple has a lot of iPhones. Why don't they just use their users iPhones? So this was an interesting point that Elon brought up and he said, basically, Apple, if they wanted to, could basically send compute to all the computers and iPhones that are running in the world right now. The problem would be that you would deplete the battery on the iPhone. Like if you run a really strong app on your phone, really powerful one, you'll run the battery down. Oh, no. Wait a minute. A Tesla is just a computer. This is, I mean, it's an interesting point here. Basically if they have one kilowatt of compute running in the vehicle and you have a, well, he said 50 to 60 kilowatt hour battery pack. That means that you obviously have 50 to 60 hours of compute time that you can run. And most likely it's going to be plugged in as Lars, so hopefully pointed out. So right, your car is plugged in at home. And if you have a Tesla, you know that this is true, you get home, you plug in, it charges up. And then two in the morning, the thing's full, not doing anything. So that, that charger, that your car, it's just sitting there, taking up space. If that was working, doing compute, you could be possibly making money. I don't know if Tesla's just going to steal electricity from you. I'm assuming they're going to reimburse you. And then sadly, sad to end on a sad note, but Martin Viecha, who is the VP of investor relations, he is leaving after seven years. He said he'll stay on for a couple more months, but he won't be on the next earnings call. And he started at the beginning of production hell and he said it's been unlike anything else he's seen in all my years. And it's funny, Elon said that he hired him because he thought Martin's analysis of the company was the best he had ever seen. So it's just, it's, it's great that they've had all these great people. There's going to be more great people joining Tesla. I think that it's just such an intense work environment that if you want to have a family, you can't stay there forever. The other point that I want to stress is that with this reorganization of the company and some bigger members of Tesla leaving, I think that this is Elon ramping up for the next stage. The next stage of the company, I mean, we've gone through. I would consider two or three, depends on how you want to look at it, stages of the company. Let's go with three or four. First you had the early days, right? Way, way, way early, him and JB and working with, you know, having to get ebb and hard out and everything like that. Next we have like model S ramp. And then a little bit of the model X, I'm going to put model S and X together. And that was tough. Okay. That really, really, really a tough time in Tesla. Then you had the model three ramp. That was insanely tough. I would say that the model three ramp kind of ends now. I would say like this, this era, if we're going by Taylor Swift's standards, this era is basically coming to a close where the model three and the model Y, model Y, of course, being the best selling car in the world, we've kind of hit that era. This next era coming up is going to be based around robo taxis, robots, energy deployment, all of this stuff. Can I just put a little era in though I want Cybertruck to have its own little era? Yeah. I feel like that's going to be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I get you. Sadly, no. No, I got it. Sadly, it is going to be a side show to this much bigger show. And I think that the Cybertruck deserves a tons of attention. But the robo taxi is not going to be the kind of thing where you talk about it with your Tesla friends. It is going to be where you talk about it with random strangers on the street every day because everyone is going to talk about it just like when sometimes people pull out their phones and they go, "Hey, remember when we didn't used to have these?" And I mean, it's going to be complicated because it's not just going to be robo taxi, it's going to be Tesla Bot as well. Yes. So like, I mean, it's going to be a different world. They're going to merge. Right. This is, remember the, remember, remember the 90s? Remember before the internet, okay? I know that I was six years old in 1999, okay? I know. I was too young to remember this. But do you remember the world before the internet? I do. If you can, good for you, you know that that's a different time, right? We are in a different world. We are about to enter yet another world. Sorry for the rollercoaster ride, but Tesla is going to be the spearhead on this one. And again, yes, quarterly, if we want to think quarterly, if you want to think quarterly, go do something else. Go buy yourself a little bowl, okay, and fill it with water and go swim around the bowl because you're a goldfish, okay? You can't think that far ahead, get out of the kitchen. Don't invest. You're not smart enough to do this. I don't know what to tell you. You need to be a long-term thinker, Elon is a long-term thinker. They're thinking beyond the Inflation Reduction Act. Yes. Yes. They talked about that during the earnings call. All the analysts wanted to hear was like, "Well, what about next quarter?" And they're talking about like, "So when the Inflation Reduction Act ends, in 2030, holy sh*t, these guys are thinking so far ahead. That is why you invest in a company like this because they actually are, they're strategizing." You know what's funny is you take someone like JB Strobel, who left Tesla, then went on to start a company that is now working with Tesla and is a director of the company. That's how far thinking these people are, yeah. I know. It's absolutely insane. So tomorrow, when you're having this talk at the water cooler and someone's going on and on about it. Don't even bother. Talk to you later because they have to go buy more Tesla stock because I'm sure it's going to go down 10% or whatever. It always does that, whatever. It always does. We've had record quarters and the stock drops 10%, okay? So just let's put this all in perspective, robo-taxis and humanoid robots. You're not going to be mopping your floors anymore. I feel like we should do the Jim Kramer, beep, beep, beep, back it up, back it up. Let's just load on up. I mean, come on. If there was ever time to- Don't do anything, Jim Kramer. I don't want to jinx any of this. But man, was this a good earnings call? It's about the same as all of them. I say this every earnings call, I'm more pumped than ever and I am. And I understand if you're a financial analyst, you're mad at Elon because he made you look like a f*cking fool, the God f*cking fool that you are if you're a financial analyst and you sat there and you asked him dumb-ass f*cking questions. Oh my God, there were so many points where he dunked. He was dunking on his competition. They were dunking on the OEMs and talking about how long he would take to integrate. Do you know? Just full self-driving is like all they'll have to do is put the cameras and the computers in the car and it'll take them three or four years. As a sports analogy, do you know when you get to that part of the game or the race where you know you've won? When the commentators are laughing. It's not over yet. But you know you've won. Yes. This is where we're at. This is where we're at. I've stopped really talking about the game. It's- It's- It's like you can walk off the field right now. You've won. They know Tesla knows they've won. Everyone who really knows knows they've won. If you don't know it, then you should not be an investor in this style. I can't- I can't- I can't tell you that anymore. And I get it. If you haven't driven 12.3, I get it. You may not understand. So like Jesse said, get yourself into a vehicle that has it. Test it out. And if you don't come back understanding it, then you really shouldn't be in this company at all. And that's fine. That's fine. That's fine. You'll kick yourself later, but that's fine. At least you will have tried. And you can tell your grandkids someday that you're like, "I said it wouldn't go anywhere. Now where's my robo taxi?" All right. Thank you so much for joining us, everybody. We'll see you guys next earnings call. And we'll see you next week here on Disruptive Investing. Hit the subscribe button so you don't miss anything. Adios. 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