$1.2 trillion in electric vehicles and batteries through 2030 -

and the elephant on the room is Tesla putting up 30% and it seems from internal cash flow

Advantage over startups, 20 years
Advantage over legacy automakers, no debt

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I found this link in the comments section of an article by professor Aswath Damodaran at Seeking Alpha where @Pablo6sigma said:

I also believe that it [automobile TAM] will be limited by the size of the automotive market space which will likely continue to be driven by the same old metrics of population growth and per capita GDP. Disagreements And First Principles: The Pushback On My Tesla Valuation | Seeking Alpha

Makes sense

@Russell’s Decalogue replied

The EV market is growing mainly because people don’t want to burn gasoline if they don’t have to. Disagreements And First Principles: The Pushback On My Tesla Valuation | Seeking Alpha

Nonsense - follow the money

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BTW, I disagree with professor Aswath Damodaran

The Captain

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Ron Baron says perhaps $1500/share in 2030. That’s a $5T market cap. I just want to know what earnings he is estimating to support that market cap? The car part of the company will have almost no growth at that point.

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A 30% CAGR between today and 2030? Yeah, no way.

The industry is investing heavily and clearly plans to have EVs available. Whether buyers will buy them is still the big unknown. More recharging infrastructure will help. Costs of fuel and batteries rebates subsidies all matter.

If 50% of vehicles sold in 2030 are EVs, the program is a success. And significant growth is required. And California may refuse to license new ICE vehicles. We will see if that all happens.

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In related news, looks like DOE is backing Redwood Materials with a $2B loan for battery material production:

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I think you’re right. Since 2013, Tesla’s vehicle delivery CAGR has been about double that (22,400 → 1,313,851, ~57%). I’m leaving out 2012 since the number of deliveries was so low it distorts the CAGR high.

No way it will be only 30%.

Plus, of course, Tesla’s energy business will grow much faster.

And that’s ignoring the Inflation Reduction Act, which will shower more money on Tesla than anybody else, by far.

Damodaran is a smart guy who has been consistently wrong about Tesla. He has updated his model multiple times to correct his errors, but he gets it way wrong over and over. Ron Baron is a smart guy who has been consistently right. But he’s sandbagging big time.

Now whether the stock price will reflect the actual business is unknown, as we have seen all too well over the past year or so.

-IGU-

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I watched a video of Damodaran giving a lecture to his students, he is a wonderful teacher! The problem with his value analysis is that it’s basically 1934 Security Analysis and the world has moved on from cigar butts to complex systems.

BTW, On March 1 Tesla is having their Investor Day and will be announcing Master Plan 3. I don’t want to speculate on specifics but I think it will be quite revolutionary mostly on the manufacturing side, The Machine that builds The Machine.

About growth, the 50% growth target was for the numbers of cars sold and earnings per share should easily outpace that.

The Captain

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If there is going to be higher raw materials input cost and more completion, why would profit margins increase?

DB2

Because cost of raw materials is not the only cost, because competition is meaningless when Tesla can sell all it makes. On the other side of the cost equation there is lower unit cost with increasing volume and most important, Tesla’s fanatical search for cost efficiencies. Tune in March 1 for the Platform 3 unweiling. Tesla is aiming to cut manufacturing costs by 50% and that can only be done with radical innovation.

Redwood Materials is aiming to reduce the cost of battery materials through recycling.

The Nevada factory will produce anode copper foil and cathode active materials, two key ingredients of lithium-ion batteries, from a combination of raw materials, scrap from sources including the nearby Tesla battery Gigafactory in Reno, and end-of-life batteries shipped in from across the country. At full capacity, Redwood plans to produce enough of these materials to supply battery production for more than 1 million EVs per year.

Of course Moore’s Law and Wright’s Law are still in effect.

The Captain

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Most of us in the industry have believed for a few years now that Moore’s Law is dead, unfortunately.

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Did you know that Moore’s Law was in effect before he was even born? Before they invented transistors? In his book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil traces the evolution of computing machines from the earliest by Charles Babbage and shows their increasing computing power in line with Moore’s Law. But just as computing machines evolved from mechanical to electrical to electronic, maybe we are not at the end of the computer’s increasing efficiency shifting from transistor performance to coding performance with AI or something…

The Captain
is an eternal optimist

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