Larry Goldberg is a serial entrepreneur (co-founder of Sapiens Decision), angel investor, and co-author of the book “The Decision Model”.
The linked video supports my views on Optimus, the Tesla bot, and Larry Goldberg posts numbers supporting the argument. Since the major hurdle is adoption, Crossing the Chasm where many great technologies go to die, Tesla has a huge advantage over most vendors because it has an in-house use for the robot. This criterion applies to Amazon backed Digit. Practically all industrial products come out of the factory ‘knowing’ how to do the jobs they were designed for. Humanoid robots, like babies, don’t! They need to be trained with AI which means there is a need for sand boxes where they can “play.” Tesla has them, Amazon has them, but most robot suppliers don’t. Tesla has the AI capability in-house, most others will need to buy AI related stuff from the likes of NVIDIA (also covered in the video) as well as outsource manufacturing.
Musk is tweeting today that he is uncomfortable growing Tesla into an AI & robotics leader due to issues with his compensation package/voting control. I have been in and out of Tesla several times similar to Saul because I have been uncomfortable with Musks antics. This just adds to the concerns…
If he wants to build AI and robotics products outside of Tesla then these products should not be included in the valuation. I cannot believe he actually said this publicly.
I mean there is a back story to all of this, which I think adds valuable context. He wants to be able to steer Tesla in the right direction, and given his past success in that department, I’m pretty comfortable with what he is asking:
Institutional money is said to have largely stayed away from investing in a Tesla due to ‘key man risk’. This is the risk associated with one person being so important to company success. I believe Elon Musk is uniquely flawed; but, I believe he is an absolute genius at innovation. I also know that, as Musk has said himself, ‘At this point Tesla, as a company, is on autopilot’ and Musk only has 15% of the voting rights. Whether Elon Musk runs Tesla or not, I believe that Energy, Full Self Driving, and Bots will succeed, in at least reaching 10% of revenues possible.
IMO, Musk will likely choose to stay at Tesla and if not able to get enough control he’ll move his effort in development of AGI outside of Tesla to X.ai. This won’t effect Tesla other than to limit upside from one more possibility, albeit a massive one (AGI).
Edit
Elon has not Ben paid for over a year. He’d met all milestones over a year ago.
The technical/financial resources required to develop a successful humanoid robot is enormous. Musk is perhaps capable of this, but the technical/financial drain on Tesla appears to be excessive unless he intends to become a major bot supplier of this technology to the manufacturing/distribution universe. At this juncture this does not support a larger position in Tesla.
Of course he intends to become a major bot supplier. You do not develop something that far without having intentions of producing it. Otherwise he would just keep with the bots in his factories like they are now.
Do you have data to back up this statement? The reason I ask is because there seem to be a lot of synergies within Tesla such as Dojo for AI, actuators, electric motors, and electronics used in EVs in addition to having the robots do in-house jobs at Tesla.
Maybe not but it sure helps to justify the stock price.
It’s not a given when you look at Amazon that bought a robotics company for internal use only (as far as I know).
Musk’s request for more stock for the BOT really does not make sense. He owns 13% of the company and has options on another 7%. The smallish TSLA 7-member board of directors is made up of friends and family. So don’t be kidded. Musk controls TSLA. And he has delivered on most of the outrageous goals the last 10 years and much more. His ‘Felix The Cat’ bag of tricks is very deep.
I am a Musk fan and glad he is an American given his contributions to global warming, spacecraft leadership, low cost Internet access for the whole world, and yes exposure of government censorship at twitter. But having personally had a short messaging exchange with him on FB SpaceX during Covid, Musk is not a normal person or maybe he had been smoking something… dunno.
I would not place much weight in most of what Musk tweets. The BOT comment seems disconnected. Like with a star sports teammate, focus on what the guy achieves, not what he says. I’ll be back into TSLA after the next pullback. TSLA is a trading stock for me given the volatility. I am glad to see TSLA discussed on this board, but for me TSLA is not a Saul stock.
Sorry for a poor communication. I spent a career in auto manufacturing engineering and bot many robots. My point - it would be difficult to justify the investment of financial and technical resources for the development of humanoid robots unless the investment was spread across potential sales to all customers in the user universe. Scale is important, but even Tesla does not have the scale to justify this enormous development cost for internal use.
No harm done. We are here to talk and to hash out ideas.
Valid points but I do believe that Tesla will sell or lease the robots in time. The confusion comes from Musk’s remarks that at first the Optimus robot would work in Tesla’s own factories.
The important point of difference between the robots you bought and Tesla’s bot is that industrial robots are supposed to work as designed from the day they are delivered. By contrast, AI driven robots have to learn to do new jobs. This is so novel that it would not make sense to sell the robots before the process was first worked out, tested, and certified. That is what Tesla is trying to do by first deploying the robots in house.
In a sense FSD was a proving ground for the process and putting it in the hands of clients has been a learning experience. By using Optimus in house at first Tesla is avoiding a lot of headaches.
I was driving today and noticed a truck with a camera on it, like what the Google maps cars used to have. I thought, Tesla would not need to have a special car, every Tesla can capture video, if Tesla is storing the video, they would have by far the largest data lake of mapped video in the world.
Add in human behavior data and it gets real interesting. Only Facebook, Apple, and Google play in the same league and their data is more in the human human interactions while Tesla’s is more machine human interactions.
Qaz, I understand the concept, the paradigm, but I do not know the details, how it actually works. Having looked into the Science of Complexity for over two decades, as a layman, it has become clear that size matters, in everything. The more complex a system the more likely that “emergent properties” arise from it. The latest version of AI, neural networks, is just that, huge amounts of data processed by giga-huge, lightning-fast computers.
This is why Dojo matters, why NVIDIA matters, why Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon (AWS), and Microsoft (Azure) matter, why the Internet matters. Why cloud computing and CDN (content delivery network) matters. It’s about data, about ones and zeros in unthinkably large volumes. Even DNA is digital but carbon based digital.
Denny Schlesinger
(wo)men with straightjackets are after me…
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
It all runs on electricity
Computing already has a massive impact on electricity demand
Data centers consumed 240-340 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2022, or 240-340 billion kilowatt-hours – about 1.0-1.3% of total global electricity use. That’s comparable to the electricity consumption of the entire United Kingdom.
I don’t know if this is an appropriate posting for this board, but it does involve actions of a company that many of us are invested in which might cause a significant loss of value.
Musk has asserted that unless he is given enough stock to boost his current stake, estimated at about 13% to 25% he will split AI initiatives from Tesla into a new and separate business entity. He has not addressed how that might impact Tesla shareholders.
It’s not clear to me where the 12% stock is supposed to come from. Does anyone have any idea as to how this will be implemented should the board agree?
More fundamentally, I can’t see anyway that this can be done without damaging shareholder equity. If the stock is purchased in the open market and then given to Musk, that will drain cash out of the company. If there’s enough treasury stock to give him, it will cause dilution. Can you see how Musk’s demand can be met?
If his demand is not met and he moves Dojo, Optimus and maybe FSD as well as other projects into a new company, how are shareholders to recover all the R&D funds that have been invested in those projects, let alone the loss of future value?
It seems to me that Musk is trying to recover the money he squandered on Twitter by stealing it from Tesla shareholders. It think it’s obvious that either granting him the stock or splitting the AI projects into a new company will just create a class action suit against him and/or his new company in order for Tesla shareholders to gain compensation for the loss of value in the company.
Do you see it the same way? Is there any way in which Musk can actually gain a 25% position in Tesla without just buying the shares with his own funds?
My understanding of the Elon Musks compensation package is that he met all milestones over a year ago; but, the shares promised are not awarded until 5 years post being met. At the time he has the awarded share he’ll be at 22% ownership.
So, hopefully the above makes clear two things.
He’s due for a new comp package
He hoping to get an offer that takes him up to 25% ownership.
About 8 posts back, I included some details from his last contract, 2018. And, among those documents is some further context from hi 2012 contract. I after reviewing those, I came away with believing hat this is a none issue and very reasonable. But, tell me what you think was unreasonable from his prior contract and how that make into any kind of problem for this next one.
@WillO2028 Thanks for the explanation. Apparently I missed or more likely forgot what you had posted regarding Musk’s compensation as I read it a while ago. The 25% request is much more reasonable than I had thought. Musk is erratic and his behavior and postings constitute my primary misgivings about my Tesla position. But I must admit that my thoughts on this demand were beyond the pale, even for Elon. I really thought he had taken a dive off the deep end.
All that being said, I still think an ugly class action lawsuit will result if he takes all the AI initiatives out of Tesla. As a shareholder, I paid for the development of those projects and as a Tesla investor those AI projects are a significant part of my thesis. In fact, I contend that Tesla-AI will form the dominant contribution to the future value of the company. Much more than the various vehicles the company might produce.
I don’t remember the exact number at the moment, but the combination of vested stock and options he already has is more like 22%, so not nearly as drastic a move.
I wonder how he could actually move any of the projects to a new company. After all, what has been done on them so far is the property of Tesla, not Musk. So, at best he would have to spin them off and Tesla have a large interest in the spun off company. No?
I am not sure if Musk was getting at spinning off the products or the just developing future AI products outside the company (through X/Twitter, etc). And development of FSD/Optimus would have to continue without him.
Anyway you look at it this is a mess and boarders on a breach of fiduciary duty to shareholders. No wonder the stock is performing terribly during a massive rally in tech/growth stocks. I think the stock is extremely oversold and sentiment overly bearish, but this mess combined with continued price cuts/margin deterioration is keeping me on the side as I have not yet been confident enough to buy in.
