TSLA Puts, More DD than the Bada Bing
Alright you group of self-fellating, highly regarded individuals, I feel like I am staring straight into one of the most obvious trades in my lifetime, and nobody here seems to be on board. I’m talking, of course about shorting TSLA. I know I know I know, I can already hear you furiously typing away at your Dorito-covered keyboards yelling at me to use my own libtard tears to pleasure myself to pictures of Joe Biden, and that Daddy Elon Always Delivers. But what if I told you that new vehicle sales are already down 45% in Europe and between 15 and 50% in the good old O US of A? I’ll be breaking my case down into 4 sections.
Currently Hodling: 11 puts at $190, exp 6/20, 3 puts at $175 exp 7/18, 5 puts at $190 exp 8/15
For those of you who are living in the caves of Afghanistan and submitting your trades via a combination of pigeon carrier and/or smoke signals, I will introduce a bit of background here, but for everyone else who watches the news, you can probably skip this part. Elon has in his own words gone “Dark Maga” and decided that the most important thing he can do with his time is to gut the federal government. Both the act of doing this, and the seemingly haphazard (to put it lightly) implementation,has created a large cohort of people who hate him. Okay, back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Declining Car Sales
What is Tesla actually in the business of doing? It’s this Schrödinger’s morass of a company that simultaneously does everything and nothing all at once. Is this a technology company focused on AI, which just so happens to have a car manufacturer attached to suck up all that juicy data? Or is this actually a car company that likes to pretend that it's doing AI and full self driving? It doesn’t matter because they both suck, but let’s focus on cars now.
For better or worse, Elon has:
- Completely and irrevocably intertwined the Tesla brand with his own for the sake of free publicity. Tesla famously doesn’t have a marketing department, because Elon has made it his job to generate free publicity via his rockets, his penis, his “Flamethrowers,” or other Boring shenanigans.
2) Elon is very publicly and continually shitting on about half the country while boofing horse-killing amounts of ketamine and Seig Heiling his admirers. Whatever the fuck He’s is doing in govt., it is WILDLY unpopular with Democrats and former Romney/McCain style republicans.
I don’t know of a single other car manufacturer that has active protests outside of its dealerships. Hell, there was one woman who literally planted bomb(s) outside of them. I’m in no way condoning that, but you have to fuck up real bad to have this be the outcome. This is such an unbelievable self own it should end up in the WSB hall of fame of most regarded plays. The most insane thing is that TSLA’s customer base is almost definitionally left leaning.
Survey after survey shows that people who are left leaning are far more likely to be willing to purchase an electric car. And even if you’re completely apolitical, are you going to think twice about buying a car from a place that has people protesting it? Do you really want to have your car called the Tesla Model SS, or a ”Swastacar” because its CEO has a proclivity for making an ass of himself? A whole Etsy cottage industry has propped up keeping hipsters supplied with their homegrown kombucha by selling “ I bought this before I knew he was crazy” stickers. Enough hypothesizing, let's get to the numbers :
In Europe, sales are down 45%. Let me say that again, 45%. WITH THE TOTAL NUMBER OF EVs SOLD GOING UP IN EUROPE BY 37% IN THE SAME TIME FRAME. This is a monumental fuckup and if they were Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota, or BYD, their shareholders would dump them faster than Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriends after their 25th birthday. California is down 11% last year.
Now in the US, we haven’t had the same awful numbers….come public yet. Lucky for you my highly regarded reader, I’ve done some fresh DD that hasn't made its way into the news. 4 states report EV registrations on a MONTHLY basis, so we can at least look at the January data. [Data](https://www.atlasevhub.com/market-data/state-ev-registration-data/) Methodology to digest data in appendix. They are:
New York
Texas
Colorado,
New Mexico.
This data basically compiles the registration data for BEVs and PHEVs and provides the make, model, model year, month, and year of registration.
New York TSLA Market Share of BEVs:
November 51%
December 49%
January 25%
<Gulp> (you know the one), liberals are basically abandoning TSLA.
Texas TSLA Market Share of BEVs:
November 63%
December 61%
January 47%
More conservative states are still abandoning it, just at less steep levels
Colorado TSLA Market Share of BEVs:
November 33%
December 27%
January 24%
Seems kind of flat, but down substantially from earlier in the year (April was around 40% market share). So while work is in no way definitive, this is indicative that they are losing market share at a rapid clip, and is likely to result in a huge hit to the P/E, if not outright losses. Pivoting away from this massive public relations turd pile, there are actual fundamental issues to worry about TSLA having genuinely strong competition:
US:
Tesla is steadily losing market share due to increasingly good EV competition. Ford, GM, VW, Hyundai/Kia, Volvo/Polestar have collectively gotten off their asses and made real, honest to god decent EVs. Lucid is probably 2-5 years ahead of TSLA in terms of straight EV technology, and Rivian is probably on par. Personally, I own an ID.4 from Volkswagen and….its fine. It’s fast, it’s efficient, and although the company was started by Nazis, it’s not currently run by one.
CHINA:
I literally cannot imagine a worse market to compete against. China has a massive oversupply of EVs with a series of automakers that have been government backed with the mandate of developing low-cost high quality EVs. Razor thin margins, high quality competition, etc. BYD can produce a similar car for the same or significantly less. Social Credit Score for Tesla - 500. I could write an entirely separate post about how BYD, CATL, etc are dominating this shit, but I'm trying to stay focused on the obvious tendies available here.
Europe:
Europe is enacting serious tariffs on China’s EVs because they are so cost-competitive and not geopolitically aligned. Elon is backing the AFD in Germany and suggesting that the UK should kick out its leader. WTF do you think they are going to do when the human incarnation of a McDonalds bag threatens 25% tariffs on them for shits and gigs? This is a fucking train wreck. Actually, that's a great metaphor, because this whole thing is one dimensional and obviously headed for disaster.
Let's get to the “Future” of the brand: The Cybertruck. I’ll admit, it's kinda cool in an ABSTRACT sense. After seeing it in person, it’s clear that snorting “Male Enhancement” pills and then staring at some Ayn-Rand fever dream anarcho-capitalist vision board is not best design practice for the US car market. As an aside, I genuinely would love for the Tesla Semi to work. I’m a huge fan of electrification and decarbonization for both economic and environmental purposes, and it saddens me that this took a back seat to the Joe Rogan Mobile.
CyberCab FSD and AI
Let’s put aside for a moment the idea that TSLA is a CAR company that makes CARS as its main product. Sure, that’s where it gets most of its revenue, but I can hear you screaming that I just don’t get it. TSLA is going to BE the future of transportation. You won’t even need to own a car in the future, you just open the TSLA app, and a car will magically arrive and take you to your destination. For an extra $2.50 the CyberCab will rent you a washed and sanitized pocket pussy while AI videos of Elon, Trump, and Bibi rebuilding the Gaza strip play on the inside of the windshield. Oh also, Elon is just straight up stealing the Ibest engineers for his other project Xai, so yeah. I’ll break this down into 2 categories: Autonomous Taxis, and whatever FSD is.
Autonomous Taxis
WAYMO is currently operating autonomous taxis in LA, Austin, SanFran, and Phoenix. Waymo completed 4 million trips last year. Waymo has the infrastructure to do this at scale. Waymo has successfully done this for quite a while, and is cultivating a decent brand that is currently not known for Seig Heiling. TSLA has exactly 0 of those things. Waymo is currently valued at 45 billion dollarydoos. Tesla is valued at ~1trillion. Tesla applied for a permit like 2 days ago.
In doing a bit of DD on this, I called a friend of mine from when I was getting my PhD. He worked for Mercedes’ self-driving team and then went on to work at a LIDAR startup. I talked to him at length about this and he firmly believes that you NEED LIDAR for driving. His response was that Lidar used to be ~50k but is now significantly cheaper, down to about 5k per LIDAR. CRITICALLY Elon in his infinite wisdom has decided that in order to be capital efficient, all future FSD cars will not use LIDAR, thus making them cheaper. My question to you is: If you have a cab that is capable of running nearly 24/7 in a metro area, generating profit at all times, is a small increase of 25K in capital costs even going to put a small dent in the profits of that company? Absolutely the fuck not. This is the dumbest, most short-sighted decision, and I feel bad for the TSLA engineers that are forced to deal with this arbitrary constraint because the world's richest man is also the cheapest. [Example](https://www.reddit.com/r/MildlyBadDrivers/comments/1j1omc6/the\_tesla\_autopilot\_failed\_to\_detect\_obstacles\_on/)
Okay this is a good time for a little break, and I’ll give Elon some praise where he deserves it. Elon’s big talent has been eschewing conventional wisdom. In 2010, conventional wisdom was that electric cars were expensive, underpowered econo boxes that the government forced you to build. The company had the very good idea of leaning into the expensive part, and making it hyper desirable. He also did a great job with SpaceX! By eschewing conventional rocket designs and insisting on reusability, SpaceX was able to generate a 10x reduction in cost to orbit per kg. The fundamental issue with this worldview is that sometimes you start questioning assumptions that are actually important, and subsequently get something big very wrong. By the time you need to course correct, it's too late. Running a startup and large scale company are very different, and sometimes it's hard to transition between the two.
Whatever FSD is:
Earnestness done, back to long form shitposting. BYD is releasing their “Gods Eye” FSD software more or less for free with their new cars. GM has SuperCruise, Ford has BlueCruise. Mercedes is actually offering L3 Autonomous driving on certain sections of road, etc. Tesla is busy calling an advanced L2 autonomous system “Full Self Driving”, which it's not, or “Autopilot”, which it's…also not. At the moment, you can go to Comma.ai, get a phone to run an open source Neural Net, and get some really impressive Level 2 Driving. Creating a pretty cool adaptive cruise control does not a trillion dollar company make.
CyberCab.
90% of the time I’m ordering an Uber, I’m in a large group of people transporting a gaggle of borderline autistic men from brewery to brewery. Why are there only 2 seats? I know Elon has a breeding fetish and desperately wants to increase the population, but limiting a cab to only 2 people is not the way to go.
Potential+ Conflict of Interest, Potential+ Legal Liability and Pure++ Sleaze
+ This is a CYA so that I don’t get sued
++ This is obviously nebulous so I can call someone sleazy.
Where to begin. Between the 400M in unarmored Cybertrucks, the cancellation of Verizon for the FAA and insistence of Starlink instead, and countless other obvious grifts, there is significant legal and reputational liability for the Autist-in-Chief. This kind of obvious out in the open corruption is going to generate significant backlash, and even has potentially serious legal liabilities. The board is stacked with his family and friends and are providing zero oversight. There is the liability for massive lawsuits against the board and company on behalf of its shareholders. What board would let a CEO effectively run one of the world’s largest companies while running like 5 more orgs and also illegally moonlighting as head of this infantile joke named org while simultaneously not technically its head. Elon is just poaching wherever he wants for whatever company he wants as if there are no real barriers between them. This is not a family company where Brenda goes to borrow a cup of sugar from the bakery.
Conclusion
Downvote this fucking memestock into the ground. This company is not worth 150X earnings. Facebook is 58, and that’s high for it. Amazon is 40, Nvidia is 42. Ford is 5, but with like, lots of debt, so let's not use that. Toyota, the world’s #1 car company in terms of cars sold, is 250B. They currently made 10 times the number of cars that TSLA made last year. If Tesla’s P/E was in line with tech stocks, say 50, it would be roughly $100 per share at the moment, BEFORE the massive upcoming drop in sales. Do you think the market is going to be willing to give an infinitely long leash to Mr. Botched penis implant?
The Jig is up.
YOLO TSLA PUTS
Appendix: Disclaimers
I’m obviously left leaning and that’s going to have an effect on my analysis, there's a large body of research that shows this to be the case so I just wanted to put it out there. 3 years ago I graduated with my Ph.D in the field of Computational Mechanics, and a large number of my closest friends from graduate school are currently facing massive disruptions in their professional lives because of the budget cuts. Think people that work at NASA, Federal Labs, etc. I’m pissed.
Appendix: Methodology
Critically, the database does not identify if a car is new or not, so we have to make a determination. To do that, one of my assumptions was that if the Car Model year was within one year of the year of registration, then it would count as a new sale. This obviously has some faults, but unfortunately, car companies still sell new 2023 cars in 2024. While it's certainly possible to buy a used car less than a year old, this is still likely a very good estimator. It’s also clear in the data that not all of the January registrations are in yet, but the underlying statistical assumption is that it is unlikely that TSLA registrations would be affected in a statistically different manner. I’ll be excluding New Mexico as there are roughly 10x fewer. The code for my analysis is here:
This is for analyzing Colorado, but it's very straightforward and can be switched to NY or TX.
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
Data = pd.read_csv('CO_EV_Registrations_02.csv')
State = 'Colorado'
Data['DateTime'] = pd.to_datetime(Data['Registration Date'], format='%m/%d/%Y')
DataLatest = Data.loc[Data['Latest DMV Snapshot Flag']==True]
DataLatest['RegistrationYear'] = DataLatest['DateTime'].dt.year
DataLatest['RegistrationMonth'] = DataLatest['DateTime'].dt.month
DataLatest = DataLatest.loc[DataLatest['Drivetrain Type'] == 'BEV']
DataLatest = DataLatest.sort_values(by='DateTime')
DataLatest['IsNewCar'] = (DataLatest['Vehicle Model Year']+1) >= DataLatest['RegistrationYear']
DataLatest = DataLatest.loc[DataLatest['IsNewCar']]
pivot_df = DataLatest.groupby(['RegistrationYear', 'RegistrationMonth']).agg(
total_vehicles=('Vehicle Count', 'sum'), # Sum of all registered BEVs
tesla_count=('Vehicle Count', lambda x: x[DataLatest['Vehicle Make'] == 'TESLA'].sum()) # Sum of Tesla registrations
).reset_index()
pivot_df['tesla_percentage'] = (pivot_df['tesla_count'] / pivot_df['total_vehicles']) * 100
pivot_df['date'] = pd.to_datetime(pivot_df['RegistrationYear'].astype(str) + '-' + pivot_df['RegistrationMonth'].astype(str), format='%Y-%m')
plt.plot(pivot_df['date'], pivot_df['tesla_percentage'], marker='o', linestyle='-', label='Tesla %')
# Formatting the plot
plt.xlabel('Time')
plt.ylabel('Tesla Registration Percentage')
plt.title('Tesla Registrations as a Percentage of Total Vehicles Over Time' + State)
plt.xticks(rotation=45)
plt.grid(True)
plt.legend()
# Show the plot
plt.show()
pivot_df