They have already leveraged their stock beyond their entire pre-AI market cap. There is no return to the old days now. If the AI boom goes bust on them, they have left themselves impossibly exposed. They will owe more money than they can possibly pay back.

They took what should have been a slam dunk to sell shovels for a gold rush with a nice fallback to previous viable business into an existential threat to their business.

A lot of the “AI” layoffs were using it as a plausible excuse for layoffs they wanted to do anyway. So I don’t anticipate a lot of them coming back.

In fact, if the models are ingesting this, they will get dumber because training on LLM output degrades things.

Someone compromises your password. Now they can “find hub” to know exactly where you are. If they are a criminal, they can wait and strike when you’re online data says you are vulnerable.

You lose your unencrypted device. Someone launches your browser and logs into your bank…

Advertising knows your financial situation and might, for example, present a higher price because it sees that you generally are willing to pay more.

It’s not that you have something to hide sure to dubious behavior, it’s that all these others will exploit that knowledge to commit crimes against you or have unfair advantages in their relationship with you.

Challenge there being that seems to have proven elusive. It’s not too surprising, but trying to use machine learning for robotics is actually really hard.

Driving is much easier, training data with video, audio, and other sensor input complete with how the human manipulated steering and two pedals.

But direct human interaction with the environment is both much more complicated than three controls and is not instrumented. They are trying to build training data from remote operators, but it turns out we aren’t very good at controlling these things remotely anywhere close to acting directly. We are terrible teachers and there’s a fraction of the actionable data that other more successful models had to work with.

If an AI sees a video of someone doing something, it can make a similar video, but can’t model how that might map to what it would see as unrelated motor and hydraulic operation.

Note that Tesla was clearly a viable business, I don’t see the justification for it being 3 times the value of ford, gm, Toyota, and Honda all put together.

Generally people are not challenging the fundamental possibility of these as viable business, just that they don’t make sense at their valuations.

Though I’ll agree that open ai particularly should get some skepticism. To the extent that actionable business models might emerge, I don’t see openai actually in a position to be a big party of any of it. Microsoft and Anthropic seem to mostly own business revenue, ChatGPT is generally not even providing the models people select when they are able to choose.

OEM license revenue represents a tiny tiny bit of their financials these days. They could just charge nothing for it and business wise no one probably notice much of a difference.

It is foundational to a lot of what they do, but older devices are just as good for their subscription and tie in revenue. Hell I use my work subscription for office from Linux, complete with OneDrive filesystem synchronization. Microsoft gets all their money from my headcount even as I don’t even use Windows.

But that capex could bite them hard if revenue falls to follow from it. That’s pretty much the only exposure investors care about.

Familiar but with a difference in my case.

I’ve spent my entire career alternating between two experiences.

One is being grilled why I an delivering what I think should be done instead of what the executives told me to do.

The other is getting awards and promotions when it turns out that I was right and the customers loved it.

It happened to work for me to do it my way, though my executives have usually simultaneously rented the implication they don’t have good vision, they also know how to leverage my success for themselves. Particularly this most recent promotion has been stalled to reward better drones instead, but it’s looking like they have to pivot back to rewarding the folks the paying customers actually like instead of those that feed the executive egos.

It’s not just an abstract number, but leveraging it changes the value. If they hypothetically tried to leverage 2 trillion with of their stock, it wouldn’t be worth 2 trillion.

Of course the needle would probably barely move if they tried to leverage 50 billion.

Oh robot butlers would be huge, but no one is even vaguely close to that. All the demos have been remote controlled, demonstrating that can make dumb robots, but that’s not really new…

Yes, but it sounds like the kid jumped into the street without looking and physics were not on favor of getting from 17 mph to 0 in time.

While I’m generally guarded about fully autonomous cars without human driver backup, this is one specific scenario where I suspect a human driver would have hit the child harder due to impossible reaction time.

Robo taxis are a thing… but not much of a thing and it’s not Tesla.

Don’t worry, while they may have worse business results than a lot of other companies, displaying steeper loss of market, whose non car initiative have failed, whose leader squandered his reputation to throw in with a political movement that hates EVs in hopes of political clout that evaporated within a few months…

They still have a market cap bigger than all their competitors combined, because why not…

No amount of Christianity faiths away grief. Whatever you may sincerely think in your mind, you will feel the weight of the loss

Neither do folks necessarily expects a widow or widower to be wholly consumed by grief, and maybe even after 11 days be able to normally engage with normal life, though as far as my experience has been, such a traumatic death tends to impact people longer…

However, it is difficult to imagine such a cheerful, at ease demeanor in the context of discussing the memorial, and celebrating how awesome the ‘merch’ did. But let’s go and give the benefit of the doubt and say that a person with almost a couple weeks under their belt can at least distract themselves by pretending this is just another event and distancing their mind from the reality that it has to do with the spouse’s death. Except then due to some context I don’t know she seems to be concerned about infighting, and says he’s dead now and get over it as a reason to stop whatever infighting she was concerned about.

So she wasn’t acting like someone who found enough strength and comfort in her faith to carry on in a functional capacity in spite of the trauma. She wasn’t acting like someone who was distracting herself from the situation. She was a person at ease and excited about engagement and merchandising, with perhaps a bit of impatience for people that need to be told to get over it, he’s dead.

Yes, but even then you’d expect the faltering to be reflected, just earlier. As the analysts estimate low profits you’d expect the stock to suffer a sharp decline then.

Given how overvalued Tesla is arguably in general and that the rationalization is that while it’s not the biggest and best brand now, but their growth trajectory should carry them past all the other automakers, it’s insane that they are only down 11% from their late december highs, and still showing a $1.4 trillion market cap…

It’s not a company that looks like growth nor do their current results look to justify that crazy valuation. They are valued at 3x Ford, GM, Toyota, and Honda combined, despite having more modest business results than any of them.

Yes, this local move upward on beating estimates despite a bad result is normal, but the broader trend of this stock is still anything but.

They squandered their reputation to gain political clout that seems to have evaporated and are locked into EVs in a market where that’s no longer subsidized and a great deal of EV interest is muted now and other manufacturers are able to push out compelling EV cars. You know that Musk is going to take your money and spend it how he sees fit including obscene bonuses to himself…

I just don’t understand Tesla investors at all at this point…

Eh… he was a fair target for mockery and it’s not like his death changed any minds for the better… Charlie the martyr is far worse than Charlie the living douche.

It’s not a matter of illegal, it’s a matter of how much of a grift it is. Celebrating merch sales about your husband’s death is just sociopath level.

It matters in the context of this movement trying to play like they gave a shit about this man for the sake of sympathy when even his own widow clearly cared about engagement and merchandise than his actual death.

Admittedly, not that newsworthy because most of the world has stopped thinking about him, but TPUSA is still rolling and still riding that martyrdom angle.

Woo, more merch sales!

Eh, I think she’s fine on that front, whatever procedures she has had are a bit lighter.

She doesn’t have the over the top saw-face like others in the circle that have basically mutilated themselves with ill-advised procedures.

I didn’t know a single person whose faith caused them to feel like the loss of a loved one is no big deal. They may say that in their mind, but it hurts all the same

But maybe 11 days is enough to be a bit more collected in general, but the context is off-putting. Even thinking about revenue and merch sales during something akin to your spouse’s funeral seems like a sociopath. I’ve heard people who had absolutely moved on and normal day to day get choked up at a one year memorial when they were faced with discussing a close friend. To be directly talking about a memorial for your husband less than two weeks after his death without missing a beat, and sincerely at complete ease, not merely trying to put up a brave front… That’s not the reaction of someone that actually cared.