The ZIRP Paradox

I find this Tesla review very interesting but it also misses one of the major factors in Tesla’s growth. It is truly one of the best pure play climate change companies in the market. To accelerate the transition to sustainable energy is a great narrative for our times. It is how I can use my money to forward my desire during the world of trump and leaving the Paris accords (which are necessary but nowhere near sufficient). I would much rather put my money in Tesla than Exxon or SP500 or the value dividend stocks (fossil fuel energy company dominated). Yes, the climate change narrative has exceeded all expectations when added to our DCF and ZIRP for Tesla. I have a Tesla since 2017 and it only made me more willing to invest in the company when the shorts caused the stock price to drop way more than necessary. I now see the irrational exuberance of the Tesla crowd and wonder when the merry go round will stop. But woe to me every time I have sold a bit of my Tesla stock because it had shot up like a rocket. It has just kept defying gravity. Perhaps this SP500 addition will be the last major phase of this massive run, But I would hate to bet against Tesla, but I would never purchase the stock at current prices and have accelerated my desire to sell but will never go all in or all out.

Energy is quantifiable. Let us define energy as sustainable, unsustainable, or not defined. Then, not unlike the thousands of pages of the tax code, let us, in good governance, require all energy users to report their energy use down to the last joule/calorie and give tax deductions or credits as ‘deserved’. So when a Peloton user burns calories while using ‘unsustainable’ energy electricity, that would not qualify for favored tax treatment. Similarly, a solar panel may have components which were not obtained ‘sustainably’. And so on. Ultimately, the energy on the planet is what was created by the fusion of the contributing stars prior to earth’s formation combined with the cummulative energy of the sun as absorbed since that formation. I would bet that only Buddha has maintained a ‘sustainable’ energy use minimum. Tesla - that’s funny Nanny!

Rusty… using this same myth… now do Bitcoin! I’m a bull, and I think this is the best bear case.

It all makes sense but I prefer Occam’s Razor - in this case, good old fashioned stock price manipulation through offshore options buying.

I’m a software guy, not a car guy, but this topic is up my alley. An anecdote: I was seriously ready to buy a Volt for the climate benefit, but GM messed that one up as well. Too cramped, too meh. Instead I put myself on the Model 3 waiting list for 2+ years. There’s a lot I could say about driving a Tesla, but when people ask me I generally refer to it as an iPhone on wheels.

I have had serious misgivings about Musk and the stock valuation for a long time, but I also believe people are discounting the software angle. It’s not just by about Autopilot. You can even purchase software upgrades for your car, much like in a video game. That is the definition of the hedonic treadmill, is it not?

Tesla looks so much less ridiculous when compared to Snowflake and their CEO’s $95,000,000 per month options grant. We truly live in the dumbest timeline.

You need a Brian Scaletta IPO!

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s exactly what you have to convince yourself of on Tesla. Not any specific fundamental scenario on software, but the “general” idea that software represents an almost undefinable upside opportunity over the very long run.

Haha. Little bit of column a, little bit of column b, perhaps.

The long Now is an absolute masterpiece, I read it about once a month.

I sold my puts on Tesla last week because I needed the losses.

I honestly don’t know how this ends , but it does feel very familiar. I remember telling clients in early 2000 , either everything we know about how you value a business is wrong or these stocks are too high. I feel the same way now , but ZIRP has changed the game and needs to be factored. But this market does value future cash flows over present cash flows - and the further they are in the future the more they are valued.

Its like living in the Twilight Zone.

Great article Rusty —-but I love my Peleton.

Merry Christmas to all the pack!

I’m curious about the actual carbon footprint of a Tesla. This argument is pushed, in general, on the merits of electrical energy vs. gas. But how much carbon is produced in the production of the car and battery? How much is burned up building those giant battery factories? how much to recycle the batteries, and how long do they last? It is a new enough car those questions perhaps cannot be answered with precision, but I’ve seen nothing about it.

Back in the early 'oughts, Toyota hybrids were extremely popular among the woke crowd with enough money to overpay for a car. “Fabulous for the environment!” Within a few years a team of guys studied and compared all aspects of carbon emissions, from production to the end of the expected lifespan of the vehicle. Who had the lowest overall emissions? The Jeep Cherokee. It was relatively simple and cheap to manufacture and people kept them running for 20 years and sometimes more. I regret I do not remember the name of the auto magazine this was printed in, but it’s probably not hard to find.

The story of the Cherokee has stuck in my mind as a very useful example of narrative as bunk.

Rusty, curious to get your thoughts on another paradox that may or may not be unique to Tesla. How do you reconcile Tesla’s ability to exist only in this specific set of economic conditions with the fact that they’re one of the few companies seemingly trying to innovate in an industry that lacks any kind of imagination or innovation recently?

I find it very plausible that by keeping interest rates where they are and making capital easy to access, we’ve wound up in a world where capital is not deployed efficiently and we do not see the market discriminating against unprofitable investment ideas as harshly as it has in the past. But in an industry as capital-intensive, low-margin, and cutthroat as the car industry is, the barriers to entry are massive. Just name the last time we had an upstart car company that managed to even make a dent in the market for a 15-year period. I can’t recall any in the last 50 years. It’s a brutal business that no one wants to enter because it chews up cash and destroys it.

The paradox with Musk is that despite cheap liquidity that would allow him to build a very staid an unadventurous company if he chose to, instead he’s gone out and actually built a car that has created a whole bunch of revolutionary ideas in an industry that is normally horribly afraid of change because of the costs associated with it mentioned earlier. I think there are reasons to have questions about some of the financial engineering of Tesla in 2017-2019 when they went through CAO after CAO, I think they obviously have quality problems that would be unacceptable in any other luxury manufacturer, but despite the infinite timeline they possess, they’ve innovated more relentlessly than every other company in the industry. Despite the questionable tweets and financials mentioned earlier, Elon Musk has actually done the one thing that we often note many CEOs are unwilling to do - he’s taken risks to build something new. With that, we get all of the good and bad of Elon, but as you mention in your piece, I think there’s an awful lot of good ideas mixed in with the bad ones here.

But the other question that I raise based on this is that were it not for the current situation as it relates to liquidity, would Musk have even been able to get Tesla to this point? Not of the market cap they possess, but of the products they create. Would he have had to give up greater equity control to a PE/VC-run board that would have sold the tech to one of the Big 3 where it would have been buried in a 2014 Cadillac as the acquisition was written down by 80%? Would the initial cost of capital been too much to even get off the ground? We rightfully nail companies when they prioritize short-term decisions to maximize stock price, but aside from his unique qualities as a pitchman, Musk’s execution at Tesla can hardly be said to be trying to maximize stock price today at the expense of tomorrow.

Now - man, this is really the interesting part to me - Musk’s success has absolutely bred a group of copycats. Whether it’s SPACs that push their trucks down hills or established automakers who want to see a little Tesla juice added to their stock, there’s no question that ther eis a whole bunch of capital following Tesla that looks like it has a chance to be horribly allocated. I mean, we’re talking dot-com era issues with companies worth billions of dolalrs with no revenue in an industry with 3-5% margins on a good day. And the SPAC craze isn’t likely to leave initial investors holding the bag for nearly as much as they put in, thanks to the wonderful service of public markets. So if we’re talking about the fact that Tesla is viewed as a success story that is now drawing capital into a business that eats it, then we’ve got some real issues. Because I’m not sure if I’d rather be forced to start an automaker or an airline if those were my only choices.

I think it’s important to separate Tesla into 3 parts when looking at it - the product, the company, and the stock. The product has been fantastic though quality has been inconsistent to say the least. The company has lived on a razor’s edge and still exists in a business that may kill it at sometime in the next decade. And the stock price is untethered from reality and built upon the foundation that you noted allowed its growth. Weighin these three pieces separately, and their impact on the auto industry as a whole, is the industry better off for having Tesla in it than existing without it? I’m not sure I have a good way to weigh the force Tesla is exerting in a positive direction against waiting for the other shoe to drop on the EV SPACs over the next few years and the destruction of wealth that I see coming there, but curious as to your thoughts on it.