Tesla Will Soon Report A Terrible Q2: Shortseller

By Jacob Wolinsky
Published on
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Stanphyl Capital letter to investors for the month ended June 30, 2022, discussing their short thesis for Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA).

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Tesla’s Gigantic Money Furnaces Losing Billions Of Dollars

In an interview released in June but conducted in late-May with a local Tesla fan club, Elon Musk called Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA)’s new German and Texas factories “gigantic money furnaces losing billions of dollars.” Yet in the quarterly conference call just five weeks prior to that he implied things were going great at those factories…

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Q1 2022 hedge fund letters, conferences and more

So, as Zach said, we remain confident of a 50% growth in vehicle production in 2022 versus ‘21. I think, we actually have a reasonable shot at a 60% increase over last year. So, let’s see. Obviously, we ramped production, as you will know, with Giga Berlin and Giga Texas in the past few months. So, with two fantastic factories with great teams, and they are ramping rapidly. Now, with new factories, the initial ramp always looks small, but it grows exponentially. So, I have very high confidence in the teams of both factories. And we expect to ramp those initially slowly, but like I said, growing exponentially with them achieving high volume by the end of this year.

…and then proceeded to almost immediately dump billions of dollars in TSLA stock. Back when this country had an SEC that prioritized “corporate fraud” over nonsensical crap such as “climate change disclosures” it might have taken a look at this, but under Trump and now Biden the SEC has become one of the most useless agencies in Washington, which is quite an accomplishment considering its competition!

We also learned in June that Tesla only fulfilled its obligation to report a series of serious Autopilot accidents to the NHTSA after the NHTSA had already learned about them.

Elon Musk remains the most vile person ever to head a large-cap U.S. public company, and we remain short Tesla, the biggest bubble-stock in modern market history, because:

  • It has a flat-to-sliding share of the world’s EV market and a share of the overall auto market that’s only around 1.5%, yet a market cap greater than the next 9 largest automakers (by market cap) combined despite selling fewer than 3% of the cars they do.
  • It has no “moat” of any kind; i.e., nothing meaningfully proprietary in terms of its electric car technology (which has now been equaled or surpassed by numerous competitors), while existing automakers—unlike Tesla­—have a decades-long “experience moat” of knowing how to mass-produce, distribute and service high-quality cars consistently and profitably. Meanwhile, its previously proprietary Superchargers are being opened to everyone.
  • Excluding working capital benefits and sunsetting emission credit sales Tesla generates only minimal free cash flow.
  • Growth in sequential unit demand for Tesla’s cars is at a crawl relative to expectations.
  • Elon Musk is a pathological liar.

A Terrible Q2

Tesla will soon report a terrible Q2 (even before accounting for a roughly $500 million Bitcoin write-down), with deliveries down substantially from Q1, which itself showed no growth over Q4. However, Q2’s decrease was due to a monthlong COVID-related closing of Tesla’s Shanghai factory, and thus it might be a while yet before we can get a “clean” demand picture for the company. Regardless, Tesla has objectively lost its “product edge,” with many competing cars now offering comparable or better real-world range, better interiors, similar or faster charging speeds and much better quality. (Tesla ranks second-to-last in Consumer Reports’ reliability survey while British consumer organization Which? found it to be one of the least reliable cars in existence.) Thus, due to competitors’ temporary production constraints, waiting times are now longer for many of Tesla’s direct EV competitors than they are for a Tesla. (Here’s one example, and here’s another.)

In fact, Tesla is now the second, third or fourth choice for many EV buyers, and only maintains its volume lead though a short-lived edge in production capacity that will disappear over the next 12 to 36 months as competitors rapidly increase the ability to produce their superior EVs. In fact, Tesla’s poorly-built Model Y faces current (or imminent) competition from the much better made (and often just better) electric Hyundai Ioniq 5, Kia EV6, Ford Mustang Mach E, Cadillac Lyriq, Nissan Ariya, Audi Q4 e-tron, BMW iX3, Mercedes EQB, Volvo XC40 Recharge and Polestar 3. And Tesla’s Model 3 now has terrific direct “sedan competition” from Volvo’s beautiful Polestar 2, the great new BMW i4, the upcoming Hyundai Ioniq 6 and Volkswagen Aero, and multiple local competitors in China—here, from Snowbull Capital’s @TaylorOgan, is just one example of that Chinese competition:

Tesla

And in the high-end electric car segment worldwide the Porsche Taycan (the base model of which is now considerably less expensive than Tesla’s Model S) outsells the Model S, while the spectacular new Mercedes EQS, Audi e-Tron GT and Lucid Air make it look like a fast Yugo, and the extremely well reviewed new BMW iX and Mercedes EQS SUV do the same to the Model X.

The worst thing that can possibly happen to “the Tesla story” will be when its German and Texas plants are fully operational and the subsequent excess capacity stares the world right in the face, thereby ending its myth of “unlimited demand” (especially at current, drastically-raised prices, where the cheapest Model 3 now starts at $47,000 and the cheapest Model Y begins at $66,000); in fact, look for margin-destroying price cuts by late this year or early 2023.

Tesla Is Netflix

Indeed, for years I’ve said “Tesla is Blackberry”—the maker of a first-generation version of a product that—once the market was proven—would be supplanted into niche obscurity by newer, better versions; now I can provide a much more recent analogy: Tesla is Netflix. For years Netflix had an absurd valuation based on its pioneering position in streaming media, but once it proved that such a market existed myriad competitors swarmed all over it, and in April the stock collapsed when we learned that not only is Netflix no longer in “hypergrowth” mode but for the first time since 2011 (when it transitioned from physical DVDs) it actually lost subscribers. I believe Musk knows that Tesla is “the next Netflix” (hence his recent “Twitter buying distraction”), with VW, Hyundai/Kia, Ford, GM, BMW, Mercedes, BYD & other Chinese competitors and, in a few years, Toyota & Honda, being the Disney, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Peacock, Hulu, Paramount +, etc., of the electric car market, stealing Tesla’s share and eventually pounding its stock price down 95% or so from today’s, into the valuation of “just another car company.”

Meanwhile, in June the NHTSA announced that its investigation of Tesla’s deadly Autopilot has expanded into “an engineering analysis,” the last required step before (finally!) demanding a full recall. The refund liability potential for Tesla for this is in the billions of dollars, and possibly even the tens of billions if a class action lawsuit proves that the cars involved were purchased solely due to the (fallacious) promise of “full self-driving.” And, of course, there will be a massive “valuation reappraisal” for Tesla’s stock as the world wakes up to the fact that Tesla’s so-called “autonomy technology” is just trailing-edge garbage.

Also in June the NHTSA released some raw data about driver assistance system crashes, and over 70% of them involved Teslas. (For all Tesla deaths cited in the media—which is likely only a small fraction of those that have occurred—see TeslaDeaths.com.) Also interesting is that—unlike for other systems—in the vast majority of cases the Autopilot Teslas hit something rather than “were hit,” as was the case for more advanced systems (Level 4). And Tesla has sold this trashy software for over five years now:

Tesla

…and still promotes it on its website via a completely fraudulent video!

Meanwhile, the “record” profits that accompanied Q1’s nearly flat delivery number were obtained via myriad one-time items, including $679 million of emission credit sales that will disappear over the next year or two as every automaker ramps up its EV sales, a mysterious $502 million reduction in SG&A expense (of which only $140 million was due to reduced stock comp) despite opening new factories in Germany and Texas (what is Tesla capitalizing instead of expensing???) and a combination of FIFO accounting and multiple sticker price increases that allowed Tesla to expense rapidly rising raw materials costs at older, lower prices while selling cars built from those materials at new, considerably higher prices. And, as cited here previously, Tesla practices consistently fraudulent warranty accounting. Adjusting for these factors, Tesla had GAAP earnings for the quarter that were at least $1/share lower than the posted $2.86, and annualizing that realistic $1.86/share to $7.44 means that at June’s closing price Tesla (on a no-growth quarter) had a PE ratio of around 90 vs. an industry-wide figure in the mid-single digits.

Meanwhile, excluding growth in net payables and $993 million in sunsetting emission credit sales, Tesla’s free cash for Q1 2022 and Q4 2021 combined was just $950 million, which annualizes to only around $1.9 billion*. A 15x multiple on this (roughly a 100% premium to BMW’s multiple) would make TSLA stock worth only around $28/share!

*And I’m not even backing out Tesla’s massively dilutive stock comp

An Energy Company

And for those of you who think that Tesla is “really an energy company,” in Q1 “Tesla Energy” had revenue of just $616 million (down 10.5% sequentially) and cost of revenue of $688 million, meaning it had a negative gross margin. So if Tesla is “really an energy company,” it’s even more screwed than if it’s just a car company!

Meanwhile, many Tesla bulls sincerely believe that ten years from now the company will be twice the size of Volkswagen or Toyota, thereby selling around 20 million cars a year (up from the current run-rate of around 1.3 million); in fact in March Musk himself even raised this as a possibility. To illustrate how utterly absurd this is, going from 1.3 million cars a year today to 20 million in ten years means that in addition to one million cars a year of eventual production from the new German and Texas factories, Tesla would have to add 35 more brand new 500,000 car/year factories with sold out production; i.e., a new factory nearly every single quarter for ten years!

Another favorite hype story from Tesla bulls has been “the China market,” but Tesla’s Q1 2022 domestic China sales sequentially declined by approximately 8000 units vs. Q4 2021, and it had only around 1.9% of the overall Chinese passenger vehicle market and has flatlined at only around 10% of the BEV market. In other words, “Tesla China” is no longer “a growth story”:

Tesla

Another favorite Tesla hype story has been built around so-called “proprietary battery technology.” In fact though, Tesla has nothing proprietary there—it doesn’t make them, it buys them from Panasonic, CATL and LG, and it’s the biggest liar in the industry regarding the real-world range of its cars. And if new-format 4680 cells enter the market some time in 2024 (as is now expected), even if Tesla makes some of its own,  other manufacturers will gladly sell them to anyone.

And oh, the joke of a “pickup truck” Tesla previewed in 2019 (and still hasn’t shown in production-ready form) won’t be much of “growth engine” either, as it will enter a dogfight of a market; in fact, Ford’s terrific 2022 all-electric F-150 Lightning now has over 200,000 retail reservations (plus many more fleet reservations), GM has introduced its fantastic 2023 electric Silverado which already has nearly 200,000 reservations and Rivian’s pick-up has gotten excellent early reviews.

Regarding safety, as noted earlier in this letter, Tesla continues to deceptively sell its hugely dangerous so-called “Autopilot” system, which Consumer Reports has completely eviscerated; God only knows how many more people this monstrosity unleashed on public roads will kill despite the NTSB condemning it. Elsewhere in safety, the Chinese government forced the recall of tens of thousands of Teslas for a dangerous suspension defect the company spent years trying to cover up, and now Tesla has been hit by a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. for the same defect. Tesla also knowingly sold cars that it knew were a fire hazard and did the same with solar systems, and after initially refusing to do so voluntarily, it was forced to recall a dangerously defective touchscreen. In other words, when it comes to the safety of customers and innocent bystanders, Tesla is truly one of the most vile companies on Earth. Meanwhile the massive number of lawsuits of all types against the company continues to escalate.

So Here Is Tesla’s Competition In Cars...

(note: these links are regularly updated)

And In China, Where Tesla’s EV Market Share Is Stuck At 10% And Not Growing…

Here's Tesla's Competition In Autonomous Driving; The Independents All Have Deals With Major OEMs…

Here's Where Tesla's Competition Will Get Its Battery Cells...

Here's Tesla's Competition In Charging Networks...

And here’s Tesla’s competition in storage batteries…

Thanks,

Mark Spiegel

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