Liberty

The media don't understand that Musk is a part-time internet troll. Didn't he try to buy The Onion recently? He grew up on the internet and it's his type of culture/humor. Interesting how the halo effect works for this... When things are going well for Musk and his stock is up, people love his humor/iconoclasm (remember when the whole world's mouth was agape at the red convertible orbiting the Earth with Douglas Adams and Bowie references and an empty spacesuit driving?). When things are going badly, then it must be going badly because he's not a serious old stodgy CEO like all the others... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ As for the candy, Munger seems to like it:

It is possible. My understanding of the RF propagation is that wavelength has a much bigger effect in terms of penetrating walls and obstructions than transmit power. Sure, but what I mean is if you have a router and a smartphone that are specced to work together, they'll both transmit at about the same power and propagate over about the same distances, right? So if you boost one of the two (the router) without boosting the power of the smartphone, you won't get all the gains because while the smartphone might be able to receive the router better, the router won't be able to receive the smartphone better and for the connection to be stable and fast, you need both sides to be clear, not just one. That's how I picture it, anyway. Am not a RF guy, so am happy to be shown why I'm wrong. Full Duplex Docsis will address this issue... I believe it's a completely different thing than what I was talking about, unless I'm missing something. Full duplex docsis is a spec for better using cable bandwidth (reaching 10gbs and symmetrical ul/dl), I'm talking about how wireless transmission power needs to be specced together to get the most benefit (can't just increase power on one side and not on the other).

No question. I used to have a fairly optimistic view on the company but that has soured significantly in recent months. I'd say the range of outcomes are skewed far more negatively these days. Things do look bleaker, but I still think the likely "bad scenario" is that they're acquired by Google or Apple or Tencent or someone else if things go off the rail too much. Or maybe they sell another big chunk of equity directly to Tencent or whoever. Musk has done the seemingly impossible so many times that I think there's still a chance he gets the M3 ramp-up done through sheer force of will. Things didn't look good in 2008-2009 either, trying to sell a $100k two-seater of unknown technology and reliability during the great recession, or for SpaceX after their first three launches blew up and they barely had enough money for a fourth... Will this be another nail-biting chapter in the future book, or is this where they hit a wall? This guy certainly is never boring to watch...

From free to almost $550 CAD/year :P Let's see if they have pricing power...

It is possible. My understanding of the RF propagation is that wavelength has a much bigger effect in terms of penetrating walls and obstructions than transmit power. Sure, but what I mean is if you have a router and a smartphone that are specced to work together, they'll both transmit at about the same power and propagate over about the same distances, right? So if you boost one of the two (the router) without boosting the power of the smartphone, you won't get all the gains because while the smartphone might be able to receive the router better, the router won't be able to receive the smartphone better and for the connection to be stable and fast, you need both sides to be clear, not just one. That's how I picture it, anyway. Am not a RF guy, so am happy to be shown why I'm wrong.

Power may make some difference on the edges but not much if the access point antenna is omnidirectional and there are significant obstructions like walls. You can test this by increasing the power on your Wifi router. I tested it: bought an external amplifier and jacked up the power output of my Wifi router antenna and it made almost no difference to the Wifi range. Isn't this because the device you were using with the wifi wasn't specced to also be higher power?

Couldn't range on 5G still be better than wifi because the transmission power will be higher? Though I agree about the problems caused by the physics of using these frequencies. The economics sound very different from large cells currently used for LTE.

Q1 letter: http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ABEA-4CW8X0/6240016912x0x979026/44C49236-1FC2-4FD9-80B1-495ED74E4194/TSLA_Update_Letter_2018-1Q.pdf

Mr. Market has the memory of a goldfish on acid.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180501005638/en/Oath-Selects-AWS-Preferred-Public-Cloud-Provider

"Revenue Grows 16 Percent and EPS Grows 30 Percent" "New $100 Billion Share Repurchase Authorization Announced, Dividend Raised by 16 Percent" Not bad! https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/05/apple-reports-second-quarter-results/

If you're wondering why it's tanking, along with MTCH (-17%): https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/01/facebook-is-launching-a-dating-app.html

Looks like FB is getting into online dating: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/01/facebook-is-launching-a-dating-app.html

Looks like a case of your greatest strength also being your greatest weakness. The same aggressive ambition that makes Musk do things that others wouldn't even touch at rates that leave others behind is the thing that probably means that he's living too close to the edge financially. I wish he had a rockstar CFO that could be the Yin to his Yang, but that's probably a tall order since it's hard to have more than on chef in the kitchen when it comes to these oversized personalities. Still as someone who has no capital at risk with him, I think it's great how he's catalyzing whole industries and making things move forward faster than they otherwise would have. Progress doesn't happen by itself, people have to do the hard work. I wish him the best.

Not all excess or overvaluation is a bubble. The market doesn't spend much time right on the "historical average" line, it's usually swinging back and forth between over and under. So while I think we've had some bubbles in the recent past, I think some of what many people are qualifying as bubble doesn't fit that description, at least for my understanding.

Fiscal Q2: https://www.transdigm.com/investor-relations/news-releases/news-article/

Howley chairman, Stein new CEO: https://www.transdigm.com/investor-relations/news-releases/news-article/?myartid=2345699 That was quicker than I expected.

Today is Claude Shannon's birthday (born in 1916, died in 2001). Probably a good day to go on Amazon and order this book! ;)

Well, at least you have bragging rights, right? Or is it worse to be right but have made almost no money than not to have invested at all..? :-\ Somewhat off-topic, but "having bragging rights" reminds me of this comic about exposure: http://s3.amazonaws.com/theoatmeal-img/comics/exposure/exposure.png

FX-adjusted organic growth for past 2 years (most important line is maintenance & other recurring, that’s where they really make money).

I'm thinking that people are reading way too much into one quarter. On a short time scale, most of what you see is noise, not signal. Charter hasn't been taking much price, if any, since the acquisition. In fact, they've been increasing internet speeds on their packages, so they're giving people more value for the same price. They'll increase them even more when they are all-digital (which frees a ton of bandwidth in their pipes). I have no doubt that someday they'll take more price, but for now I don't think that's the reason.

You have to look at what changed since then. Back then, video was very profitable. Scale is still important, and you don't want to necessarily rapidly lose video subs and have a much worse rate card and all that. But if you had very slowly melting video subs with rapidly growing broadband, you'd be in a good spot. People cut video because they switch over to OTT video and spend more time on their mobile devices, so they're not really cutting the cord, just spending on a different product (with better margins) on the same cord. If you look at this: Based on what management said, a lot of the video losses in this Q were for non-pay, and the timing was at the discretion of the company. It seems like it's possible that they had this spike in Q1 and the rest of the year will look a lot better (maybe grow? they seemed confident they could do it in the past, though the integration is probably disruptive on that front for now) because they just did it all at once rather than spread it over time.

I'd love more detail on how you'd imagine the physics of that would work. Sorry, I think you misread a question as a statement. So you are implying that photons and a glass pipe are required, so the laws of physics dictate that alternate delivery is not one way it could blow up? Seems like this article agrees with you, long term (I've also read the Deloitte report, like everyone else, projecting the explosion in demand for fiber): https://www.zdnet.com/article/fiber-broadband-is-it-a-waste-with-5g-and-elon-musks-satellites-on-the-horizon/ I guess maybe continued surprise cord cutting numbers and a covenant or three gets tripped before the 5G rollout/demand explosion? I was kind of just giving your question a push with another question. The thing with wires, is that they're not shared. Airwaves/spectrum is a lot more shared, and the physics of radio waves means that the frequencies that have the higher throughput are also shorter range and don't penetrate materials as well as the longer ones, so you need more numerous, smaller cells, and you start to have more trouble providing reliable, high quality service... So I'm trying to imagine a world where most houses in a decently dense neighborhood all start streaming 4K Netflix content (with all the kids in their bedrooms watching Youtube on their iPads simultaneously...) over wireless in the evening. It'd be difficult on the shared spectrum on a local level, it would be difficult to give good service to everyone (always weird deadspots and people deep in basements or with thick walls that get poor reception), and the backhaul needed to pipe all those bits back would be almost as costly to built as a new cableco from scratch, since each 5G cell would be quite small (lots of branches needed on the tree trunk, so to speak). That's just how I visualize the situation, but maybe I'm missing something.

Strange shareholder letter, IMO. Non direct relation to GOOG business. I believe he should have at least try to address GOOG way on how solve the privacy of data issues, if he does not discuss the business . In one way, it's cool that they're thinking so long term that the current stuff doesn't even make the cut of a letter. A lot of things can be addressed in conference calls (GFDR, etc). But I haven't had time yet to read the latest transcript, so I don't know how transparent they were about that. I do like a mix of high level and some more operational, in-the-trenches level stuff in letters, though, so that one left me a little bit on my appetite too.

I'd love more detail on how you'd imagine the physics of that would work.