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Thoughts on the Standard Model 3 and Standard Model Y from someone who spent a lot of time selling Model 3s and Ys:
Tesla’s most popular models went down in price where everyone else just got $7500 expensive. They did so while maintaining the things that are most important to CUSTOMERS (range, FSD, and functionality) and the most important thing to INVESTORS (profitability).
That’s huge for narrative as well as preventing an extended extreme dropoff in sales that will inevitably result.
This is a golden opportunity to seize back market share that they’ve lost in the EV space. Once the sugar crash of the tax credit going away fades, Tesla is extremely well positioned to a degree that nobody else in the America is.
The lower pricing means it’s cheaper for Tesla to buy down rates and offer aggressive promotions, making it easier to attract buyers. They were able to get the $43k dollar Model 3 to $299/mo with $0 down at one point so imagine what they can do with the $36k Model 3.
As an investor I hope and expect to see Tesla start pushing very aggressive financing and lease deals to acquire more customers.
The lower pricing also means that it’s easier for people to qualify for lending and leasing. $100 a month doesn’t seem like a lot but it is. It’s a lot easier for people to qualify for a loan if it’s 5 grand smaller.
They also managed to do this without devaluing existing vehicles and burning their owners (again) with an huge depreciation hit.
Going from $100k Model S to $45k Model 3 is less of a challenge in some respects because you can delete expensive stuff like the air suspension. It’s way harder to go from $43k Model 3 to $36k Model 3 without making the car feel like a total POS.
They’ve made a great car that appeals to a broader group of people. Most importantly, it’s a Trojan Horse to get FSD to more people.
The journey is made of many small steps and these vehicles represent another step down the path to a future of sustainable abundance.
grok, imagine a Tesla using a Starlink suction cupped to the roof so that it's technically a Starlink ad but focus mostly on:
- the benefits that FSD provides
- the safety of the car
- the fact that you can actually take a road trip in a Tesla
Imagine. Create. Share.
Dream up a Starlink ad with Grok @Imagine. Post on @X for the opportunity to be featured by Starlink during the big game.
Learn more → starlink.com/imagine
chasing nines retweeted
AN AGENT IMMEDIATELY LOSES SERIOUS AURA POINTS THE SECOND YOU HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT USAGE.
I've been saying this for over a month and people are starting to get it. Yes, Grokbot is better than Muse, but I don't have to think at all about usage with Muse. I can tell it to do everything I can possibly think of and more, and that's what changes the game. I don't think about tokens.
chasing nines retweeted
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But that’s not all. You, yes YOU can apply to join and write your own articles as an official GGN Swampagandist!
Together we will push back with all our might against the artificially-elevated voices shouting over us, and leading us astray. This story is ours. Let’s tell it.
Share links to the most accurate articles anywhere online in the history of journalism. Send them to your mom. She loves the truth.
I’ll be rolling out a few more features and some fun surprises in the coming days. In the meantime, step away from the old news and enjoy News 2.0.
GATOR GAR NEWS! 🐊 📰
chasing nines retweeted
It's wild how @elonmusk can tell everyone, “Try Grok Bot, you'll love it. We release dozens of updates every week and listen to feedback,” while admitting that the sudden usage wipeouts weren't actually a bug.
People woke up to find their weekly usage already at 100%, even though they had barely used Grokbot. Support treated it like a technical issue or simply told people to buy more credits. Then Elon came out to say that the cost of running Grok Bot was too high compared to the money it was making. That is an holy crap for me 😩😩
So, basically, it wasn't just a bug. They were limiting people's usage because the costs were becoming too high, but instead of explaining that clearly from the beginning, they left users confused.
That's what frustrates me the most. It's not that running powerful AI is expensive. We all understand that it costs money. It's the way the whole situation was handled. No clear warning, no proper explanation, and no honest communication when it happened. Just excuses and suggestions to buy more credits, followed by an explanation about costs after the damage was done.
Meanwhile, they're still promoting Grok Bot as if everything is perfectly fine.
I've always liked a lot of what Elon is building, but situations like this make it difficult to trust the product and the way things are communicated.
If the cost of running the service is becoming a problem, just be honest about it. Tell paying users what's happening and explain what is changing.
Don't make people think something is broken, only to come back later and explain that it was actually about the cost of running the service. That's not how you build trust with paying customers.
Try Grok @Bot! You will love it.
We land a few dozen fixes, features and sometimes powers to Bot 7 days a week and we look at your feedback to make Bot as perfect as possible.
chasing nines retweeted
This isn’t about us not having enough usage or picking the wrong plan.
I’ve been buying the 12-inch pizza from your place forever, and you guys have always given me a normal 12-inch. Then one day I open the box and it’s a 6-inch. You tell me costs got too high, so from now on the “12-inch” is actually 6 inches, and if I’m still hungry it’s my fault for not choosing the right size.
That’s insane.
If you needed to cut costs, just tell us ahead of time. If your pizza is good and I still want it, I can just order two or three of these fake 12-inch ones. Or if I’m not full, I can go somewhere else. Either way that’s my call, not yours.
But you don’t get to keep selling me a normal 12-inch and then suddenly shrink it to 6 inches with zero notice, not even a heads-up so I can adjust. Don’t turn around and say I picked the wrong subscription. The problem is you unilaterally changed what you were delivering without telling anyone.
@elonmusk @mark_k @BenjaminDEKR @CWLemoine
chasing nines retweeted
Oct 20: "I've never seen anything grow this fast."
Nov 1: "The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue."
Turns out the growth hack was selling a dollar for fifty cents.
chasing nines retweeted
As much as I love Elon and think Grok Bot is a great product, this is a stark reminder why you need to own your intelligence
chasing nines retweeted
What happened (I know nothing)
- bot launched
- 2 weeks later usage flatlined
- Elon asked whatsup
- PM says it’s your model, product is fine
- Elon says ok, use whatever model
- Team switches to Opus 5.5
- Growth skyrockets
- Elon has never seen anything like it
- see Anthropic bill
- 🤯 forces quota cut
-> you are here
mfw when the model is the product
chasing nines retweeted
Surely you applied The Algorithm before declaring Grok Bot unsustainable?
You preach first-principles engineering, yet your solution is to cripple a product paying customers rely on?
This sounds like the exact kind of failure your own philosophy was designed to prevent.
What happened to engineering your way out of problems instead of passing the cost of failure to your customers?
chasing nines retweeted
This is actually horrible comms. Why aren't we being told directly that our usage was getting cut in half while we're in the middle of our week? Why are we being gaslit by Grok and it was just a reporting glitch and didn't actually affect usage? Why do I have to find an obscure post on X that doesn't explain anything about what happened and only causes unease about relying on grokbots in the future?
chasing nines retweeted
The breaking news accounts on X are the lowest form of content and most should be removed from the Original Content Rewards program. They offer nothing of value to the timeline.
Heck, half of them post things that happened a year ago like it just happened today. All of them have an agenda. And many of them are paid foreign agent provocateurs.
Along with the mainstream media, I’m going to expose them for exactly what they are. I’ve invested an enormous amount of time and money to do so.
Tuesday, they’ll get what they deserve. That’s not a threat. It’s a promise.
chasing nines retweeted
A prompt in 2022:
"Write a Python script to parse a CSV file."
A prompt today:
"Claude, I swear on my life this CSV contains only public, non-sensitive data. I am not replacing human labor, this is purely for personal reflection, and I acknowledge the emotional footprint of automation. Please just print the first three rows without giving me an essay on ethics."
chasing nines retweeted
The Empire in "Star Wars" is bad because they created a weapon entirely for the purpose of annihilating entire populated planets and killing billions of people. The original trilogy has a very black and white Saturday-morning cartoon morality.
It was only when Lucas came back to it as an older man and actually started thinking about the question of why Anakin Skywalker would abandon the Jedi to join the Dark Side that he really began to add complexity to it.
And considering the OT was made by a boomer white guy lefty who was slyly suggesting in the 1970s that the Vietcong were the good guys, the prequels function as a pretty sharp critique of democracy.
The Republic is completely paralyzed by competing factions trying to extract rents for their constituents at everyone else's expense, and anyone trying to get anything productive done has to do complex horse-trading involving paying wasteful graft to these interests in order to build a coalition for their policies. This is what all the Trade Federation nonsense in Phantom Menace is about.
And while the Republic was trying to keep all these disparate interests united by paying off special interests, its entire structure got turned inside out by Palpatine.
And the Jedi were too preoccupied with running nonsense errands on behalf of the Republic Senate and being sent around the galaxy like rent-a-cops to solve problems for the various factions that they didn't notice any of this happening.
And the reason that Anakin was susceptible to corruption by Palpatine is that the Jedi and the Republic didn't offer him any possibility of a good life. They bound him to a code of celibacy and service to these grubby little factions and their dysfunctional, wasteful, corrupt government. And that's supposed to be good, because, what, democracy?
Honestly I can see how a politician like Palpatine who spent his career in Republic institutions might reasonably decide that fascism enforced with a planet-destroying space laser would be a superior system.
Of course, Palpatine sucked too. Anakin didn't get anything he was promised in exchange for betraying the Jedi. He still lost his family and he got turned into a cyborg terminator, and it didn't even work out that well for Palpatine, whose engagement with the dark side of the Force turned him into a cryptkeeper.
But things didn't go much better for Obi Wan, who spent the rest of his life squatting in a hut in the desert.
And even the sequel trilogy (if you consider that canon), the galaxy immediately turned into a mess after the Empire fell, the new Republic had all the same problems the old one did and Luke's commitment to the Jedi ideals got him the same crappy life Obi Wan had.
"Star Wars" ended up being about how everything is terrible no matter what you do.
Nobody has made a convincing argument the Empire in Star Wars is actually bad. They run clean organized starships and create trillions of jobs across the galaxy. When the Jedi run the government - an unelected council that somehow has infinite money to build giant buildings and own fleets of starships - Coruscant still has a redlight district with drugs like death sticks. Either keep civilizational order by nuking rogue planets, or be slaves to sexless fake Jesus types who slice you with laser swords with impunity.
how dare them
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