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New Update 2 years later: I start job 5 on Monday. ~1.2 Mil a year. Here's my path and some thoughts on this crazy life.
I am NOT the Original Poster. That is u/sweetmullet. He posted in r/overemployed. There was a previous BORU with the first parts of the story here. New Updates marked with ****\* I also re-formatted the older parts due to how the sub has changed the last few years. I added a few of OOP's comments (not included in the original BORU) but OOP has probably close to 1000 spanning several years, so this is a very small sampling. Thanks to my friend u/powerkickass for the rec! Do NOT comment on Original Posts. Latest updates have not been posted on this sub before. This is a VERY, VERY LONG and somewhat technical post. Mood Spoiler: honestly idk but it's definitely an interesting look into someone's life Original Post: January 10, 2022 I am in IT. I have a fairly niche title that everybody wants right now. I have 5 full time jobs, 4 of which are fortune 500 companies. If I manage all 5 for a year, I will make around 1.2 million in 2022. I made 16 dollars an hour in 2016. I'm still struggling grasping the sheer amount of money dumping into my bank account. At the start of 2021 I got a new job. It paid around 70k (105k to ~170k) more than I was making at my previous job. I had the inside scoop from a previous coworker, so I was able to name drop and negotiate effectively. I was tempted to keep both jobs, since due to covid both were fully remote. My fiance is incredibly risk averse, so she talked me out of it. As I got situated in my new position, I became increasingly set on getting a second job. I played video games from 8-4, and sat in meetings barely paying attention. I've probably done around 15 hours of real work since I started in January of last year. In April I opened my resume to the world and by June I bagged job 2 (82 bucks an hour). Holy crap! Two jobs! I was giddy with the money, terrified of meetings overlapping, and horrified if they found out about each other. As I settled in to job 2, I found the meetings to be tedious. There were around 4 hours of meetings each day for job 2. I suffered through them, agreeing to job 3 (having never stopped interviewing. I just made my salary expectations higher and waited for something to fall in my lap). My thought process was that job 3 (90 an hour corp to corp) would likely replace job 2, as job 1 is a laughable cake walk. However, since I am now in the position of power, I decided to try to flex it a bit. I told my project manager that the meetings were a waste of my time. They got nothing done, and they didn't contribute to my work at all. I now participate in an average of 45 minutes of meetings each week for job 2. Job 3 is also a cake walk - around 1.5 hours a week of meetings, probably 5 hours a week worth of work. I continue to field any job that will hear my salary expectations. I am now saying 95 an hour is my salary expectation. Another corp to corp gig comes around, and the hiring manager loves me. Once again being in the position of power, I am able to simply set my expectations with ZERO fear of the results - "Given the scope of the work, my salary expectation is 105 an hour". "The highest we can go is 100." "Nope." They gave me my request. They then tried to push back my start date a week. I told them "I had already gave my two weeks at my previous job, so they will need to pay me for the absent week". They hemmed and hawed, they tried to say no. I simply told them that I wouldn't work there then. They paid me 4200 dollars for a week that I didn't even sign in. I expected this job to fold quickly, as it's with a VERY prestigious company and there is quite a bit of spotlight on my role. It turns out that I haven't done fuck all since I started mid October. At 4200 dollars a week to go to a standup each morning to say I have nothing to do since *October*, job 4 is somehow an even bigger cake walk than job 1. On Monday I start job 5. Initially having agreed to 115, I tried to press them for 127 an hour, but ended up at 120. This appears to be another job that I will just sort of expect to get fired from, but hopefully it turns into another easy 5k a week for doing jack shit. Let's talk about things that I think are working for me: 1: Be fearless. After all, once you get job 2 your risk absolutely plummets. It is ingrained in you to be terrified of getting fired. That fear can fucking die when you move into your second role. The amount of relief of not having to worry about what your boss thinks of you, or how you accidentally overslept and that might piss off some clown in charge, it all fades. It's beyond freeing. 2: Be willing to be fired. I have the luxury of having job 1 be a cake walk with incredible benefits. So, from there, who gives a fuck about getting fired from job x? I try to keep job 1 happy (in the future probably not saying things like "I am going to actively find a new job" lol) and don't really give a shit about the others. I try to do the absolute bare minimum to keep all the jobs, since replacing one is a pain, but any fear of getting fired just isn't there. 3: Flex. Your. Power. Be willing to say "I can't make that meeting" or "This meeting is a waste of my time." People don't want to rock the boat. They don't want to do something that might be stupid. Use the fact that most people also want to do the bare minimum to get by. I have had zero pushback when I've asked meetings to be moved, or "Hey, I can't make the standup today". 4: Fuck having to defend yourself. Just say "I can't make it". I have gotten zero pushback on this. 5: Use your power position in not needing to listen about the job that is offering that paltry 65 an hour. Recruiters have a range. Demand the range. If it doesn't fit 10-15 bucks an hour more than your current job, tell them no. I EAGERLY accepted a role at 82 an hour 6 months ago. Christmas Eve I accepted a position for nearly 50% more than that. Flex. Your. Power. Job 2 takes the power out of your employers hands and plants it firmly in your own. Use it to climb, grow, and make your life what you want. I have paid off all my debt already, bought a second house, will have enough money to completely revamp both houses by the end of February, and plan on snowbirding from Florida to WV for the foreseeable future at the ripe age of 35. Since this is all debt free, maybe I will cut down to 2 jobs? Maybe I will just dump money into retirement (starting your own S-Corp is fucking powerful guys. Talk to a CPA). Maybe I don't really give a fuck? Because the world, for the first time in my life, is MY fucking oyster. I'm more than willing to answer any questions. Even though I have 4 active jobs right now I still play video games 4-5 hours a day. I have plenty of time. Hopefully this empowers someone to take the leap into this fucking incredibly positive lifestyle. Some of OOP's Comments: Commenter: I LOVE THIS! But I’m curious… do your jobs not ask for statuses on tasks? How do you get away without producing much? OOP: I think most people think the bare minimum is much higher than it actually is. There's a lot of sighing, a lot of "ahh this roadblock", a lot of "I ran out of time this week". There's been a ton of times that even I have been like "There is no way they actually take this excuse" and they always do. Commenter: What tech stack you using? OOP: I'm hesitant to give any real details in this vein, but fuck it. I'm a site reliability engineer. I advocate for automating system tasks, along with working towards identifying issues that cause outages or issues that will eventually cause an outage. I mostly work within the Azure cloud, as it's easiest to hide behind the cloud when I'm ignorant on a topic. I'm honestly an absolutely trash engineer, and I fail any interview that really digs into technical knowledge. Commenter: are you salary or contract? OOP: 1 Fulltime, 1 w-2 contract, 3 corp to corp contracts. (to another): None of them have non-compete. I don't think it applies, given the scope of work? I was sort of surprised that none of them had one. Commenter: Corp to Corp is new to me, where can I find jobs like this? Also, what do you put on LinkedIn or job history in your resume while working for multiple companies? OOP: Most tech roles that are contracts will offer both W-2 or corp to corp. You just need to have your own corporation, insurance, etc. Costs about 1.5k to set up all in all. I keep job 1 as my job history. I don't mention any of the other jobs. Commenter: Congrats on the money OP but there is a thin line we might not want to cross. You may think this is coming out of jealousy (sure, it is) but idk man, this sounds like “stealing”. OOP: I apologize if I get animated here, but it's something I am very passionate about. Every single corporation you have ever worked at doesn't care about you. They will "steal" your time for as little as they can possibly pay for it. They will ignore every good thing you do, and say you don't get your bonus because of that one time you forgot to fill out your timesheet. Corporations are designed to fuck over the people that work for them as much as they can, stopping just before those people stop coming to work. Fuck this mindset. I wouldn't advocate to do this to a mom and pop shop. I'm tempted here to list some of the companies I work for, but I won't because I think that WOULD be being Icarus. Suffice to say that I don't lose a fucking wink of sleep. They do it to people every single day and it's considered "good business". Fuck them. Commenter: How much is your net deposit on pay day? Asking as a Junior dev to motivate tf out of me… OOP: 4800 a week pre tax, 4200 a week pre tax, 3600 a week pre tax, 4500 every 2 weeks after tax, 3250 every 2 weeks after tax and 401k max. Commenter: That sounds great, but I am just wondering how do you handle the on-call. The possibility of being on-call simultaneously for 5 different jobs sounds like a nightmare. OOP: J1 has my on call 2 weeks every 13 months. I actually just got through my oncall and ignored all the calls because I didn't recognize the number. No issue from anyone on that front. J2 had me on call straight out of the gate, but I told them that it was unrealistic for me to be on call with the number of systems and familiarity you need to have (they have a VERY old, antiquated system). So I just am not on call at night anymore. J3 only needs to be up during business hours. So I am "On call" about 3 hours after I sign out for the day. J4 I was afraid of, but like I said above I have done literally (and I mean literally) nothing since mid October. J5 is more of an advocacy role I think. I will be surprised if I am an engineer that is on-call. I'm unsure about this one though. Mini Update in Comments February 16, 2024 (1 month later) I'm pretty slammed with 5 jobs. I was in meetings all day except for 30 minutes yesterday. The goal is to make a bunch of money. If I can make a bunch of money and not slave away for 8 hours a day that would be ideal. Ahh, keeping j1. It is the easiest, and the one that would probably never fire me. However, Resume management is a huge part of this IMO. I don't want to have some weird amount of time where I am "working two jobs" according to my resume. The titles at both of the new potential jobs are also very good. I don't know. I haven't decided yet. The excitement does fade. I'm pretty used to the amount of money flowing now, and honestly it still manages to feel slow. lol Update Post 1: April 10, 2022 (3 months later) Hey everyone. I've had lots of people ask for an update and I got notified that it's my 10 year cake day today, so I'm feeling inspired to write up a summary of my last 4 months. I still have all five jobs. I've gotten a promotion at one, a surprise extension at one, and berated for "not delivering anything at all" at one. When berated about a month ago, I simply yelled back that "my job is hard" and that "poor communication from management has pulled me in many directions" and I haven't heard anything about it since. I've stepped my game up slightly to hopefully eliminate these chats in the future. I have had several large deliverables that have been pretty stressful - I tend to heavily procrastinate (which is honestly probably why I am good at managing multiple things - I inflict this on myself constantly. Lol) and that has led to some overwhelming moments. Thoughts like "I should quit this job instead of deliver" came to me pretty often, but that's pride talking. Fuck pride. Fire me please daddy. So I've been continuing the trudge, trying to not allow the absence of good work and the looming concept of being let go get the better of me. I have a plan, I'm sticking to it. Job 5 turned into the biggest cake walk of all - I get paid about 20k a month for job 5, have a nice extension into August, and have done about 3 hours of work (probably about 8 hours including meetings) since I started. This one is not going to last forever, but my boss and I jive well, and I am serving the purpose they want me to serve, so everyone is happy. I'm still playing 2-6 hours of video games every day, averaging about about 15 hours of work [editor's note- OOP clarified he meant per week, not day.] I've started playing video games through meetings and paying even less attention than normal. This is honestly probably pushing things too far, and I'll need to limit myself a bit better. Once again, I will be aggressive about answering reasonable questions (to the guy that asked if I would be a reference for him, I appreciate you shooting your shot but jfc), give advice, or whatever. Please recognize that I am not some grand pooh bah of employment though. I am a trash employee who kind of lucked into a vein of IT that people don't know how to control yet. Icarus with 5 sets of wings Some OOP's Comments: OOP: I go into this pretty heavily in the other post, but yeah, debt is eliminated, bought a second house, rehabbed the first house, rehabbing the second house, bought a model S. I am going to start heavily contributing to a pension for my company next. There's just so. much. money. There have been a huge number of quality of life adjustments, my wedding is coming up and has been paid for completely in cash, I paid for 6 people to fly to it, helped my younger brother out with some cash, I tip like 100% at every restaurant we go to. I'm absolutely being more frivolous than I should if I was trying to be as efficient as possible, but it's fun as shit and I get to make other people have a good time too. Life is good. OOP's Job: There was another dude in the previous post that was an SRE [site reliability engineer] and he just flat called me a liar because his job was so demanding. I think being an SRE is a place where you can chill, or inflict a ton of positive change if that's what you're into. I think the real secret sauce is knowing how to be a shitty employee without anyone really catching on, rather than being an SRE specifically. OOP's office set-up: https://imgur.com/a/PExxflI It's modified now a bit - I have a switch on the far right side with 4 computers attached to it and switch to a mouse/keyboard/monitor setup for whatever job I am doing work for. But that picture gives the main gist. Update Post 2: August 10, 2022 (4 months later, 7 from OG post) Title: Part 3 - It's not all butterflies and rainbows - An Icarus Story Hey all. It's been 8 months since my original post which can be found here. My update post can be found here, which was 4 months ago. [editor's note- OOP's math is off here, but that's probably because they started posting in January (1) and now are posting in August (8)] To bring you, my beloved reader, up to speed here's a rundown. At the start of 2022 I had 5 jobs making an estimated 1.2Mil/Year (that estimate turned out to be bad. It was more like 960k). My update consisted of being wary about J2 being dissatisfied with me, J5 offering a dramatic contract extension, and the other jobs going mostly well. There have been two main moments that I would like to share with the group, and both of them include being let go. J2 I initially hated, due to their excessive meetings. As my beloved reader may recall, I pushed them aggressively about how those meetings were a waste, and they were significantly cut down. J2 was relaxed and I didn't do much at all. My leadership changed at about the 6 month mark, and immediately my new supervisor smelled the foul stench of a dogshit employee. At first I thought he was simply grumpy in general but it turned out he wasn't interested in continuing my contract. He scheduled a meeting about 3 months into being my boss, and explained that he was frustrated that I don't deliver anything. I yelled back that my job is hard, and didn't hear much from him over the next 3 weeks. With no real warning, the contract company I was working through emailed me and told me I was no longer an employee with them, pack your laptop, yada yada. While you could say his comment about me not delivering was a warning, there was no actual talk of "You aren't delivering well enough, if you don't improve you will be let go". If this was my only job I would be angry and poor. J5. I truly miss job 5. My boss used me as a scalpel occasionally after I met my initial goals. We got along amazingly well. I barely worked. She knew I barely worked. I got the weird crazy shit done that she needed a consultant to handle that an employee might get in trouble for. Truly an amazing gig. She said my contract would extend into 2023. Insert frowny face here. The economic downturn led to the money drying up for all consultants at this company (of which there were many), and I got about 1 week of notice (in the middle of a 3 week vacation I was on) that my job would effectively not be available when I got back. My boss reached out, apologized for the abruptness of it all, and we said our farewells. If this was my only job I would be angry and poor. This, to me, is why we do what we do. In once instance I got fired for being a shit employee that deserved to get fired. In the other my boss is exceedingly pleased with our working relationship but the company chose to protect profits over giving a shit what the impact was to the individual. In both cases the company chose to utilize a safety net to protect itself. It has the luxury of shedding employees in order to protect the plans or financials of itself as an institution. OE allows individuals to develop their own safety net. It provides a solid "You fuck on me? I fuck on you" relationship with these employers that truly don't care (due to the nature of capitalism, profit focusing, and corporate mindset). It levels the playing field considerably. For those of you reading that suffer from a deranged moral compass that wants to bootlick for these abhorrent corporations that don't give a single flying fuck about you, I want you to consider the above two lessons. Very different perspectives, same exact result. As an overall life update, house 1 renovation is completely done (paid in cash), my Tesla has been purchased and received (paid in cash), I took a lavish vacation overseas and paid for 10 people to go (paid in points for travel, cash for the airbnbs), house renovation two is set to be paid for and will hopefully begin at the start of this year. In essence I have shrunk down about 10 years worth of goals to about 10 months. With the 3 current jobs I make just under 600k, and I start a new job 4 this week. As always, I am pretty much willing to answer any question that doesn't DOX my ass. I am a huge advocate for this mechanism of changing your lifestyle and your lifegoal timelines and I hope to convince at least 1 more person to take the leap. -Icarus (with slightly melted wings) Some of OOP's Comments: Commenter: how the heck can you take a 3 week vacation from 5 jobs all at once OOP: I had been fired from j2 already. The other 3 are contract spots, so I just don't get paid. J1 I took vacation days. The companies: I have a LinkedIn that stops at current j1. I'm pretty sure someone from j5 saw my j1 still posted on LinkedIn and called HR saying they thought I was working multiple gigs. I explained the general concept of what I was doing sort of, giving them enough info to appease them but not enough to burn my lifestyle down. J1 HR was appeased, but it definitely made me rethink my current thought on LinkedIn. Mine is still active and listing j1 though. OOP's Comments on original BORU: Commenter: "the company chose to protect profits over giving a shit what the impact was to the individual." Really dude? Really? OOP: To be clear, this wasn't a "the employer is bad because they did this". The point I meant to convey is simply the reality of the situation. The company WILL protect itself, and employees are some of the easiest things to shed. I'm advocating for the value of not having all of your eggs in one basket, not the evils of corporations protecting themselves. OOP's accountant/CPA: I said this in the other thread too - the CPA didn't even blink when I was describing the situation. Commenter: Good for this person. That is a really sweet set up. It's still hard to not feel salty when I work 40+ hours a week as a teacher and am paid less than a tenth of what he earns in a year (at 600,000). OOP: I have a soft spot for teachers because of this. The people we SHOULD pay get absolutely fucked. I am paying one of my teacher friends 100k a year to learn how to do what I do, and hopefully take over a job or two in the near term. My other teacher friend wants to stick around, so I just buy everything for him when we are out and about. My heart goes out to you guys. You're super fucked right now. Hopefully it gets better. You are appreciated. Commenter: I've seen some humblebrags in my life, but this takes the cake. I suspect you're going to write a book or become a financial personal trainer or some shit. You don't even know the story of Icarus. OOP: I call myself Icarus because someone in the first thread called me that. Icarus is the boy who made wax wings (to escape jail I think?). He flew too close to the sun, focusing on having a blast flying, having too much confidence in his creation, and his wings melted. He plummeted to his death. My response to that nay-sayer was that I have many sets of wings because of this, but keeping the name is more of a troll of that one dude. I have no plans on leading people down silly paths and making money off of other peoples backs. I truly love pilfering money from large corporations. I'll stick to that, thanks. I have been tempted to write a book though. People have seemed to enjoy my straight forward approach and aggressive honesty about myself. I doubt I will follow through with it though. New Updates to this sub Update Post 3: February 7, 2023 (6 months later, 13 from OG post) Hey guys, this is the fourth iteration of my path of OE. I started in about June of 2021 and have been updating semi frequently since January of 2022. A bunch of you have asked for more updates, so here we are. For clarity, I will refer to all jobs by the number that they were received. As an example, J2 will be referred always as J2, though I am no longer employed there. J1 - J1 still going great - Just got 50k dumped into my bank account as a bonus. Just got vested in all ways that I can get vested. The meetings are starting to increase due to team size and responsibility increases, but it would be pretty hard to beat the benefits/vacation/pay all in one, so I will probably keep it even if I have to drop down to 2 jobs. Idk. What the hell do I care? I'm a huge advocate for being dynamic, so we will see. J2 - Fired. They figured out I sucked after about 10 months. I did, in fact, suck. Oh well. J3 - Fired. The work load was pretty easy, but getting that work load done was misery. So. Many. Requests. I'm talking 7 individual requests to 6 different teams to get an alert created. Absolute ass. Sad that I sucked for my super cool boss, but that's really the only negative. Lasted for about 1 year. J4 - J4 going strong and I hope it never goes away. I do absolutely fucking nothing. I have 4 30 minute meetings on my calendar. I go to 1.5 of them. I am "on-call", but I have been called a grand total of 3 times, and those wake up calls are literally the ONLY thing I have contributed. 245k so far to do damn nearly literally zero things. Hilarious. I fucking love J4. J5 - As you may recall, I loved J5. My boss and I got along marvelously. Due to the economic downturn I had to say goodbye, but she called me and I'm back! Whoop whoop! Start date is in a few weeks. Hell yeah these wings are apparently unmelting back to wings as a plummet to the earth. Rad. J6 - J6 sucked so bad. I was there for about 2 months. 120/h. They were just unsatisfyable. My go to is to impress the shit out of them up front and fade away into the ether. Well these guys just refused to be impressed. Whatever. They paid me 40k to be frustrated and annoyed for 2 months. Worth. J7 - This job just started, and I was brought on as a large group to another company to facilitate some SRE focused changes. Good. Fucking. Lord. This team is a joke. A sham. A terror to all things "agile". Leadership is nonexistent, we have no access, access requests get denied, stories get deleted and are called "confusing" but that confusion isn't explained or corrected. I fully expect this job to just completely collapse. Who knows? Who cares. That's the rundown. If you're keeping track, that's effectively 4 jobs currently. I was down to 2 for a few months. It was honestly kind of relaxing. I'm still trudging along, just raking in money. My financial advisor loves planning shit with me, as I am pretty open to whatever, I'm young, and I've got a fuckton of money coming in. Between my wife and I we made about 880k last year. On that note... Holy fucking fuckkkkk taxes. Bruh. I'm about to send a god damn house worth of money to the IRS. My CPA is still working on it, but the fed is gonna get like 200k from my ass. Obviously worth, but holy cow. I think I paid like 23k in fed taxes for the 2020 year. Crazy shit. With the 2 w2 jobs and my wifes w2 job, we have a good amount in taxes paid already, but I'm still gonna write a 130k check or some nonsense. Brutal. As part of my life advice column, don't forget to save for taxes if you have your own corp. I was living the high life with 5 jobs. I could save up 200k in about 2 months if I needed to, but jobs don't stick around forever. Don't count on them. Just put it in a decent savings account and keep that shit. Life in General Life is pretty good. I have a solid retirement plan set up. My arbitrary figure right now is to retire at 55 with a yearly stipend of about 230k until death with a before/after taxes wombo. Houses are sitting pretty, with a much needed facelift to one, and the other will start in the summer. I hired a buddy to learn how to be an engineer since I've figured out how to set myself up and I like to help people. Dude is making 100k a year being a fucking rookie. Hilarious. I also get a nice tax reprieve from bringing him on as 1099, so that's nice. The hope is for him to kind of take over J7 if they ever get their own giant foot out of their own giant ass. Otherwise I don't have much to update. I haven't really learned anything new; my perspectives/recommendations are static from my first post. I think it's a good way to go about this whole OE thing. Chase that J4 man. Whoooo boy that job is fucking rad as hell. As always, I will aggressively answer questions people have. Don't nag me though guys. Read through the comments of the first post before you ping me or I will ignore you. One of OOP's Comment: Commenter: How’s your physical health? Do you have time to get some exercises? Does your sleep schedule get impacted? Plan on having kids? OOP: Physical health is ok. I've been pretty shitty the last 5 years, but was incredibly active before that. Working towards losing the belly that has built up now. I've been super into fasting recently. It's working pretty well. Sports 2-3 times a week, trying to get at least 30 mins of walking in each day. It's a process. My sleep schedule is awesome. I wake up at 8:58 for my first meeting sometimes, about 3/4 times I just skip it and get the extra 30 mins of z's. Kids are no bueno. I have plenty of nieces and nephews that I can rain money down on and I like my time being mine. Link to OOP's long reply to someone saying it's fake Update Post 4: August 26, 2024 (1.5 years later, 1 year 8 months from OG post) Title: The final chapter - The closure of OE. From 5 jobs with an expectation of 1.2 mil a year to one job. Hey everyone. Some of you may remember my original post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed/comments/s12c8l/i_start_job_5_on_monday_12_mil_a_year_heres_my/ I still get requests to update, and given that my J4 project was officially announced as closing at the end of September, I figured today was a great day to write out my experience, what I did with my money, and some closing remarks to fully close out this wild ride. This year, I have had two jobs. My original J1 is still my J1. I was promoted to principal and overall the amount of work I have to complete has significantly increased. While I don't care about companies at all and believe that pilfering as much money from them for as little work as possible is not only morally right but absolutely appropriate given they do the inverse to us every day, I do care very much about the individual people I interact with daily. There are multiple juniors on my team that require substantial effort, which I am very happy to help coach them and assist in their career growth and navigation. My teams' overall responsibility has also been much better defined and therefore it's been harder to hide in plain sight. I like the company, I like the work, and I like the team. I've never been proud of a place I've worked at before, and I believe that J1 has earned that pride and the trust I have placed on them by allowing it to become my sole job. J2 (J4 from my original post) has gotten pretty gross. We were a team split in half by FTEs and contractors (10 in total). We got a new manager early in the year who simply has no appreciation for how terrible the on-call is. We were all sharing the primary/secondary responsibility, so I was on-call once every 2.5 months. That week is usually hell. You will get called on average 2.3 times a night. There were a few times where I worked for ~30 hours straight. Absolutely brutal. One of my fellow contractors left for a different team and the new manager made the rest of the contractors be solely responsible for on-call. So now I am on-call once a month, which is honestly so bad I thought about leaving just because of this, even though we basically don't do any other work. It simply wasn't sustainable keeping J1 happy while getting absolutely ass-blasted 7 days out of 28. Well, they have decided to end our contract at the end of September and expect the FTEs to now do that work. They are a good crew. I truly pity where their work life is headed. I am still passively looking for a new j2, but honestly right now I feel a fairly immense amount of relief. Unless something falls in my lap I will be working the single job until the market recovers. Having to actually earn a job through solid interviewing is so annoying. lol. Below I will go over earnings, how I've benefited, where I fucked up, and where I succeeded. Hopefully it's interesting to you, or even something to learn from. Rough gross earnings: 2022: 360k 2023: 730k 2024 (estimated year end): 450k Net worth at the start: ~90k Net worth current: ~1 million Purchases that improve my life on a long term basis: Significant improvements to primary residence: 120k Hot tub: 15k Second home in the area of both of our families: 50k down. Rental income hasn't started on this yet, but something just fell in our lap for 6 months out of the year for 2k/month. This will pay for a majority of the financial impact this creates. 15 year/2.2% rate. We stay here ~2 months of the year. Significant improvements to primary residence: 120k The top of the list has to be wine. I have spent too much money on wine. No real estimate here. submitted by
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LucyAriaRose |
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The Rise of Canoo ($GOEV) – Why JPOW’s printer, Biden’s EV support ($15 billion in infrastructure bill, $160 billion in EV subsidies in budget), ~70% increase in institution ownership, 30+% SI and ~98% utilization are primed to send a young and unique EV manufacturer to the stratosphere.
Gather around folks, hope y’all made some gains the last time around. This DD is split into 8 parts, so feel free to jump to whichever section you’re most interested in. Part 1 – Introduction Part 2 – Market Trends and Upcoming Catalysts Part 3 – Company Overview and Unique Value Proposition Part 4 – Recent Updates Part 5 – Financials and Valuation Part 6 – Bear Case Part 7 – SI and Squeeze Potential Part 8 – TL;DR Part 1 – Introduction It was a warm Monday morning on August 23rd almost a month back, when seemingly for no reason – GOEV shot up from ~$5.9 to ~$8, a 30% gain on the day. The next day – GME popped, for a 30% gain as well, with AMC and BB also making up big gains, leading to the ‘meme mania’ we’ve been experiencing for the last couple of weeks. Why’d this happen? Well there were no company/industry catalysts. The only event that seemed to occur in the prior week was the expiration of monthly options. One of the theories going around is that there’s an almost quarterly cycle going on at this point where FTD’s are leading to a surge in prices in the next cycle for ‘meme stocks’ which tend to be heavily shorted for the most part. How accurate this is I have no clue and whether this applies to GOEV I don’t know, haven’t investigated that particular theory but there’s plenty of posts/comments floating around for you to look into if you’re so inclined. The quick point I’m trying to make here is that if a heavily shorted stock is popping 30% in a day, with no major catalyst for the industry or the company in question – and that company is now advancing towards realizing its major milestones with favorable tailwinds expected for the sector, it could pop a lot more than 30% in the months to come. GOEV is among the youngest EV companies - having been around for less than 5 years, with arguably the most unique vehicles coming out (on schedule – seems to be pretty amazing in the EV space) that very few, if any, of the established or other up and coming competitors are producing, and has been shorted more it seems – for the failure of its peers than any real fault of its own. Part 2 – Market Trends and Upcoming Catalysts From an investment into equities point of view – S&P 500 has fallen about 0.5%, on average, during the month of September. Stocks have tended to go up, on average, during every other month — other than a slight dip in February — over the past half century link. However, this may soon be coming to an end as in the past week Investors stampeded into stocks and out of cash as global equity funds witnessed their biggest inflows since March 2021 while large-cap U.S. funds enjoyed a record haul, a weekly round-up by BofA showed. link Let’s take a look at the EV market dynamics and upcoming catalysts before getting into GOEV specifically, so we get a high-level understanding of the bigger picture. The global EV market is expected to be valued at $725.1 Billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 27.19% from $171.26 in 2021 source. This is expected to grow to $1.007 trillion by 2027 which is an average of 2 sources - source 1, source 2, another source actually has the market valued at $2.5 trillion but it’s a bit of an outlier compared to the other 2 source 3. Global EV forecast is for a compound annual growth rate of 29 per cent achieved over the next ten years: Total EV sales growing from 2.5 million in 2020 to 11.2 million in 2025, then reaching 31.1 million by 2030. EVs would secure approximately 32 per cent of the total market share for new car sales. Despite the pressure exerted on the market by the COVID-19 pandemic, the long-term outlook for EVs is strong. The significant shift in expected volume of BEVs and PHEVs by 2030 is based on four factors: consumer sentiment, policy and regulation, OEM strategy and the role of corporate companies. All four of these factors saw major changes in direction over the last year, prior to the emergence of COVID-19, and have since been shaped further by the pandemic. link In November 2018, an article came out stating that the number of EVs on U.S. roads was projected to reach 18.7 million in 2030, up from 1 million at the end of 2018. This is about 7 percent of the 259 million vehicles (cars and light trucks) expected to be on U.S. roads in 2030. Annual sales of EVs will exceed 3.5 million vehicles in 2030, reaching more than 20 percent of annual vehicle sales in 2030. About 9.6 million charge ports will be required to support 18.7 million EVs in 2030. This represents a significant investment in EV charging infrastructure. link. As it turns out, that number of annual EV sales of 3.5 million vehicles in 2030 was revised to almost double of that in a November 2020 report, just 2 years after the previous article. The US electric vehicles market is now expected to reach 6.9 million unit sales by 2025, up 5x from 1.4 million unit sales forecast for 2020, due to government incentives driving EV ownership. Over 90% of states offered incentives for setting up EV charging infrastructure, with meaningful quality of life incentives and exemptions are offered across 39 states in the US, including easier payment plans for the purchase of EVs, limited-time incentives to accelerate EV adoption/conversion and lack of requirements for emission inspections across several states. link President Biden is seeking a pledge from auto manufacturers that would see EVs make up 40% - 50% of new U.S. vehicle sales by 2030 link 1, link 2 which is double of the 20% forecast just three years earlier in 2018, and would likely occur only with strong support on the supply side through infrastructural and other support that would enable EV manufacturers to develop the capacity to produce the target number of vehicles, and demand side with respect to incentivizing people to purchase EVs. EV tax credits jump to $12,500 in proposed $3.5 trillion budget blueprint Democrats passed a couple of weeks ago. This bill adds $4,500 to the current $7,500 tax credit available for a total of $12,500 potentially available to EV buyers. It includes passenger vehicles and light-duty trucks. The proposal calls for $160 billion to fund subsidies and purchase incentives, EV charging infrastructure funding, EV manufacturing incentives, federal EV procurement requirements, and incentives to electrify heavy-duty commercial fleets. link The proposed EV credits in the budget blueprint would last for 10 years and consumers would be allowed to deduct the value of the credit from the sales price at the time of purchase. In 2027, the $7,500 credit would only apply to U.S.-made vehicles. It would also create a new smaller credit for used EVs of up to $2,500. There are also lower credits for EVs with smaller battery packs. The bill says individual taxpayers must have an adjusted gross income of no more than $400,000 to get the new EV tax credit. It would limit the EV credit to cars priced at no more than $55,000, while trucks could be priced up to $74,000. In August, the Senate in a non-binding amendment narrowly voted in favor of prohibiting taxpayers from claiming EV tax credits if they make more than $100,000 annually or if vehicles cost more than $40,000. link Furthermore, the bipartisan infrastructure plan, titled the American Jobs Plan, includes billions of dollars for other electrification efforts and for a national charging network. Specifically, the bipartisan plan includes $7.5 billion for a network of EV charging stations across the country. It also includes another $7.5 billion for electric buses and other transportation methods. link States area also providing EV incentives to residents e.g. Gov. JB Pritzker signed Illinois’ clean energy law which includes a $4,000 rebate for residents to buy an electric vehicle (EV). link. By 2030, there’s expected to be an 8% divergence between EV demand estimates and production plans, meaning there needs to be a massive scaling up of infrastructure/capacity of EV manufacturers over current projections in order to fill the gap in the market. link Part 2 – Company Overview and Unique Value Proposition Before we look into what’s happened since my last post, let’s go over a quick refresher on what the company does. Canoo is a Los Angeles-based company that has developed breakthrough electric vehicles, with over 650 employees link from leading technology and automotive companies link. Canoo’s Chairman Tony Aquila mentioned that the company was focused on a product lineup that fits in the gaps of everybody else’s lineup… take the turning radius of a Prius, the size of a Ford Ranger, Payload of F-150 and sell it as one vehicle link. What makes this Canoo so special compared to other EVs is their modular platform, which is purpose-built to deliver maximum vehicle interior space and adaptable to support a wide range of vehicle applications for consumers and businesses. It is this modular platform that led to Apple’s interest and having talks with Canoo (the talks are assumed to have fallen apart because Canoo was looking for an investor while Apple was looking to for an acquisition), as the platform is different from ones developed by other startups and larger automakers because it integrates more of the car’s electronics, allowing for greater flexibility in cabin design. It also features steer-by-wire technology, which also increases design flexibility and is not yet widely adopted in the industry. link. Apple wasn’t the only major company interested in Canoo, Hyundai Motor Group (Hyundai and Kia’s parent company) actually went a lot farther than Apple did with Canoo, announcing a partnership in February 2020 to develop new electric vehicles based on the technological platform developed by Canoo link. This was extremely unusual and referred to as a significant victory for Canoo, as ‘pretty much every electric vehicle startup has talked about wanting to license out their technology or partner with legacy automakers, almost none have landed a deal… Canoo now joins that small list despite only coming into existence at the end of 2017, when its founders started the company’ link. Ultimately this partnership did not go ahead because Canoo’s chairman didn’t feel as though it was worth it for Canoo, saying that the original deal with Hyundai didn’t factor in the value of Canoo’s IP, so a shift in strategy was made from licensing out the technology to protecting the IP and manufacturing and selling Canoo’s own vehicles to commercial operators link Regarding the technology/IP - Canoo has developed the world’s flattest skateboard platform, which enables class-leading passenger and cargo volume on a small vehicle footprint. For example, the lifestyle vehicle, which will offer the interior space of a large SUV, but on the exterior footprint of a compact car. To help achieve this, Canoo’s suspension utilizes a double wishbone with two fiberglass leaf springs, mounted transversely in the front and rear of the platform. The dampers are mounted to the frame, eliminating the need for large shock towers that take up vital cabin space. The entire suspension system is incorporated into the skateboard and sits below the height of the tires. link. Let’s take a look at the current automotive model and see how Canoo’s approach and the use of the skateboard platform add so much more value than conventional ICE manufacturers link, currently the model is broken because 70-80% of the portion of vehicle lifetime profit is only generated after the first owner. The current model is geared towards the first owner and nothing more, with an assortment of OEMs/spare parts retailers/3rd party installers servicing vehicles after the initial sale. Canoo aims to change this by targeting multiple owners after the first purchase i.e. owners 2-4, offering customers the ability to upgrade the model of whichever vehicle they have or switch them entirely as the platform on which the vehicles are built is the same link. The use, and subsequent re-use of the skateboard platform enables significant cost savings and risk reductions link, with the platform providing a strong business advantage as it is consistent across Canoo’s vehicle lineup. If a project is started for a new vehicle which will have the skateboard platform as its foundation, they will be able to carryover engineer and labor, ~half, from one project to the next. It’s also worth pointing out that in traditional ICE, it would be exceptional if Bill of Materials cost carryover across variants reached 25%, with Canoo, this is exceeding 50%. The specific savings include: 45% - 55% labor savings for new variants developed 57% of the BOM cost carryover across variants 70% of critical functions are delivered by the platform. These enable the development of space efficient cabins that integrate simply onto platform link, and provide the key basis for engineering Canoo’s new value proposition of having a harmonized and articulated 3 – layer vehicle concept that keeps fresh and returns capital over an entire vehicle lifecycle link. This image also showcases how Canoo aims to capture the full vehicle lifecycle value link The three vehicles that Canoo has publicly announced as part of its lineup are: Lifestyle vehicle link - Fully electric, highly versatile and offering more utility inside and out for city explorers, businesses, families and adventurers. The multi-purpose platform unlocks SUV-size interior space on a smaller exterior footprint. It’s pretty hard to put into an image of the vehicle into words so I’d recommend clicking on the above link to check it out for yourself. Some key figures (note the range provided in certain cases is for the variants): Launching late 2022. Starting at $34,750* 2 seats - 5 seats - 7 seats 250 mi range Up to 350 Horsepower 28min charge time 80% 188 ft³ interior volume 80 KWh battery 1,464 lbs payload – 2,000 lbs capacity Multi-purpose Delivery Vehicle link – Business ready vehicle that lowers the total cost of ownership while providing easy maintenance. More cargo in a small footprint to enable easy maneuverability. A productivity tool that enables you to plug in your tools and get to work. Some key figures (note the range provided in certain cases is for the variants): Starting at $33,000* 200 ft³ - 500 ft³ cargo volume 130 – 230 mi, 90 – 190 mi range (EPA) 1,540 to 1,980 lbs Pickup link – All Electric, All American, All Utility - The Pickup Truck is built to be the new standard in function, form and utility — ready for work and the weekend. The picup truck is as strong as the toughest trucks out there and includes features for people who use trucks on the job, weekend, and adventure. Some key figures (note the range provided in certain cases is for the variants): Launching as early as 2023. Price – Not currently listed, but during the Q&A portion of the investor day portion on June 30th, somebody asked what the base pricing for the pickup was, given that the Ford lightning F-150 base price was being advertised at $32,000. Chairman Tony Aquila said Canoo was not prepared to announce the pricing at that time, but Canoo would not be beaten in this category – you can check it out at the following link link Targeted HP – 500+ Payload Capacity – 1800 lbs Range – 200+ mi Powertrain – AWD or RWD There’s actually a fourth vehicle as well that hasn’t been listed anywhere officially but was found by /u/Mcardiel007 when he was having issues communicating with Canoo and went to their Torrance location and spotted them unloading what is potentially the new sedan. All credits to him/her for the following pictures pic 1, pic 2, pic 3, pic 4, pic 5. We can see that Canoo is targeting the most attractive segments at a lower incremental cost. The most profitable and highest carbon dioxide emitting segments are pickups and SUVs, with $115B+ accounting for 90% of 2020 profit pool in US, and ~60% of the transportation emissions (Canoo is targeting these segments with its Lifestyle Vehicle and Pickup). One of the fastest growing segments is delivery vans, with ~2M more delivery vehicles needed globally by 2030 link. It’s important to keep in mind existing fleet conversion to EV as well. Using the common platform provides a pivot-ability to focus on high margin products and is a large and profitable opportunity – highly lucrative and accretive to overall margin link. Canoo is also looking at car data and not just strictly being a vehicle manufacturer – with an opportunity for harmonizing hardware and software + superior cleaning leading to actionable data instead of the status quo of outsourced hardware + poor cleaning leading to disjointed data. Each connected vehicle offers 1 – 2 TB of raw data per day, with car data monetization globally valued at $250 Billion - $400 Billion link. To sum it up – Canoo is well-positioned for success with a differentiated business model link, developing exceptional products that are aimed at the most profitable segments ($115B+ for 90% 2020 profit pool) in the US, addressing upfitting and accessories market in the US by monetizing full vehicle lifetime value with emphasis on 2nd, 3rd and 4th customers (valued at $24B+), and monetization of car data globally through customer-centric, software ecosystem generating exponential network effect ($250B+). Part 4 – Recent Updates Now let’s take a look at some of the hires that the company’s been making (note that almost all of these hires have happened since the last quarter, with most being in the last two months, and this is not an exhaustive list). Canoo has quietly been putting together an all-star management team experienced in three key areas – diplomacy, automotive, and technology. Ambassador Josette Sheeran – President at Canoo, Executive Chairman at the The McCain Institute, former UN Special Envoy for Haiti, Vice Chairman of the World Economic Forum, Executive Director of the World Food Programme, Undersecretary for Economics Agriculture, Energy at the US Department of State. Ram Balasubramanian - Chief Information Officer at Canoo, former Senior Vice President, Business Technology at Salesforce, Chief Information Officer at Motorola Solutions, Chief Information Officer (CIO), India Region, Global Business Solutions Leader at PepsiCo. Christian Treiber - Senior Vice President of Global Customer Journey & Aftersales at Canoo, former Member of the Board of Directors at the German American Chamber of Commerce, Inc., Member of the Board of Directors, RepairSmith (backed by Daimler AG), Vice President Customer Service, Mercedes-Benz USA, Member of the Supervisory Board at Mercedes-Benz Versicherungs AG, Director, Service and Parts Sales Mercedes-Benz Passenger Cars at Daimler AG etc. Govin Ranganathan - Director Logistics, Materials & Transportation at Canoo, former Head of Logistics at Nio, Engineering Manager at Tesla, Sr. Manager of Production Control at Fiat Chrysler, Lean Manufacturing Specialist at Damien Chrysler. Arnold Abernathy - Chief Information Security Officer at Canoo, former Deputy Chief Information Security Officer at Toyota, Programmer at NASA, with other experience including McAfee, Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young, CA technologies. Randy Rodriguez - Director of Advanced Design at Canoo, former Director of Advanced Design at General Motors, Creative Manager Design and Styling at Tesla, Project Lead Designer at Nissan Motor Corporation. Senon Franco – Senior Exterior Design Manager at Canoo, former Senior Exterior Designer at Hyundai, Creative Designer at Honda, Exterior Designer at GM, Exterior Designer at VW. Branden Coté - Vice President Product Management & Sales at Canoo, former Director, Market Management North America & Greater China at Mercedes-AMG Bryce DeArmond - Manager of Strategic Partnerships, Data Customer Journey at Canoo, Former Account Manager at Samsung Electronics America, Samsung Field Operations Manager at Samsung Electronics America, Director of Sales at IRIO. Kristen Harris - Senior Commercial Counsel at Canoo, former Director, Legal Affairs for EMEA and Latin America at the Harley-Davidson Motor Company, Regional Legal Counsel at Texas Instruments, Legal Consultant at Taiwan International Patent and Law Office Now why on earth would these long-established and assumingly well-reputed individuals with executive level careers at places including the United Nations, U.S. Department of State, Nio, Tesla, Fiat Chrysler, Daimler AG/Mercedez-Benz, General Motors, Nissan, Toyota, Hyundai, Honda, Salesforce, NASA, McAfee, PepsiCo, Samsung, Harley-Davidson etc. move to an upstart EV manufacturer within the last couple of months if they didn’t believe in it’s potential for success? Some of these individuals have spent 5-10 years with their prior companies, it doesn’t make sense that they’d all be jumping over to Canoo for a 1 year engagement. Other than the talent, Canoo has made a number of moves in in recent months as it moves closer to bringing the first of the Lifestyle Vehicles to production, including: Announcing plans to build its new factory outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma, creating more than 2,000 jobs and opening in 2023. The facility will be built on a 400-acre site at the MidAmerica Industrial Park complex in Pryor, Oklahoma. It will house a paint shop, body shop, and general assembly plant. Oklahoma is providing an incentive package that totals over $300 million, and may kick in millions more based on whether Canoo hits or exceeds a target of hiring military veterans to make up 10 percent of the workforce at the facility link. Partnering with VDL Nedcar as a contract manufacturing partner to manufacture the Lifestyle Vehicle for the US & EU markets while it builds its US-based mega micro-factory. By parallel pathing contract and owned manufacturing Canoo will meet its commitment to start production and deliver vehicles in Q4, 2022. Canoo Chairman Tony Aquila mentioned that VDL Nedcar ‘is the top trusted European manufacturer building high quality products for leading OEMs, and they significantly outcompeted the other contenders. VDL is also independently owned by the van der Leegte family of entrepreneurs - which aligns with our commitment to support businesses that form the backbone of communities. This strategic partnership will enable us to deliver vehicles to market while we build our Phase 2 factory in Oklahoma. It also strongly positions us for geographic expansion in Europe and builds a lasting relationship with VDL Groep of companies. Our investment will help us scale quickly and fulfill our mission to bring affordable, purpose-built EVs to Everyone.” The Nedcar facility is slated to build up to 1000 units for both the US and European markets in 2022 with a target of 15,000 units in 2023 link De-risking the path to market, Canoo designed, built and tested beta for its lifestyle vehicle link, with highlights including: $250M invested in Beta ~1.5M hours of engineering ~500k miles of testing 13 beta runners / 32 beta properties tested US NCAP 5-star overall rating targeted, with simulated, sled and vehicle level crash testing. Undertaking the Gamma Phase with SOP on track for Q4 2022 link, with key highlights including: 12 months of testing ~120-150 vehicles will be built and validated ~70 crash tests 30 sled tests Full slate of vehicle tests; no shortcuts 80% of all components are sourced 63% of all engineering is released 54% of tooling is committed Partnering with the frontdoor collective for 10,000 MPDVs, the frontdoor collective are a network of delivery service partners that provide dependable last-mile delivery experience, with founders and executives with experience from FedEx, Walmart, XPO, Amazon, Instacart and the U.S. military. With more than 100 franchisees with experience in delivering for companies like Amazon, XPO, Axlehire and Ontrac, the company, aims to expand that to 300 franchisees by the end of this year link. Surpassing 9,500 non-binding pre-orders across lifestyle vehicle, pickup track and multi-purpose delivery vehicle link Showcasing its vehicles at various events including the ACT Expo and Cars & Coffee (both of which were attended by some of the amazing folks at the canoo subreddit who attended, took detailed notes/pictures and shared it with everyone), and receiving invites to others such as the LA Auto show link. Part 5 – Financials and Valuation Before looking at Canoo/Competitors, here are some analyst PTs R.F. Lafferty - $19 link H.C. Wainright - $15 link Bank of America - $5 (can’t find the article at the moment but I’m sure I’ve seen it somewhere) Average = $13, current SP = $6.7 As of Canoo’s second quarter 10Q, the company had cash on hand of $563.6 million link, which according to the company is more than sufficient to cover the cost of bringing its first products to markets link. The company could raise $273M from warrants if the SP is greater than $18 for 20 out of 30 days. At a pre-revenue stage there’s not too much to say in this department, other than to note that value of a couple of orders: Over 9,500 non-binding preorders – which if they are followed through with would be worth at least $313,500,00 (assuming 9,500 orders of the cheapest vehicle which is the base model MPDV). 10,000 MPDVs for the frontdoor collective which would be worth at least $330,000,000 (assuming cheapest MPDV). As far as valuations go, let’s divide the pre-revenue EV manufacturers into tiers for an easier look – based on their market cap. I’m sure some are missing because I only took a few, let me know and I’ll add them in later. These market caps were taken within a few moments of each other on 9/21 from yahoo finance. Lucid Motors – $41.23B, 11,000 pre-orders, delivery delayed to fall 2021 Nikola Corporation - $4.25B, lowered delivery guidance of 25/50 vehicles for 2021 Fisker Inc - $3.917B, >17,000 pre-orders, value of $637,483,000 Faraday Future - $3.66B, 300 FF 91 Vehicles, value of $54,000,000 delivery in 2022 Canoo – $1.63B, 19,500 pre-orders (9,500 individual + 10,000 front door collective), value of $643,500,000, delivery fall 2022 for LV, 2023 for MPDV Company A (market cap too low, has a DOJ investigation ongoing and issued a going concern for whether it would have cash to make it to production) - $1.2B Just looking at a couple of examples here it would seem that Canoo is undervalued purely on a pre-orders/revenue perspective. Fisker and Faraday Future, which are both expected to deliver in 2022 as is the case with Canoo, have over double the market cap despite Canoo having similar preorder value (compared to Fisker) or much higher (compared to Faraday Future). Haven’t done a cash flow analysis of every company but even taking into consideration Fisker having $400M more in cash on hand source, there’s a significant discrepancy. Faraday Future meanwhile has less than half of Canoo’s cash on hand at $230M link. Part 6 – Bear Case With anything pre-revenue, the biggest issue is always going to be do we have enough cash to get the product off the ground imo. I could write a really long paragraph but yea that’s pretty much it in a sentence. Since I’m on the bullish side for the company, I’ll lay out a few reasons why I think Canoo won’t be running out of $$$ before it comes to market – these have mostly been stated here and there throughout this document but I’ll summarize them below: As of Canoo’s second quarter 10Q, the company had cash on hand of $563.6 million which according to the company is more than sufficient to cover the cost of bringing the Lifestyle Vehicle to market. Oklahoma is providing an incentive package that totals over $300 million, and may kick in millions more based on whether Canoo hits or exceeds a target of hiring military veterans to make up 10 percent of the workforce at the facility. EV funding is a significant portion of the upcoming budget, this is less grounded than the others but there is assumedly some hopium that Canoo would be able to receive some federal support if needed. The company could take on debt to assist in getting to production – H.C. Wainwright in their coverage indicated that they expect $500M to $525M in funding could be raised in debt to 2023. Tony has previously stated that they are looking for as non-dilutive an approach as possible, and given the current SP it wouldn’t make much sense to go the additional equity route. In May, the SEC opened a fact-finding inquiry into Canoo as it did with many former EV SPACs, unlike others such as NKLA and (Company A) – nothing further has come as of yet, nor have any DOJ investigations been launched. Part 7 – SI and Squeeze Potential I know y’all have just been waiting for this so I’ll get right down to it. Famously developed by the esteemed /u/pennyether, the SMELL system is going to help us take a look at some key numbers that’ll help understand GOEV’s squeezability. Short Interest – 31.8 million shares, 32% of free float Market Cap – $1.63 Billion, not big enough that it’s immovable, not small enough that shorts would be able to cover without investing a decent amount of capital Extremely Memeable – I mean… GOEV, like Go… EV, idk I think it ticks off the memeability criteria Low Liquidity – Average volume per yahoo finance is 2.7M shares, which is 2.7% of the free float so any inflow will cause the share price to move pretty significantly. Over the last quarter, it seems that institutions have been loading up on Canoo for cheap, with institutional inflows of $177M and only $2.56M sold link Low Risk (IV) – Yep, current IV is 77.1% for 9/24 and 10/1 options. Please do NOT consider this financial advice, like at all, but if you’re one of the folks who look to just buy options for the sake of contributing to a gamma squeeze, take a look at the post by /u/ChemaKyle on how buying far OTM options and how it’s not the best idea if you want the MMs to hedge. There’s not much of a need to hedge vs something that doesn’t have a ramp up and no OI at the ATM values. I’d agree with his/her post and the commentators that buying ATM options and the underlying shares would have a greater chance at causing a gamma squeeze, but this is something you should research and do your own DD on as well based on your risk tolerance and investment threshold. Part 8 – TL;DR The global EV market is expected to be valued at $725.1 Billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 27.19% from $171.26 in 2021, with total EV sales growing from 2.5 million in 2020 to 11.2 million in 2025, then reaching 31.1 million by 2030. EVs would secure approximately 32 per cent of the total market share for new car sales. The US electric vehicles market is now expected to reach 6.9 million unit sales by 2025, up 5x from 1.4 million unit sales forecast for 2020, due to government incentives driving EV ownership. President Biden is seeking a pledge from auto manufacturers that would see EVs make up 40% - 50% of new U.S. vehicle sales by 2030, to support this EV tax credits jump to $12,500 in the proposed $3.5 trillion budget blueprint Democrats passed a couple of weeks ago. In August, the Senate in a non-binding amendment narrowly voted in favor of prohibiting taxpayers from claiming EV tax credits if they make more than $100,000 annually or if vehicles cost more than $40,000. Either way, this is huge for Canoo which is offering base models of the Lifestyle Vehicle and MPDV at submitted by
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reddit.com |
ny92 |
Sep 22, 2021 |
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TIFU by trying to be Tesla
In keeping with TIFU tradition this happened many years ago. We were a pair of young and passionate engineers. If you only care how this ended, skip down to the part where we departed engineering and entered the hallowed, and now carbon-scorch marked, ground of the TIFU. TIL: Tesla himself submitted a TIFU after melting the first AC generator in the country at Niagara Falls. He forgot the off switch. The Plan HAARP is a government project and we wanted to see if we could do something similar with spare parts and a pickup truck -- instead of a bloated military expenditure run by professionals. We were going to try for a bit of mad science instead of the nice and polished kind a billion dollars buys. Point of note: There are no mad scientists, just mad engineers. They don't have control groups and tend to care more about making awesome as fuck things happen than petty contrivances like FCC radiated power standards. The goal was to use some Tesla-inspired engineering and a junkyard of old electronics parts to make our own HAARP. Tesla's experiments are simple and every electronics enthusiast knows them by heart. They need: capacitors, coils, and a really big off switch. The Capacitors Capacitors usually come in micro or pico-farad sizes. We needed a really big cap -- so about, uhh, a few million times bigger. America! Go big, or go home. We built some big honkers out of metal drums and coated the inside with paint. We checked continuity and had to redo it a few times before we actually got that right. In went the guts that make a capacitor, and we're done with that. We had to come back to this once the coils were done. At the end of the series we filled up some two liters with our secret capacitor sauce and would run some AC pulses through it into a multiwatt resistor block out of some industrial equipment. Math ensued, and we hit our tolerances. The Coils We had to wind the coils ourselves too. We needed what was basically a voltage ladder, which would be a series of transformers at like 50:1 each time. It's not a problem for the first few in the series, but when you start getting reeeeeeally high voltages, even the tiniest crack in your wiring and everything's on fire. We had to use really thick wires because those come with really thick insulation that won't have any cracks in it. It got... big... and... heavy. And this is how we went from pickup truck to flatbed. Go big or go home! The Off Switch The most important part of any mad science... is making sure you can shut it off. Many an evil overlord have died shortly after screaming "But -- I am invincible!" Off. Switch. Ours was made of some pneumatics pulled from a dead caterpillar. It pushes forward, the connectors meet, and we have juice. When we're done, we hand-pump it the other way to release it. It's also safe because we're not near it and it's all plastics, rubber, and non-conductive oils. Out of a fear of having the pump fail from our nearby barely controlled chaos, we opted for the hand pump. Slow -- but it can't break. The Juice We were going to power this off the mains. No, not house mains. Overhead mains. The big ones. Don't ask how we hooked it up. Think junkyard. Bored engineers. Imagine! Tesla's experiments needed a lot of juice. So does HAARP. And there was no legitimate way to get that much power except right from the source just like he did. How it Should have worked We'd get some spectacular arcing in our mystery sauce substitute for the primary tap output. It would make the air ionize. That's what HAARP tries to do, except a mile in the air. Normally, Tesla coils are put in open air to let the arcing have a little fun and put on a light show. We needed that in a confined space so it was less the light show and more what the light show did that we needed: Ionization. We put it inside a tall pipe and sprayed the inside with non-conductive paint many times. We should also get some pretty good heating effect, so air would draw in from the bottom, pushing the ionized air out through the top. I think it put out something like 800 million volts by the math. For comparison, most people are sane enough to stop at around 500k to 3 million. If it were left in the open air... the arcing distance would be over 20 meters long. There was no video of this because, obviously, hooking into the HV mains is frowned upon. Most people do it for less savory reasons than the wholesome pursuit of science. Also, we didn't think anything more sophisticated than a vaccum tube would survive anywhere near our monstrosity. The intense RF radiation causes lightbulbs to glow -- even just from the transmission tower, which is just due to the current flow and not a deliberate engineering choice. Cell phones near it would probably never work again. But that was going to be all we'd have to worry about. The circuit was balanced. We had a off switch that could not fail. It wouldn't draw any more juice than the factory that had run here before. Nobody would notice. Transportation We thought it might be best to not be around when five hundred people called in asking why the lights flickered and then everything wireless went ape shit. A normal car has normal electronics, which might not work after if this was loaded in back on the flat bed. Remember what I said about big drums and big coils? That's... big heavy. So -- diesel engine. God bless something that can survive a nuke. We also needed to sure our vehicle was primitive enough to survive any mishaps and carry away the evidence with us. This was less a finely tuned chunk of RF engineering and more like a hundred ton coal-powered locomotive. But it'd put on a pretty light show. We would throw a couple thick plastic tarps and sheets all over the back of the truck, which should protect it. Electricity takes the shortest path to ground -- with all the metal covered and the vehicle propped up on rubber tires, it wouldn't be a problem. Airplanes get hit by lightning all the time and nothing happens. Our ride was sure to live. The Location We carefully selected a location where we could set up, and be near a transmission tower and a road. That took time, but we eventually found a parking lot behind a closed factory. A few cars were around, parked, but it was quiet and that was perfect. Here's when TIFU enters the game We waited until it was late enough nobody was going to see a couple dumb kids pull up in a wheezing diesel with a tarp over something big in the back. A few minutes of setup and we do our (redacted) on the tower, and we're ready to throw the dead man switch. The hydraulic pistons edge slowly forward as we frobbed the foot lever. After a minute or so, a loud and deep buzz filled the air. The st. elmo's fire was spectacular. Just as we expected, the heating effect caused the air to ionize and in seconds we had a nice glow coming out of it. And by glow, I mean roar. Like back of a fighter jet roar. It actually reminded me of some experiments you see in high power physics or nuclear reactors. It was a sight to behold ripping out of the back of a flatbed. It started to heat up. A few sparks flew out of the coils, but given the juice pouring through it that was hardly a surprise. We weren't going to run it long. Well everything went to hell pretty much as soon as we confirmed our little frankenstein did something cool. The two liters? We did the circuit perfectly. We overengineered everything else. Except those fucking bottles. We were tired and it'd been a month of fuckery building it. We fudged. Just run it a few minutes, see what happens, and then pack it in, right? The bottles didn't last that long. And when they went a minute in, it was to a loud boom and spray. Inside the circuit, there's a resonant frequency allows the best discharge of energy. Deviate much from that, and your whole circuit can become unstable. Rather than a smooth cycling flow, you'll start to get harmonics and stuff. Ordinarily, this just means you don't get a pretty lightshow anymore and your little Jr. Tesla Coil Science Kit just makes an underwhelming buzzing noise and lets out the magic smoke. The feedback eventually just karks it. We... did not have a Tesla Coil Science Kit Jr. -- "For Safe, Clean Fun!". No. We had the Tesla Coil Science Kit Sr., and it's motto was "Let's Fuck Some Shit Up." With that much energy floating around, that meant wild excursions in voltage and current. Gratz... we're now ground zero of exactly what happened to Tesla right before he melted the Niagara falls generators. The only difference is... this thing has an RF element. The smooth flow of ionized air started chiefing bad. It started shitting out lightning balls like an angry steam locomotive. Near a transmission tower. Which it was connected to. We... are not clever engineers anymore. We'd put it at least five times the distance of our expected arc distance between our apparatus and the tower -- so there was no way for it to ground out on it. That would have been very bad. Ionized air is... ionized. Ionized means it eats the paint off of shit. Literally. While we were trying to figure out if our new Chiefer Coil Deluxe(tm) was either an experimental success or a horrifying failure before shutting it off, Chiefer Coil decided to end the debate with huge fucking sparks in the everywheres. The drum wasn't insulated anymore. And our circuit wasn't stable anymore. This... was now causing lightning on a cloudless night that would have been visible for miles, along with orange and bluish shit floating around up there. It would have looked like an angry UFO saucer on a war path to the people on the freeway miles away. We didn't know if there was enough left of the equipment to dampen any oscillations enough to keep the current from jumping to one of those ionized pockets that it was shitting out. Main line current will crispy critter you instantly With transformer isolation compromised the secondaries (output) could feed back into the primary (input). We were faced now with a daunting choice: Rush the hydraulics to release the connection, run and leave a very pissed off power company and half a million people behind, or begin praying at about 7 megaprayers per second. We made about 21 megaprayers while throwing paper-rock-scissors to see who'd rush the hydraulic disconnect. It was a harrowing run to the primer to retract the hydraulics. I stomped on that like a Erdogan body guard on that thing, pulling the oil into the reservoir and kark it before it karked me. All around, lightning was grounding out to everything metal and the air was humming after our equipment dropped the bass. Well, again, our circuit execution was flawless. Our materials design was... less so. We retracted the hydraulics but a spark gap had formed. The mains didn't want to let go. Now we had an ape-shit tesla coil feeding back on itself next to something that was now sending a continuous arc ten feet straight up. It danced about in curling ribbons while pyrotechnics of blue and gold shot all around it. If one of those hit, the ionization path would send potentially a billion volts up to the tower and backfeed into the main grid. It'd be exactly like a lightning strike, only far, far worse. The noise of all of this had everything around us vibrating with a deafening and modulating hum. We thought we just needed to retract it a little more than the arc gap would be if the HV grounded out. Which is true: We didn't know it at the time but this is how power companies turn them off. We were fucking terrified for about ten seconds that it might not actually turn off. It did, just like it does for the power company, and the acrid smell of ozone was the only trace we left behind as we took our asthmatic (and borrowed) diesel, only the engine working and all the lights dead, and the smoking ruins of the equipment back out into the country before taking grinders to our equipment. Engineers: 0. Mother Nature: 1. TL;DR We built a really big tesla coil and nearly melted a power plant. EDIT: Some note technical details are incorrect or missing. This is not accidental. Moderators allowed this post on that condition. EDIT: PLEASE stop asking how to do this! It was a fuck up in the fine establishment of mad science, not a ringing endorsement to be suicidal. The plans were inscribed in the Electronomicon and left in an electronics graveyard. Only the high priests in the field of EE know of its location. EDIT: There was something else here I had to remove because some loser pulled an /r/shittymorph . Please disregard... and now I finally know what people are talking about on that one. Someone write a bot to point these trolls out so we can all hate on them together. :( submitted by /u/MNGrrl to r/tifu [link] [comments]
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reddit.com |
MNGrrl |
May 23, 2017 |
United States
