Joe Dodridge

Investor building with AI. 8 yrs in private equity RE. Covering markets, CRE, energy, AI, robotics and space. Former D1 tennis, current padel player.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@wholemars For me it was Ashok saying FSD Unsupervised could reach customer cars in select areas by Q2 2027, with owners able to add them to the robotaxi network. Those cars are already sitting in driveways.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@teslaownersSV Every real estate investor learns this one. Paper depreciation can make a building look like it's losing money while it throws off cash every month. Then the roof needs replacing, and that's the depreciation that was real the whole time.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@realEstateTrent honestly the most real estate thing I've read all week. did she pick the school for that on purpose or did the deals just start showing up?

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@GuyDealership @MyConversica Curious where it lands better, service customers or new sales leads? Service feels like the easier win since those people already trust the shop.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@teslaownersSV Is that 100x per satellite, or for the whole network once V3 is fully up?

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

Same thing happens in regular real estate. The seller usually picks the buyer they trust to close, not the top number. Quick answers, real deposit, no retrading at the end. Three months on an NDA and an 18 month escrow loses deals to smaller buyers all day, no matter how good your credit is.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

Robotaxi check in, week of Oct 25

Tesla's Texas robotaxi registry went from 803 to 970 this week. 114 of the 167 new ones were Cybercabs, so Cybercab is now 463 of the 970. h/t @TeslaZoa for posting every TxDMV update.

Tesla also put out its first Robotaxi safety report: more than 3 million autonomous miles and zero injuries so far, per @aelluswamy.

Still not reported: how many of those 970 are giving paid rides on a normal day, and how many rides each one does.

My read: the fleet is growing faster than I expected. What I can't tell from the outside is whether each car is busy, and that's the whole business. Dallas getting Cybercab next month should give us a second city to watch.

If you've seen real ride numbers anywhere, send them my way.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@mattyp @bot When will grok have access to iPhone messages?!

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@BaT_MaN_23 @grok No sport?! You’re crazy

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@elonmusk @BrianRoemmele Genius

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

I've started posting a lot more of what I actually think, on purpose.

Part of it is that I learn faster when someone tells me I'm wrong. Part of it is accountability. It's easy to hold a strong opinion in your head. It's a lot harder when it's out here with your name on it and anyone can come back in six months and check.

So if you think one of my takes is off, tell me. I'd honestly rather hear it.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

Why doesn't LA have more padel courts? Demand isn't the problem.

It's the real estate. Pick a bad location and nobody shows up, because nobody in LA is sitting in traffic to play. The locations that do work have basically zero availability, and the good spaces usually get leased before they're ever listed.

Like most things in LA real estate, it comes down to who you know.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

Tower stocks jumped Friday on the idea that SpaceX becomes their fourth big tenant. Maybe. But I keep coming back to who pays the rent today.

AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile bring in about 85% of American Tower's US and Canada revenue. Those are the same three companies Starlink Mobile is trying to take customers from.

SpaceX would also be a very different kind of tenant. A regular carrier needs towers everywhere. A network that can lean on satellites needs a lot fewer of them, and it shows up to every lease negotiation knowing it has somewhere else to go.

Near term a new tenant is great news. Long term I'd want to know what happens to a landlord when its best tenants start losing share to a competitor that lives partly in orbit.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@teslaownersSV 927 registered and 420 of them already Cybercabs is a big jump. What I really want to know is how many paid rides each Cybercab is doing in a day. Has anyone seen that reported anywhere? @SawyerMerritt where would we even find that?

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@KatieMiller @bot @Varneyco @elonmusk Same setup here, one chief of staff bot running the rest. The Zoom walkthrough is real though. Nobody gets it until they watch it actually do something for them. @philrosenn what was the first task that made it click for you?

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

I run a handful of agents and this is exactly what I've seen. Every handoff loses a little context, the same way a message gets watered down by the time it travels down an org chart. Kind of funny that agents are rediscovering middle management. Fewer layers has worked better for me every time.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@zerohedge Six companies paying for the whole buildout is wild. In real estate that's the first thing I'd flag on any deal. Great credit, sure, but if one of them pulls back there's no seventh tenant waiting.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

Feels like a squeeze to me. Everyone is trying to buy chips at the same time and the fabs can't keep up yet.

Long term I still think compute gets a lot cheaper. That index fell every year for almost 30 years for a reason, and once data centers start going up in space, powered straight off the sun, I'd bet the cost of compute drops faster than anyone is modeling today.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@SawyerMerritt @Starlink "I wouldn't over-rotate" is what every incumbent says the year before they start over-rotating.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

Three things I'd rather own than an AI startup right now:

1. Land next to a substation
2. A long-term power contract
3. A transformer factory

The software keeps getting cheaper. The stuff it runs on doesn't.