Elon Musk to bail on Tesla earnings calls
Tesla CEO Elon Musk told investors Monday during the company’s second quarter earnings call not to expect him on future calls unless he has something major to announce.
“I will no longer default to doing earnings call,” Musk said, according to Bloomberg. “Obviously I’ll do the annual shareholder meeting, but I think that going forward I will most likely not be on earnings calls unless there’s something really important that I need to say.”
Ticker Security Last Change Change % TSLA TESLA, INC. 630.50 -27.12 -4.12%
One important thing Musk had to say during Monday’s call was that Tesla surpassed $1 billion profit in Q2 for the first time in the company’s history.
TESLA SURPASSES $1B PROFIT FOR FIRST TIME
The electric vehicle maker’s second quarter profit came in at $1.14 billion, or $1.02 per share, compared with $104 million or 10 cents a share a year ago, while total revenue came in at $11.9 billion – a 98% year-over-year increase.
Regarding his time management, the billionaire entrepreneur was asked during the call whether he would grant interviews to YouTubers, to which Musk explained that if he is doing interviews, he cannot be doing “other work.”
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That “other work” includes not only running Tesla, but overseeing SpaceX and The Boring Company, both of which he founded. He also co-founded Neuralink and Open AI. Earlier this month, Musk told a court he doesn’t enjoy being CEO of Tesla, saying, “I rather hate it and I would much prefer to spend my time on design and engineering, which is what intrinsically I like doing.”
But not everyone thinks it’s a great idea for Musk to skip future Tesla earnings calls.
Former investment banker and Bloomberg opinion columnist Liam Denning wrote in a piece published late Monday that “$30-odd billion of rival spending a year — along with billions more from Chinese automakers and fresh upstarts such as newly listed Lucid Group Inc. — will have an impact, and soon” for Tesla.
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“Indeed, mass electrification of vehicles, which is Tesla’s guiding objective, depends on there being more than one player in town,” Denning continued, adding, “the difficulty, as ever, is that Tesla is priced as a winner taking all.”
He concluded: “Musk might want to keep those one-hour slots blocked out in his calendar for a while yet.”
Elon Musk says he’s planning to skip Tesla earnings calls going forward unless there’s ‘something really important’ he needs to say
Elon Musk said during Tesla’s Q2 earnings call that he won’t be on every call going forward.
He plans to join only if “there’s something really important that I need to say,” he said.
Musk also said that doing podcast or YouTube interviews means he “can’t do actual other work.”
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We may be hearing from Elon Musk a lot less going forward.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO said during the company’s second-quarter earnings call on Monday that he doesn’t plan to be on those calls in the future unless there’s something pressing he needs to address.
“This is the, I wouldn’t say the last time I’ll do earnings calls, but this is the — I will no longer be default doing earnings calls,” Musk said.
“So obviously, I’ll do the annual shareholder meeting, but I think going forward, I will most likely not be on earnings calls unless there’s something really important that I need to say,” he added.
Musk discussed his plans in response to a question from a retail investor who asked whether Musk would pledge to do interviews once or twice annually with Tesla-focused YouTube channels, to which Musk replied, “Um, yeah, I guess I’ll do an interview.”
“I mean, just bear in mind, like if I’m doing interviews, then I can’t do actual other work,” he said. “So it’s not — I only have so much time in the day, so — but yeah, I’ll do one. I won’t do it annually, but I’ll do it once.”
Read more: Fort Lauderdale asked Elon Musk to build a commuter train tunnel. So how did it end up considering a $30 million beach tunnel for Teslas instead?
Musk has said repeatedly that he’s stretched thin. During a virtual bitcoin conference with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey earlier this month, Musk said that two-thirds of the “personal and professional pain” he’s experienced in life has stemmed from running Tesla, and that he’s poured his “life energy” into running the electric car company.
During Model 3 production from mid-2017 to mid-2019 — a time he once described as “production hell” — Musk at one point slept under his desk at the factory and stayed for days at a time as the company raced to produce 5,000 Model 3 sedans per week. He revealed last year that Tesla was a month away from bankruptcy during that period, describing it as a time of “extreme stress and pain.”
The company also faced possible bankruptcy in 2008 until a Christmas Eve investment kept the company afloat. “I think we just made it by the skin of our teeth,” Musk said in 2015.
Still, despite Tesla’s hardships, Musk has found time for other pursuits. The 50-year-old dual CEO — who’s currently the second-richest person in the world with a fortune worth $180 billion — also oversees SpaceX, which was recently awarded a $178 million NASA contract to launch a mission to Jupiter. He’s also founded three other companies and has six sons, including a 1-year-old baby with the musician Grimes — all while maintaining an active Twitter presence that often gets him into hot water.
Musk also got involved in a public spat with the state of California during coronavirus lockdowns last year, which led him to publicly move to Texas and sell off his portfolio of multimillion-dollar homes. He joined Monday’s earnings call from Tesla’s Austin-based Gigafactory, and beeping from the plant was audible in the background of the call.
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