For our hot new CleanTech Talk podcast interview series, I recently sat down with Ross Gerber, cofounder, president, and CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management, to discuss Tesla innovation, Tesla’s vehicle and manufacturing platforms, the media, Tesla communications and marketing, and more.
With back-to-back profitable quarters under its belt, Tesla is kicking off 2019 with an emphasis on financial discipline. As Engadget reports, “Tesla’s 2018 fourth-quarter results showed the company still made a profit ($139.5 million), but it was smaller than that of the third quarter ($311.5 million). For the quarter, the company posted $7.23 billion in revenue. Last year’s revenue was $3.29 billion. Overall for 2018 it reported $21.4 billion in revenue.”
The goal of this series is to examine current topics being written about Tesla [TSLA] that appear to be stirring up “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt” (or FUD). The plan is to try to provide reasonable analysis about the validity of the claims. I generally do not link to the articles that “inspire” me to write this, as I do not wish to reward analysis I feel is poor with increased traffic. However, I will freely admit that my analysis may contain incorrect assumptions, and will do my best to acknowledge them in future articles.
Tesla short sellers reportedly lost nearly $2 billion at the end of last week. Yes, two billion. If you thought all of the anti-Tesla FUD and media hype was coming from the most honest of places, think again. People don’t like to lose money. They normally like to make money.
When you make a financial Model that pretends to show the development of Tesla’s financials, you should dare to use it and show the results.
All innovative companies attract negative press coverage, but the tide of anti-Tesla scare stories and misinformation has reached such preposterous proportions that it has become a story in itself (remember, colleagues, we’re supposed to report the news, not make it). It’s widely believed that much of the mud, especially the articles that focus on financial and stock-market topics, originates with short sellers, who have collectively bet some $12 billion against the California carmaker.
During Tesla’s last conference call, concerning the first quarter of 2018, Mr. Deepak Ahuja, Tesla’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO), while answering a question from Rod Lache, an analyst at Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc., said: “Rod, we are very CapEx-efficient, overall. Let me just start from that point. And if we look at our depreciation costs on a per unit basis at steady run rate of 5,000 or so cars per week, we are in my mind well below most of our competitors – well below $2,000 per unit depreciation cost.”
I just published 11 highlights from yesterday’s 2018 Tesla shareholder meeting. I cut off right around the start of the Q&A session — tweets plus live Q&A. This article continues that initial list to include 17 more highlights. In this case, we have no charts from Tesla, but the highlights may be even more interesting. As usual, Tesla CEO Elon Musk shared more details than we could have hoped for, supplemented here and there by CTO JB Straubel, CFO Deepak Ahuja, and Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen.
If you listen to Tesla’s quarterly earnings conference calls, you’ve likely heard the voice of Deepak Ahuja, the company’s CFO, answering questions. Deepak typically provides a calm, soft-spoken counterpoint to company CEO Elon Musk. He’s also got a fascinating history at Tesla.
Originally published on EV Obsession. James covered most of the really interesting news from Tesla’s Q3 2015 conference call. If you missed those, they’re here: Positive Tesla Model X & Autopilot Reception Increasing Overall Tesla Sales Numbers Gigafactory Update — Quarter 3 Conference Call Reveals New Info Tesla Q4 Plans … [continued]
