First of all, note that much of what I’ve written below is just my own personal opinion. I’m not Elon Musk’s mom, psychiatrist, or assistant. Also, despite what many have claimed or joked, I’m not on Tesla’s PR team.
Shortly after an article by the Financial Times confirmed that the Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund had amassed a $2 billion stake in Tesla, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that he was considering taking the company private with a share buyback at a $420 price point. His initial tweet was confirmed within a few hours with a new blog post on Tesla’s website, where the company shared an internal email from CEO Elon Musk to all Tesla employees sharing his logic for the move.
This quarter, the Tesla earnings call came on a day that I was already booked to basically spend all of my time slogging around Los Angeles, for CleanTechnica meetings with cleantech leaders as well as family engagements. That resulted in me listening in on the call from my Model 3 in some random neighborhood to the north of Los Angeles, which was surprisingly comfortable. I furiously took notes on the call while comparing them to the quarterly shareholder letter — while also chatting back and forth with our central team as we rallied around CleanTechnica Director & Chief Editor Zach Shahan in preparation for his line of questioning for Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
We’ve covered the wild world of Tesla short sellers for a while. When the most shorted company on the stock market is a major cleantech company, CleanTechnica just has to dig into this stuff. To much better understand what short sellers are, who shorts Tesla, what the Tesla short theses have been (yes, they change from time to time), and why we’ve largely thought that shorting Tesla is idiotic, check out the 11 stories linked at the bottom of this article.
Tesla has been in hell for the last year. Production hell, that is. The brutally long weeks and restless nights spent sleeping on the factory floor had taken a toll on Elon Musk and the team at Tesla, seemingly pushing him near the breaking point.
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.
There will be again a lot of boneheaded questions at this week’s Tesla earnings conference call for the results of Q2 2018. We have collected the most important questions we expect and put them into two categories.
Money manager Steve Eisman has a sterling reputation. He is one of the few who saw the 2008 financial collapse coming and reacted accordingly, making a lot of money for his clients. To do this, you have to know the market thoroughly and have access to a lot of information, researching large amounts of data.
With the advent of the internet came a new type of information gathering we’ll call the click-reporter. This new breed lives by provocative headlines that bring in clicks from the mouse or touchpad of internet viewers, and it’s those clicks that bring in the ad revenue. Get the scoop, create the enticing headline and some text to support it, and you’re golden. Elon Musk’s reaction to such reporting has really stirred this month.
Maarten, Zach, and I spent some time creating a model to look at how Tesla could become profitable in Q3 and beyond. It was based in part on taking Elon and Deepak telling the truth. I just wanted to see what Tesla would need to accomplish to become profitable.
