So I spent Wednesday night listening to the Tesla Q1 earnings call instead of doing literally anything more productive, and I'm still thinking about it four days later, which tells you something.
Quick recap for anyone who missed it: Tesla reported a pretty rough quarter, a record net loss somewhere north of $700 million, and everyone dialing in wanted to know the same obvious thing, how is Model 3 production actually going and when does the company stop burning cash at this rate. Totally reasonable questions. The kind of thing analysts are, you know, paid to ask.
Elon didn't want to hear it. RBC's Joseph Spak tried to ask about capital requirements and reservation cancellations, and Musk cut him off mid-question, said "these questions are so dry, they're killing me," and then went further when Bernstein's Toni Sacconaghi pushed on gross margin: "boring bonehead questions are not cool. Next?" Just moved on. Live, on a call with actual investors whose money is actually in this company.
And then, this is the part that got me, he pivoted to taking questions from a guy named Galileo Russell, who runs a YouTube channel called Third Row Tesla and was apparently live-streaming the whole thing from the retail investor line. Russell got softball stuff about reservation holders in, and Musk lit up talking to him like it was a completely different conversation.
I get the instinct, I really do. Wall Street analyst-speak is exhausting and a lot of these calls are just people trying to find a headline-worthy gotcha in a spreadsheet. I've sat through enough earnings calls for other companies (don't ask why, it's a bad habit I picked up in college and never shook) to know the format grinds everyone down after twenty minutes. But there's a difference between finding the format tedious and telling the people whose pension funds are holding your stock that their questions are boring. The stock dropped something like 5% in after-hours trading basically while he was still talking. That's not analysts being precious, that's the market reacting in real time to a CEO who sounded like he didn't want to be there.
Here's the thing that actually bugs me about it though, and it's not really about Musk being rude, rudeness is basically a Tuesday for a lot of these guys. It's that the questions genuinely weren't bonehead questions. Model 3 production had been stuck in what Tesla itself called "production hell" for months at that point, missing target after target, and asking how much more capital the company needs to get through that isn't some gotcha, it's the single most relevant question you could possibly ask a company burning cash at that rate. Waving it off as boring doesn't make it less important, it just means it doesn't get answered on the call where shareholders are actually listening.
I've been half-following Tesla stuff since I got a friend's referral code for the Model 3 back when reservations opened, and my running theory at this point is that the company runs on two totally separate PR channels: whatever Elon posts or says off the cuff, and whatever the actual comms and IR teams are trying to manage in the background. Those two channels are not always saying the same thing, and this call was a pretty good example of channel one steamrolling channel two in real time.
None of this means Model 3 is doomed or that the company's finished, plenty of smart people still think the fundamentals get there eventually. But if you're going to hold a public earnings call, answer the boring questions. That's kind of the whole point of the call. If you don't want to field them, don't schedule ninety minutes with a room full of professional stock pickers, just do a product event instead where everyone's there to be delighted and nobody's asking about cash burn.
Anyway. Back to my regularly scheduled programming, which this week apparently means half-watching a livestream from a guy in his car reacting to Tesla's balance sheet, because that's the internet we live in now.