Tesla (TSLA) tumbles after disastrous Elon Musk conference call

Tesla’s stock (TSLA) is down by as much as 10% today following the release of the company’s earnings and the following disastrous conference call with Elon Musk.

Yesterday, Tesla released its Q3 financial results, and it did miss expectations, but the stock was actually flat following the release – presumably because of the announcement of the Cybertruck delivery event.

However, things took a turn for the worse for Tesla’s stock after the conference call with Tesla’s management.

There were a few pieces of information that came out of the call that likely contributed to the stock tumbling, like Elon Musk “tempering expectations” with Cybertruck and Tesla pumping the brakes on Gigafactory Mexico.

But the entire mood of the conference call itself might have affected the current selloff.

Electrek’s Take

I was personally disappointed in the conference call. First, we missed the first half of Musk’s opening statement because he was muted.

But that’s not the crazy part. The crazy part was that Tesla unmuted him, but they didn’t tell him. He didn’t restart his statement; he just continued as if nothing happened. And then it happened again halfway through the call.

It’s not the first time I’ve been worried about Musk being surrendered by yes men who are too afraid to give him bad news, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is an example of that.

Secondly, I was disappointed by Musk skating around important questions. For example, he was asked a critical question about Tesla’s plan to eventually take legal responsibility for FSD and instead of responding, the CEO complained about people “already believing that Tesla has the responsibility” because they are suing the company and then claiming that Tesla achieved “baby AGI”, which is not an answer at all.

Lastly, he spent about half the call complaining about macroeconomics and interest rates, which I know are having a big impact on Tesla’s business right now, but it’s not a good look to complain a ton about something completely outside of the company’s power and then not answer questions that are within the company’s power.

It also feels like Musk is pushing this high-interest issue too much. It has an undeniable impact, but it’s certainly not the only issue with demand because Tesla has reduced prices more over the last year than what it needed to keep monthly payments at the same price despite interest rate increases.

I shared my thoughts on this yesterday:

It does feel like Musk is spending too much time on X and stuck in his superfan-controlled feedback loop.