Elon Musk Has Rejected "Bonehead" Questions Over Tesla's $710 Million Losses
Ready for your latest dose of Tesla-based oddness? Good, because Elon Musk has hit the headlines once again. This time it’s for totally dismissing corporate analysts’ questions on Tesla’s financial health.
As we’ve already reported on several occasions, Tesla is spending money pretty quickly without all that much of it coming back in. During a conference call with number-punchers from heavyweight industry analysts, Musk refused to answer seemingly valid questions about dollar and about how many people who had placed deposits for Model 3s still wanted them.
A Bernstein analyst called Tony Sacconaghi asked about how much money Tesla needed to raise to keep functioning after the company lost a record $710 million in 2018’s first quarter, but CEO Musk responded with:
“Excuse me, excuse me. Next, next. Boring bonehead questions are not cool. Next.”
Shortly afterwards, another analyst, Joseph Spak of RBC, asked how many, of those people who had placed Model 3 deposits and now had the chance to move on to the next stage and customise their car, had actually followed through. There was reportedly a 14-second period of silence where it’s believed that the call was muted on Tesla’s end, before 46-year-old Musk returned and said:
“We’re going to go to YouTube. Sorry, these questions are so dry. They’re killing me.”
In minutes some $1.8 billion had dropped off Tesla’s publicly traded value. Meanwhile, the Model Y’s production start date has been delayed until 2020, a year later than first stated, and we now know that it won’t be built at the firm’s Fremont, California plant. Elon Musk has also himself said that it’s ‘high time’ the company became profitable.
We hope it does, but this shareholder-scaring weirdness won’t help.
Comments
Seems to me like he’s avoiding these questions so as to not let on that things are worse than they really are for Tesla. Could just be my imagination though.
please do go bankrupt
There is so much smart people in comment section, who have solutions for Elon problems, I hope that Elon have CT profile so he can see where he making mistake, it would be helpful for him.
Unfortunately, Musk has better things to do than listen to “boneheads” like us. He’s just too focused on his business to realise that the problem IS his business.
Judging by what the guy’s been through, he’ll make it out of this as well. Im pretty sure he hides an ace up his sleeve and is about to pull it out. Stop judging him after his attitude, it’s easy to play the nice guy whenever you get public exposure, it’s harder to stay yourself and do your thing until the end. What this guy did is outstanding, he managed to make the electric car a thing, built a huge network of superchargers and a lot of awesome things, while everyone else is just waiting for his rocket to crash and model3 to fail just so they can point a finger and act smart ‘I told you, I always knew this guy is a scam’. People are so pathetic.
It’s not like half of manufacturers make electric cars and infrastructure would be built anyway, Telsa just sped up the process a bit.
Maybe Volvo will offer to buy the rival
A lot of people blow domes for money, this guy can’t answer questions for it
This just reminds me of when he sued BBC bcuz Jeremy gave the original roadster a bad rep. He lied and made up excuses and falsely defended his roadster to try and make sure people didn’t think it was unreliable. Bcuz he had no evidence, he didn’t win his court case and lost the appeal as well. Very childish behaviour!
I knew they had lost a lot, but $710M? I honestly died laughing.
Heh heh heh
MattKimberley article?