Tesla held its third-quarter earnings call last Wednesday, where management met with investors to talk through the past few months and reevaluate for the road ahead. In that call, CEO Elon Musk laid down some tough numbers: Sales are down, earnings are down, and costs have risen.
This isn’t unusual, all companies hit rough spots from time to time. Meetings like this often involve a CEO placating investors, telling them all the plans for the future, ways the company will bounce back. Musk, it seems, took a different approach: Nearly coming to tears live on the call.
Dan Ives, a Wall Street analyst, called the earnings call a “mini disaster” with regard to Tesla’s profit margins and inconsistent pricing. Rather than address those concerns, Musk apparently focused on the Cybertruck and federal interest rates. Another analyst, Kevin Paffrath, gave even harsher words to Yahoo Finance:
Oh, my gosh, this was terrible. I feel bad for him. Look, he’s got a lot of things going on, legal battles, custody battles for his kids now, but it doesn’t justify acting like Trump on Twitter stonewalling the SEC or the European Union, and quite frankly turning into a little baby on the earnings call.
I mean, he was almost in tears. It showed a complete lack of leadership. Tesla’s a leadership-less company right now and it’s terrible. That’s why their CFO just left, I believe, as well.
Sounds like things are going great over at Tesla. Investors have long worried that Musk’s other ventures would get in the way of running a car company, and it seems their fears may be coming true — rather than planning paths to prosperity for Tesla, Musk seems content to whine on Twitter. And, apparently, on live calls with investors.