Tesla’s investors are antsy ahead of Wednesday’s Q2 results. The electric-vehicle maker faces surging competition, especially coming out of China, and many investors aren’t convinced that CEO Elon Musk has his eye on the ball.
Around two-thirds of respondents to a Bloomberg survey said Musk needed to pay more attention to what is still his main gig. They think he’s distracted by his other pursuits. That seems to be a fair assessment.
Twitter is the biggest distraction. “Whatever sins this platform may have, being boring is not one of them,” Musk tweeted today. Okay, but hemorrhaging money is—he also admitted Saturday that ad revenue has halved, and the company is “still negative cash flow” thanks to its heavy debt load. Twitter can’t pay its rent, and a new lawsuit claims it still owes ex-workers a cool $500 million in severance.
The “boring” reference was presumably aimed at Twitter’s suddenly very present rival, Meta’s Threads, but that’s just another indicator of how precarious Twitter’s position is these days. Musk may not be Twitter’s CEO anymore, but it’s clear he’s still the boss, and that means paying quite a lot of attention.
Musk focus is further divided by his latest A.I. venture, xAI, which has set itself the laughably grand task of building a “good” artificial general intelligence “with the overarching purpose of just trying to understand the universe,” Musk said in a Friday Twitter Spaces chat about the launch.
And then, returning for a moment to ventures that actually make money, there is SpaceX. According to Barron’s, SpaceX is now worth $150 billion, making it more valuable than either Boeing or Raytheon. Again, a justifiable attention magnet. There's also Neuralink. The Boring Company. The list goes on.
It’s not like Tesla is standing still—for one thing, it’s finally made a Cybertruck, though as Fortune’s Christiaan Hetzner points out in his analysis, we still don’t know what it’s capable of, or how much it costs. We don’t even know if what just rolled off the production line was intended for a customer, or just for internal evaluation. Tesla’s shareholders would certainly like to know, given that the waiting list for the odd-looking vehicle, which was supposed to enter production two years ago, is estimated to be close to two million long.
Hopefully, Tesla’s CEO will tell his investors what they need to know this week. But it seems unlikely that he’ll be satisfying their desire for focus anytime soon. More news below.
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David Meyer
