Tesla’s Model Y compact crossover vehicles at a showroom in Shanghai, China, on January 18, 2021.
VCG | Visual China Group | Getty Images
Amid ongoing port constraints and rising shipping costs, Tesla CEO Elon Musk urged employees Friday, in a company-wide email obtained by CNBC, to look for ways to reduce the cost of delivering electric vehicles to customers, rather than rushing orders out last-minute to hit its end of quarter sales goals.
This year, Tesla has struggled to deliver new cars to customers in the U.S. in line with originally promised date ranges. As CNBC previously reported, some Tesla customers here experienced delivery delays of months, leaving them paying out of pocket for rentals and ride-hailing apps, and needing to re-apply for loans due to slipped deadlines.
Tesla is not alone in leaving customers waiting longer than they had hoped for their new, fully electric cars. Last week, for example, newly public competitor Rivian Automotive notified people who had reserved their R1S, a sport utility vehicle, of delivery delays.
Still, sales have grown this year for Tesla seemingly unbowed by unpredictable delivery dates.
Vehicle deliveries, which are the closest approximation to sales reported by Elon Musk’s electric vehicle and renewable energy business, amounted to about 500,000 total in 2020. During the first three quarters of 2021, Tesla had already reported deliveries of 627,350 vehicles.
Since the start of 2021, the company has not provided a clear target for 2021 vehicle deliveries. But Tesla has reiterated its loose guidance for “50% average annual growth in vehicle deliveries” over a multiyear horizon, including on its third-quarter earnings call.
JL Warren Capital’s CEO and Head of Research, Junheng Li, wrote in a note to investors last week that she expects Tesla sales to continue to rise, at least in China this quarter. “Soaring gas price benefits all new energy vehicle brands,” in the country she noted.
Some 1.3 million electric vehicles were sold in China in 2020, according to Canalys research. The firm predicted that the number would grow to 1.9 million EV sales in China by the end of this year.
China remains the world’s largest market for new cars, with strong government support for going electric.
Here’s the full e-mail that Elon Musk sent out on Friday to all Tesla employees (transcribed by CNBC).
From: Elon Musk
To: Everybody
Subj. Q4 deliveries vs. cost efficiency
Date: Nov. 26, 2021 [time stamp redacted]
Per my email several weeks ago, our focus this quarter should be on minimizing cost of deliveries rather than spending heavily on expedite fees, overtime and temporary contractors just so that cars arrive in Q4.
What has happened historically is that we sprint like crazy at end of quarter to maximize deliveries, but then deliveries drop massively in the first few weeks of the next quarter. In effect, looked at over a six month period, we won’t have delivered any extra cars but we will have spent a lot of money and burned ourselves out to accelerate deliveries in the last two weeks of each quarter.
We will still have quite a big wave of deliveries in the last few weeks of December, as we don’t yet have high volume production either in Europe or Texas, which means a lot of cars on boats from China to Europe and on trucks [and/or] rail from California to the East Coast arriving late in the quarter, but this is nonetheless the right time to start reducing the size of the wave in favor of a steadier and more efficient pace of deliveries.
The right principle is take the most efficient action, as though we were not publicly-traded and the notion of “end of quarter” didn’t exist.
Chris Martin of Coldplay performs live at San Siro Stadium, Milan, Italy, in July 2017.
Mairo Cinquetti | NurPhoto | Getty Images
Days after Astronomer CEO Andy Byron resigned from the tech startup, the HR exec who was with him at the infamous Coldplay concert has left as well.
“Kristin Cabot is no longer with Astronomer, she has resigned,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email to CNBC Thursday. Cabot was the company’s chief people officer.
Cabot and Byron, who is married with children, were shown in an intimate moment on the ‘kiss cam’ at a recent Coldplay show in Boston, and immediately hid when they saw their faces on the big screen. Lead singer Chris Martin said, “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.” An attendee’s video of the incident went viral.
Byron resigned from the company on Saturday. Both Cabot and Byron have been removed the company’s leadership team webpage.
Pete DeJoy, Astronomer’s interim CEO, wrote in a post earlier this week that recent and unexpected national attention has turned the company into “a household name.”
In May, the New York-based company, which commercializes open source software, announced a $93 million investment round led by Bain Ventures and other investors, including Salesforce Ventures.
Elon Musk‘s satellite internet service Starlink said it had a “network outage” on Thursday. The company said it was working on a solution.
There were more than 60,000 reports of an outage on Downdetector, a site that logs issues.
Starlink is owned and operated by SpaceX, which is also run by Musk.
Musk apologized for the outage on his social media platform X and said, “Service will be restored shortly.”
Musk posted earlier Thursday that the company’s direct-to-cell-phone service was “growing fast” following the announcement that T-Mobile‘s Starlink-powered satellite service was available to the public.
T-Mobile said the T-Satellite service was built to keep phones connected “in places no carrier towers can reach.”
Starlink didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Starlink internet speeds and reliability decrease with popularity, a recent study found.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the T-Satellite service was affected by or involved in the outage.
The Intel logo is displayed on a sign in front of Intel headquarters on July 16, 2025 in Santa Clara, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Intel reported second-quarter results on Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations on revenue, as the company’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan announced significant cuts in chip factory construction. The stock ticked higher in extended trading.
Here’s how the chipmaker did versus LSEG consensus estimates:
Earnings per share: Loss of 10 cents per share, adjusted.
Revenue: $12.86 billion versus $11.92 billion estimated
Intel said it expects revenue for the third-quarter of $13.1 billion at the midpoint of its range, versus the average analyst estimate of $12.65 billion. The chipmaker said that it expects to break even on earnings while analysts were looking for earnings of 4 cents per share.
For the second quarter, Intel reported a net loss of $2.9 billion, or 67 cents per share, compared with a $1.61 billion net loss, or 38 cents per share, in the year-earlier period. Earnings per share were not comparable to analyst estimates due to an $800 million impairment charge, “related to excess tools with no identified re-use,” the company said. That resulted in an EPS adjustment of about 20 cents.
The report was Intel’s second since Lip-Bu Tan took over as CEO in March, promising to make the chipmaker’s products competitive again, and to reduce bureaucracy and layers of management, including slashing staff in Oregon and California.
In a memo to employees published on Thursday, Tan said that the first few months of his tenure had “not been easy.” He said that the company had “completed the majority” of its planned layoffs, amounting to 15% of the workforce, and that it plans to end the year with 75,000 employees. Intel previously said it was trying to reduce operating expenses by $17 billion in 2025.
Intel shares are up about 13% this year as of Thursday’s close after plummeting 60% in 2024, their worst year on record.
Tan also announced several other spending cuts in the memo, particularly in the company’s costly foundry division, which makes chips for other companies and is still looking for a big customer to anchor the business.
Intel said its foundry business had an operating loss of $3.17 billion on $4.4 billion in revenue.
Tan said that Intel had cancelled planned fab projects in Germany and Poland, and will consolidate its testing and assembly operations in Vietnam and Malaysia. He added that the company would slow down the pace of its construction of a cutting-edge chip factory in Ohio, depending on market demand and if it can secure big customers for the facility.
“Over the past several years, the company invested too much, too soon – without adequate demand,” Tan wrote. “In the process, our factory footprint became needlessly fragmented and underutilized.”
Tan wrote that the company’s forthcoming chip manufacturing process, called 14A, will be built out based on confirmed customer commitments.
“There are no more blank checks. Every investment must make economic sense,” Tan wrote.
The company’s client computing group, which is primarily comprised of sales of central processors for PCs, had $7.9 billion in sales, down 3% on an annual basis.
Revenue in the data center group, which includes some AI chips but is mostly central processors for servers, rose 4% to $3.9 billion. Tan wrote in his memo that Intel wants to regain market share in data center chips, and is looking for a permanent leader for the business. Longtime rival Advanced Micro Devices has increasingly been winning server business from cloud customers.
Tan added he would personally review and approve all chip designs before they are taped out, which is the final step of the design process before a new chip is manufactured.