The Tesla Cybertruck during a tour of the Elkhorn Battery energy storage system in Moss Landing, California, June 6, 2022.
Nik Coury | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been promoting the company’s long-delayed, sci-fi inspired Cybertruck on social media this week. However, the electric vehicle maker still hasn’t issued final pricing and specs for the trapezoidal pickup, which it first unveiled in November 2019, and a company-wide email sent by Elon Musk implies he’s worried about “precision” in manufacturing the truck because its “straight edges” mean variations show up “like a sore thumb.”
In its second-quarter financial filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Tesla said its factory in Austin, Texas, was working on “tooling” for the Cybertruck, and production status was not yet active. The company also said in a shareholder deck that it was “working on equipment installation for Cybertruck production, which remains on track for initial deliveries this year.”
The company has not said when it expects to be able to mass produce the vehicle.
On Wednesday, Musk shared a post on X, formerly Twitter, with an image of the Cybertruck, saying, “Just drove the production candidate Cybertruck at Tesla Giga Texas!” In automotive manufacturing, a “candidate” is an early model of a vehicle that the manufacturer uses to gauge the quality of its production systems and vehicle assembly lines.
A Tesla promoter and fan pressed Musk for more details on the social platform Wednesday, writing in a post, “Enough with the hype, let’s get down to business. Please announce the specs, pricing and new estimated delivery event date.”
The Tesla CEO, who also owns and runs X after a $44 billion buyout last year, replied: “When we are ready to do so, we will. While I think it is our best product ever, it is an extremely difficult product to build. We are in uncharted territory, because it is not like anything else.”
Musk also sent an email to “everybody” at Tesla on Wednesday about the Cybertruck and the challenges of producing the vehicle. Tesla employees shared a copy of the email with CNBC and asked to remain unnamed since they were not authorized to speak with press about internal matters. News of the memo was previously published by Electrek.
What Musk said in the email implies that Tesla is still struggling with Cybertruck quality. Shares of Tesla were dipping slightly early Thursday following Musk’s Cybertruck comments and the email.
Here’s what the email said, as transcribed by CNBC.
From: Elon Musk
To: Everybody
Date: August 23, 2023 [time stamp removed]
Subj. Cybertruck Precision
Due to the nature of Cybertruck, which is made of bright metal with mostly straight edges, any dimensional variation shows up like a sore thumb.
All parts for this vehicle, whether internal or from suppliers, need to be designed and built to sub 10 micron accuracy.
That means all part dimensions need to be to the third decimal place in millimeters and tolerances need be specified in single digit microns.
If LEGO and soda cans, which are very low cost, can do this, so can we.
Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus and Anduril Industries, speaks during The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live conference in Laguna Beach, California on October 16, 2023.
Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images
Anduril Industries, Palmer Luckey’s defense-tech startup, will take over Microsoft‘s multibillion-dollar augmented reality headset program with the U.S. Army, the companies announced Tuesday.
The partnership still needs approval from the Department of Defense. If that goes through, Anduril would oversee “production, future development of hardware and software, and delivery timelines” for the U.S. Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System program, the companies said.
The IVAS program is intended to improve capabilities such as night vision for U.S. Army soldiers. Microsoft won a 10-year contract worth nearly $22 billion to build more than 120,000 custom HoloLens headsets for the Army back in 2021, but the company discontinued production of the device last year, according to reports. As part of the new agreement, Microsoft will continue to provide cloud and artificial intelligence capabilities for IVAS.
The hand off of the program comes at a key time for Anduril.
The startup has been in talks to raise up to $2.5 billion in funding at a $28 billion valuation, CNBC reported last week. Anduril also unveiled a partnership with OpenAI in December, and in January, the startup announced plans to invest roughly $1 billion into a manufacturing facility in Ohio.
Since its founding in 2017, Anduril has been working to shake up the defense contractor space currently dominated by Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Anduril has been a member of the CNBC Disruptor 50 list three times and ranked as No. 2 last year.
Luckey founded Anduril after his ousting from Facebook. He joined the social media company after co-founding Oculus VR, a virtual-reality startup that he sold to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014.
He was also one of the tech industry’s earliest vocal supporters of President Donald Trump. Luckey told CNBC in 2017 that he’s been on the “tech-for-Trump train for longer than just about anyone” and that the “need to be the strongest military in the world is really non-partisan.”
Luckey called Anduril’s IVAS partnership “deeply personal” and said everything in his career “has led to this moment.”
“IVAS isn’t just another product,” he wrote in a blog post. “It is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to redefine how technology supports those who serve.”
— CNBC’s Ari Levy and Morgan Brennan contributed reporting
Rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, performs onstage during a “Vultures 1” concert in Inglewood, California on March 14, 2024.
Scott Dudelson | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
Shopify has taken down a site advertised by rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, that sold swastika t-shirts.
The rapper ran an advertisement on Sunday during the Super Bowl that directed viewers to visit Yeezy.com, where it promoted a single product — a $20 t-shirt with a black swastika. The site was online until Tuesday morning.
A Shopify spokesperson said the Canadian e-commerce company took the site down for violating its terms of service. The storefront has been replaced with an error message that reads, “This store is unavailable.”
Shopify President Harley Finkelstein told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” Tuesday that the website’s owners “had an entire day” to prove they weren’t violating the company’s policies, “which did not happen.”
“The moment we realized this was not actually a real commerce practice, they weren’t actually engaging in authentic commerce, we pulled it down,” Finkelstein said.
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Finkelstein called the site, which previously sold a broader selection of t-shirts, pants and jackets, “disappointing.”
“I’m a proud Jewish entrepreneur,” Finkelstein told CNBC’s Sara Eisen. “I’m a proud Jewish community member. You and I have talked about this in the past, that it’s a big part of my identity. So obviously I’m devastated by that.”
In the days leading up to the Super Bowl, Ye had shared posts praising Adolf Hitler and calling himself a Nazi on the social media site X, which is owned by Elon Musk. On Monday, his account on X was deactivated. His profile now reads: “This account doesn’t exist.”
The brief Super Bowl ad showed Ye reclining in a dentist’s chair. “I spent, like, all the money for the commercial on these new teeth,” he said. Ye then tells viewers to “go to yeezy.com.”
The Anti-Defamation League condemned the commercial on Monday, writing in a post on X that “there’s no excuse for this kind of behavior.”
In 2022, Ye was suspended from X after he posted an image of a swastika merged with the Star of David, a prominent symbol of Judaism. Months later, his account was reinstated, a decision the company reportedly made after it received reassurances from Ye that he wouldn’t use the platform to share antisemitic content, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Musk, who acquired X, then known as Twitter, in 2022, has been embroiled in controversy over his own social media posts and activity. Musk has frequently amplified antisemitic posts on X, causing some advertisers to flee the site.
In December, Musk endorsed the far-right Alternative for Germany party. And last month, Musk attracted backlash after he repeatedly used a gesture at a rally for Trump that was viewed by many historians and politicians as a Nazi salute. Musk later made jokes about it using the names of historical Nazi party figures.
An employee works at Shopify’s headquarters in Ottawa, Ontario in Canada.
Chris Wattie | Reuters
Shopify on Tuesday reported better-than-expected sales for the fourth quarter but missed on earnings. Shares whipsawed in premarket trading.
Here’s how the company did:
Earnings: 39 cents per share vs. 43 cents per share expected by LSEG
Revenue: $2.81 billion vs. $2.73 billion expected by LSEG
Shopify forecasted revenue in the first quarter to grow at a mid-20% percentage rate, which is roughly in line with analysts’ expectations of 24.4% revenue growth, according to LSEG.
“We expect the strong merchant momentum from Q4 to carry over into Q1, recognizing that Q1 is consistently our lowest [gross merchandise volume] quarter seasonally,” the company said in its earnings release.
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The first quarter includes the results of the holiday shopping season. Online spending jumped nearly 9% to $241.1 billion in November and December, according to data from Adobe Analytics, which tracks sales on retailers’ websites. That was slightly higher than analysts’ forecast for sales of $240.8 billion.
The company said it expects operating expense as a percentage of revenue to be 41% to 42% in the current quarter. That’s a step up from 31.5% in the fourth quarter.
Net income nearly doubled to $1.3 billion, or 99 cents per share, from $657 million, or 51 cents per share, a year ago.
Revenue in the fourth quarter jumped 31% from $2.14 billion in the same quarter a year earlier.
Gross merchandise volume, or the total volume of merchandise sold on the platform, came in at $94.5 billion. Analysts surveyed by FactSet were looking for GMV of $93 billion.
Shopify sells software for merchants who run online businesses as well as services such as advertising and payment processing tools. The company has made its name as a platform for small businesses and direct-to-consumer brands to launch online storefronts. More recently, it has looked to attract bigger customers, such as Reebok, Mattel and Barnes & Noble, as a way to boost its growth.