By just about every measure, Tesla’sfirst-quarter earnings report on Tuesday was dreary. The company missed estimates on the top and bottom lines. Revenue fell by 9% year over year, the worst decline since 2012. Auto sales dropped 13% from the same period in 2023. Free cash flow turned negative.
But CEO Elon Musk downplayed most of that and suggested investors focus their attention elsewhere.
Rather than dwell on quarterly financials or the massive restructuring announced last week, Musk reiterated his vision of Tesla as a company that’s building artificial intelligence software to turn existing cars into self-driving vehicles, dedicated robotaxis that will make money for their owners and a driverless transportation network.
This is the Tesla Musk is selling to Wall Street, and he’s telling anyone with doubts to stay away.
“If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla’s going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company,” Musk said on the earnings call. He added, “We will, and we are.”
Tesla shares soared 13% in extended trading Tuesday after the earnings report, despite the disappointing results. Some of the optimism was tied to Tesla’s announced plans to start production of new affordable electric vehicle models in “early 2025, if not late this year.”
The stock’s rally picked up steam during the earnings call as Musk veered to the future. He casually mentioned that the company’s robotaxi, which he has long said is coming, will be called the CyberCab. In a shareholder deck that Tesla published before the call, the company featured a “preview of ride-hailing in the Tesla app.”
Musk also talked up a driverless network that’s like Uber with Tesla autonomous vehicles.
“When the car is not moving,” Musk said, “there’s potential to actually run distributed inference,” through the hardware that’s in the cars.
Musk has been making these kinds of pronouncements for years.
In 2015, Musk told shareholders that Tesla cars would achieve “full autonomy” within three years. They didn’t. In 2016, Musk said a Tesla car would be able to make a cross-country drive without requiring any human intervention before the end of 2017. That hasn’t happened either.
And in 2019, on a call with institutional investors that would help him raise more than $2 billion, Musk said Tesla would have 1 million robotaxi-ready vehicles on the road in 2020, able to complete 100 hours of driving work per week each, making money for their owners.
The robotaxis would make Tesla a company worth $500 billion, he said at that time. Tesla’s market cap is around that mark now and even topped $1 trillion in 2021, but the company has never managed to deliver on its driverless promises.
NBC News reported recently that the company hasn’t even sought permits that would allow it to test and operate robotaxis in three states, including California and Nevada, where it employs thousands of people.
Separately, the California Department of Motor Vehicles has filed a legal complaint against Tesla, saying it engaged in false advertising and marketing concerning its driver assistance systems — Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) systems. Autopilot is the standard, and FSD costs $99 per month or $8,000 upfront. Both require human drivers at the wheel, ready to steer or brake at any time. Tesla is defending itself in court against the accusations.
‘More valuable than everything else’
On the earnings call, Musk said he believes FSD will soon be ready to expand geographically to China pending regulatory approval. He didn’t mention the California regulator’s lawsuit.
Musk said people who haven’t tried Tesla’s latest FSD updates “really don’t understand what’s going on.”
His bluster isn’t limited to cars.
At an AI Day in August 2021, Musk said Tesla would build a humanoid robot, now known as Optimus. The company didn’t have a hardware prototype to show at the time, so an actor dressed in a spandex bodysuit danced onstage in its place. In 2022, Tesla unveiled its hardware prototype of Optimus.
On Tuesday, Musk said Optimus is already capable of doing some unspecified factory tasks.
A mockup of Tesla Inc.’s planned humanoid robot Optimus on display during the Seoul Mobility Show in Goyang, South Korea, on Thursday, March 30, 2023. The motor show will continue through April 9. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
“We may be able to sell it externally by the end of next year,” he said. “Optimus will be more valuable than everything else combined because if you’ve got a sentient humanoid robot that is able to navigate reality and do tasks at request, there is no meaningful limit to the size of the economy.”
Whether all of these capital-intensive and far-out projects belong at Tesla is a question that many investors and analysts are asking.
Musk owns a 20.5% stake in Tesla, more than 715 million shares,as of March 31,according to the company’s recent proxy filing. He’s used around 238.4 million of those shares as collateral to secure personal debt. In January, he began angling for even more control of Tesla.
“I am uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having ~25% voting control,” he wrote in a post on X. “Enough to be influential, but not so much that I can’t be overturned.”
Musk created a new startup, xAI, to develop AI products to rival those from Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Before starting xAI, he was already serving as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and was technology chief at X, which he owns. He’s also the founder of brain computer interface company Neuralink and tunneling venture The Boring Co.
Alex Potter, an analyst at Piper Sandler, asked Musk on the earnings call if he’d “come up with any mechanism” to ensure he would have the requisite level of voting control at Tesla because, if not, “the core part of the thesis could be at risk.”
“No matter what, even if I got kidnapped by aliens tomorrow, Tesla will solve autonomy, maybe a little slower but it would solve autonomy for vehicles at least,” Musk said. “I don’t know if it would win with respect to Optimus, or with respect to future products, but there’s enough momentum for Tesla to solve autonomy, even if I disappeared, for vehicles.”
But he was quick to tell investors that the company needs him to achieve his loftiest goals.
“If we have a super sentient humanoid robot that can follow you indoors, and that you can’t escape, we’re talking Terminator-level risk yeah I’d be uncomfortable if there’s not some meaningful level of influence over how that is deployed,” he said.
The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.
Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.
S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.
Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.
Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.
While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.
Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.
New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.
A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.
“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.
On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.
The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.
Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility, driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year, has not helped.
The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.
BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.
Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.
The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.
Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.
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Honor launched the Honor Magic V5 on Wednesday July 2, as it looks to challenge Samsung in the foldable space.
Honor
Honor on Wednesday touted the slimness and battery capacity of its newly launched thin foldable phone, as it lays down a fresh challenge to market leader Samsung.
The Honor Magic V5 goes will initially go on sale in China, but the Chinese tech firm will likely bring the device to international markets later this year.
Honor said the Magic V5 is 8.8 mm to 9mm when folded, depending on the color choice. The phone’s predecessor, the Magic V3 — Honor skipped the Magic V4 name — was 9.2 mm when folded. Honor said the Magic V5 weighs 217 grams to 222 grams, again, depending on the color model. The previous version was 226 grams.
In China, Honor will launch a special 1 terabyte storage size version of the Magic V5, which it says will have a battery capacity of more than 6000 milliampere-hour — among the highest for foldable phones.
Honor has tried hard to tout these features, as competition in foldables ramps up, even as these types of devices have a very small share of the overall smartphone market.
Honor vs. Samsung
Foldables represented less than 2% of the overall smartphone market in 2024, according to International Data Corporation. Samsung was the biggest player with 34% market share followed by Huawei with just under 24%, IDC added. Honor took the fourth spot with a nearly 11% share.
Honor is looking to get a head start on Samsung, which has its own foldable launch next week on July 9.
Francisco Jeronimo, a vice president at the International Data Corporation, said the Magic V5 is a strong offering from Honor.
“This is the dream foldable smartphone that any user who is interested in this category will think of,” Jeronimo told CNBC, pointing to features such as the battery.
“This phone continues to push the bar forward, and it will challenge Samsung as they are about to launch their seventh generation of foldable phones,” he added.
At its event next week, Samsung is expected to release a foldable that is thinner than its predecessor and could come close to challenging Honor’s offering by way of size, analysts said. If that happens, then Honor will be facing more competition, especially against Samsung, which has a bigger global footprint.
“The biggest challenge for Honor is the brand equity and distribution reach vs Samsung, where the Korean vendor has the edge,” Neil Shah, co-founder of Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.
Honor’s push into international markets beyond China is still fairly young, with the company looking to build up its brand.
“Further, if Samsung catches up with a thinner form-factor in upcoming iterations, as it has been the real pioneer in foldables with its vertical integration expertise from displays to batteries, the differentiating factor might narrow for Honor,” Shah added.
Vertical integration refers to when a company owns several parts of a product’s supply chain. Samsung has a display and battery business which provides the components for its foldables.
In March, Honor pledged a $10 billion investment in AI over the next five years, with part of that going toward the development of next-generation agents that are seen as more advanced personal assistants.
Honor said its AI assistant Yoyo can interact with other AI models, such as those created by DeepSeek and Alibaba in China, to create presentation decks.
The company also flagged its AI agent can hail a taxi ride across multiple apps in China, automatically accepting the quickest ride to arrive? and cancelling the rest.