Tesla is set to report third-quarter vehicle production and delivery numbers on Wednesday.
Analysts are expecting Elon Musk‘s automaker to report about 463,310 deliveries, according to estimates compiled by FactSet StreetAccount. That would include about 435,900 of Tesla’s Model 3 sedans and Model Y SUVs.
Tesla reported deliveries of 435,059 and production of 430,488 vehicles for the same period a year ago, before it was selling the Cybertruck. More recently, Tesla reported deliveries of 443,956 and production of 410,831 vehicles for the second quarter of 2024.
If Tesla meets analysts’ expectations that would represent a 6.5% year-over-year increase for deliveries after declines in the first and second quarters of 2024.
Deliveries are not defined in Tesla’s financial disclosures, but they are the closest approximation to units sold reported by the company.
In the third quarter, as it did earlier this year, Tesla continued to offer a variety of incentives and financing plans to drive sales volumes, particularly in the largest market for EVs in the world, mainland China.
Tesla hasn’t given specific guidance for the full year of deliveries in 2024, but the company has said it expects a lower delivery growth rate this year versus last. Wells Fargo, pointing to this lack of guidance, said in a note that it’s expecting 1.63 million full-year deliveries for Tesla and third-quarter deliveries at around 440,000, below consensus.
Goldman Sachs last week said it expects Tesla deliveries and production “to come in-line with consensus, largely driven by the strength in the China market.” Goldman Sachs recommended buying call options ahead of the Wednesday report.
Robotaxi day in focus
Shares in the EV maker are up more than 20% over the past month, in anticipation that deliveries could improve year over year and sequentially in the third quarter, and ahead of the company’s robotaxi day on Oct. 10.
Tesla plans to host investors and fans at its “We, Robot” marketing event at a Warner Bros. Discovery movie studio in Los Angeles.
The automaker is expected to show off the design of a “dedicated robotaxi,” which Musk has referred to previously as the CyberCab. Tesla may also provide updates on its humanoid robotics project “Optimus” and other automotive and AI-driven products and services.
Tesla EV sales and revenue fell in the first half of 2024, and the company still has yet to deliver a self-driving system that can function as a robotaxi without a human driver at the wheel ready to steer or brake at any time. Tesla also renamed its premium driver assistance option to Full Self-Driving Supervised, tacking on a disclaimer-style term at the end.
Meanwhile, several rivals in the autonomous vehicle industry have begun producing robotaxis, and operating commercial robotaxi services. Rivals include Alphabet-owned Waymo in the U.S., and Pony.ai and Baidu in China. Amazon-owned Zoox is preparing a launch of a commercial robotaxi service in the U.S. as well.
Tesla brand erosion
Some customer interest in buying Tesla vehicles has been chilled by the brand’s strong association with Musk.
The company’s favorability among both liberal and conservative consumers fell in July, according to CivicScience. Tesla favorability dropped with Democrats to 18% in July, down from 39% in January, and it declined among Republicans to 22%, down from 36% in January.
Musk — who also leads SpaceX, X and xAI — has long shared provocative posts on social media, but in recent years, he’s become less filtered and more vociferous online about his right-wing political beliefs.
In July, he publicly endorsed former President Donald Trump, and he frequently posts screeds on X concerning illegal immigration, election fraud, crime, violence and other flashpoint issues.
He has shared political misinformation and deepfakes with his massive online following on X, according to reports by The Associated Press, CNN, NBC News,The New York Times and others. Before Musk acquired Twitter, now known as X, his feed focused more on Tesla and SpaceX, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.
Among the posts Musk recently spread on X were false claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets. The Springfield Police Division, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and other local groups have all said the claims were baseless.
It remains to be seen whether left-leaning customers’ view of Musk will weigh on deliveries this year. Pew Research has found that Democrats have a much more favorable view of battery-electric vehicles and are more likely to buy them than Republicans in the U.S.
Microsoft’s Amy Coleman (L) and Kathleen Hogan (R).
Source: Microsoft
Microsoft said Wednesday that company veteran Amy Coleman will become its new executive vice president and chief people officer, succeeding Kathleen Hogan, who has held the position for the past decade.
Hogan will remain an executive vice president but move to a newly established Office of Strategy and Transformation, which is an expansion of the office of the CEO. She will join Microsoft’s group of top executives, reporting directly to CEO Satya Nadella.
Coleman is stepping into a major role, given that Microsoft is among the largest employers in the U.S., with 228,000 total employees as of June 2024. She has worked at the company for more than 25 years over two stints, having first joined as a compensation manager in 1996.
Hogan will remain on the senior leadership team.
“Amy has led HR for our corporate functions across the company for the past six years, following various HR roles partnering across engineering, sales, marketing, and business development spanning 25 years,” Nadella wrote in a memo to employees.
“In that time, she has been a trusted advisor to both Kathleen and to me as she orchestrated many cross-company workstreams as we evolved our culture, improved our employee engagement model, established our employee relations team, and drove enterprise crisis response for our people,” he wrote.
Hogan arrived at Microsoft in 2003 after being a development manager at Oracle and a partner at McKinsey. Under Hogan, some of Microsoft’s human resources practices evolved. She has emphasized the importance of employees having a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset, drawing on concepts from psychologist Carol Dweck.
“We came up with some big symbolic changes to show that we really were serious about driving culture change, from changing the performance-review system to changing our all-hands company meeting, to our monthly Q&A with the employees,” Hogan said in a 2019 interview with Business Insider.
Hogan pushed for managers to evaluate the inclusivity of employees and oversaw changes in the handling of internal sexual harassment cases.
Coleman had been Microsoft’s corporate vice president for human resources and corporate functions for the past four years. In that role, she was responsible for 200 HR workers and led the development of Microsoft’s hybrid work approach, as well as the HR aspect of the company’s Covid response, according to her LinkedIn profile.
A man holds an Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max ahead of the launch of sales of the new iPhone 16 series smartphones in a store in Moscow, Russia September 20, 2024.
Evgenia Novozhenina | Reuters
European Union regulators are taking steps to rein in Google and Apple on antitrust charges, even as U.S. President Donald Trump threatens to hit the bloc with tariffs for alleged “overseas extortion” of America’s tech giants.
A visual representation of the digital cryptocurrency, XRP.
S3studio | Getty Images
XRP surged after Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said the Securities and Exchange Commission is no longer pursuing its appeal in the case against the payments company.
The price of XRP was last higher by nearly 14% at $2.57.
“It’s been almost four years and about three months since the SEC originally sued us, certainly a painful journey in lots of ways,” Garlinghouse said at the Digital Assets Summit in New York Wednesday morning. “I really deeply believed that we were going to be on the right side of the law and on the right side of history.”
“The system just feels broken. That we had to fight this fight for the industry and you had an SEC attacking the industry, particularly the Ripple case,” he continued. “There were no victims, there was no investor loss. They were just not acting in good faith.”
In 2020, the SEC sued Ripple for breaching U.S. securities laws by selling XRP without first registering it with the agency. The company scored a partial victory in 2023 when SEC. U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres handed down the decision, which was hailed as a landmark win for the crypto industry. Still, while XRP at that point was not considered a security when sold to retail investors on exchanges, it was considered an unregistered security offering if sold to institutional investors.
The development comes as the SEC moves quickly to reverse much of the damage in the crypto industry left by the previous administration. Last month the agency ended its enforcement case against Coinbase; closed its investigations into Robinhood’s crypto unit, Uniswap, Gemini and Consensys with no enforcement action; scaled back its crypto enforcement unit; and clarified that meme coins are not securities.
This week, the newly formed SEC crypto task force will kick off a roundtable series focused on defining the security status of digital assets.
XRP was created by the founders of Ripple in 2012. It is the native token of the open source XRP Ledger, which Ripple uses in its cross-border payments business – about 95% of which takes place outside the U.S. Ripple is the largest holder of XRP coins.