Elon Musk breaks his own Tesla (TSLA) earnings rule in desperate move

Elon Musk is breaking his own rule of not making announcements during Tesla earnings as the CEO appears desperate amid a brand crisis.

Tesla and its CEO, Elon Musk, do not report the most typical earnings.

Earlier in Tesla’s run as a public company, Musk had often been combative with Wall Street analysts. Tesla became one of the first major companies to prioritize taking softball questions from retail investors over more challenging questions from analysts.

In 2021, Musk even said that he would stop attending most Tesla earnings calls, which is highly unusual for the CEO of a major publicly traded company:

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“I will no longer be the default during earnings calls. Going forward, I will most likely not be on earnings calls unless there’s something really important that I need to say.”

However, he ended up attending virtually all Tesla earnings calls after making that comment.

Musk has also often said that “Tesla earnings calls are not a place for product announcements” and has shut down the idea of using the platform for revealing new information about the company.

The CEO appears to be moving away from that amid a crisis at Tesla.

Tesla has confirmed that, along with its earnings on Tuesday, the automaker will also hold a “live company update”:

In addition to posting first quarter results, Tesla management will hold a live company update and question and answer webcast that day at 4:30 p.m. Central Time (5:30 p.m. Eastern Time).

This is the first time Tesla has announced something like that.

It comes after Tesla also held an all-hands meeting publicly for the first time just a month ago.

This is happening amid a significant crisis at Tesla. The company experienced its first year of declining sales in 2024, and the decline accelerated in 2025 amid boycotts and protests over Musk’s involvement in politics.

Tesla’s sales are declining, gross margins are shrinking, the Cybertruck is proving to be a commercial flop, and Tesla owners are selling their vehicles in mass to distance themselves from the increasingly more controversial CEO.

Musk held the all-hands meeting publicly amid this crisis and sort of used the event to promote Tesla’s products and more directly, its stock.

Tesla’s stock is down 40% year-to-date, and it’s currently down 4% in pre-market trading a day before the earnings.

What could Tesla announce at the “company update”?

Musk’s public all-hands meeting, along with the attachment of a “company update” to the earnings, both appear to be desperation moves amid a declining stock price and brand crisis at Tesla.

With Tesla delivering ~40,000 fewer vehicles in Q1 2025 versus last year, the automaker is expected to have a tough quarter, which the CEO doesn’t want to pile onto an already long series of bad news.

Last Friday, Reuters released a report claiming a delay in Tesla’s launch of its previously announced, more affordable EV in the US. More importantly, the report appears to make more people understand that Tesla’s upcoming “more affordable EV” is simply a stripped-down Model Y.

Musk may use this “company update” to clarify Tesla’s plans for more affordable EVs, but if they are not ready to go into production right away, it’s unlikely, as the CEO wouldn’t want to fall into the Osborne effect.

It’s more likely that Musk will stick to the same stock-pumping approach he has in the last few years: self-driving and robotics.

The CEO has repeatedly said that Tesla is worth nothing if it doesn’t solve self-driving, and he more recently added that he sees Tesla becoming the most valuable company in the world with its humanoid robots.

I would expect Tesla’s “company update” to focus on those areas.

Musk will likely release more detailed plans about the planned launch of the “unsupervised self-driving” ride-hailing fleet in Austin. We previously reported that Tesla will use the launch of the geo-fenced, teleoperation-assisted fleet as a “win” in self-driving despite being an approach similar to what Waymo has been doing for years and that Musk has been criticizing as unscalable.

It’s a moving of the goalpost compared to Tesla’s previous promises of customer vehicles becoming capable of robotaxi self-driving.

The unveiling of the latest generation of Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot, also wouldn’t be surprising.

Tesla has made impressive progress on the robotics side of things with its latest prototypes, but all previous demonstrations of the robots included teleoperation by humans. Until that’s a thing of the past, the Optimus robot has only minimal use cases and value. It will be something to look out for.

Along with these potential product announcements, it is also possible that Musk will announce a proposal for Tesla to invest in xAi, which he would likely present in conjunction with the integration of Grok in Tesla vehicles and robots.

Electrek’s Take

You can sense the desperation here. Tesla is afraid that the earnings will send the stock spiraling further down, and it plans a little pumping session at the same time to compensate.

I am curious to see whether it works or not. Lately, I think the stock more closely relate to whether or not people believe Musk’s claims than anything else and certainly not fundamentals.

With Tesla’s earnings anticipated to decline in the upcoming report and future earnings likely adjusted down, Tesla will trade at record-high price-to-earnings and future earnings ratios.

Every time that happened, Tesla’s stock somewhat quickly readjusted. Still, it will be interesting to see if whatever Musk announces at the “company update” can prevent that from happening, or if Tesla shareholders will start to question whether Musk’s views on Tesla’s self-driving and robotic efforts are accurate.