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:
“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.
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Tesla (TSLA) is no longer confidently stating growth in its automotive business for 2025, and it has delayed updating its guidance until the next quarter after a disappointing performance in the first three months of the year.
2024 was Tesla’s first year in a decade where its vehicle deliveries went down year-over-year.
Just a few months ago, in January, Tesla was confident in predicting that it would return to growth in 2025:
“With the advancements in vehicle autonomy and the introduction of new products, we expect the vehicle business to return to growth in 2025.”
Today, Tesla released its Q1 2025 financial results, confirming that it had its worst quarter in years to start 2025.
The automaker is now clearly not as confident about returning to growth in its automotive business this year.
Tesla updated its “outlook” section this quarter to highlight the potential impact of trade policies and now no longer discusses automotive growth in isolation. Instead, it bundled automotive and energy businesses together and said that it will “revisit its 2025 guidance” next quarter:
It is difficult to measure the impacts of shifting global trade policy on the automotive and energy supply chains, our cost structure and demand for durable goods and related services. While we are making prudent investments that will set up both our vehicle and energy businesses for growth, the rate of growth this year will depend on a variety of factors, including the rate of acceleration of our autonomy efforts, production ramp at our factories and the broader macroeconomic environment. We will revisit our 2025 guidance in our Q2 update.
Tesla’s vehicle deliveries are already down about 50,000 units so far this year compared to last year.
It will be challenging to catch up in the current macroeconomic situation.
Tesla again guided the start of production of “new affordable models” in the first half of 2025, which could help the automaker to deliver more cars.
However, as we have previously reported, these new vehicles are expected to be stripped-down Model Y and Model 3, which will cannibalize Tesla’s current sales and limit its growth to those products.
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US DC fast charging is becoming more reliable, and charging stations are getting bigger and busier, according to a new Q1 2025 report from the EV data analysts at Paren.
DC fast charging station reliability is on the rise
Paren’s latest US Reliability Index – “Can I successfully charge at this charger?” – increased from 81.2 points in Q4 2024 to 82.6 points in Q1 2025, a notable jump of 1.7%. According to Bill Ferro, CTO at Paren, “This continues a quarterly trend across the US non-Tesla fast charging infrastructure, which suggests that the ongoing efforts to replace or sunset older hardware are having a positive impact on station uptime. In addition, newer entrants into the field are bringing time-tested hardware along with enhanced driver experiences.”
Utah, Alaska, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Nevada were the top-ranked states for DC fast charging reliability in Q1 2025.
Growth slows, but charging stations are getting larger
New DC fast charging ports grew to 55,580 at the end of Q1 2025, up 3,667 from last quarter, with total stations reaching 10,839, an increase of 794. This is fewer new additions compared to the surge seen at the end of 2024, reflecting typical seasonal slowdowns due to winter weather. However, there’s a bright spot: the average number of ports per station among non-Tesla networks rose to 3.9, compared to 2.7 year-over-year. The Tesla Supercharger network now averages 13 ports per station.
Utilization rates reflect the urban-rural divide
Average utilization – that’s the minutes of a charging session as a percentage of time a station is open each day – dropped slightly from 16.6% in Q4 2024 to 16.2% in Q1 2025, following typical holiday travel patterns. But overall, charging use is climbing, especially in dense urban areas with significant rideshare and apartment communities that rely heavily on public chargers.
Early days for NACS transition
The Combined Charging System (CCS) remains dominant, with 59% of new ports, and the shift toward Tesla’s NACS (J3400) standard is still in its very early stages. Only 104 non-Tesla NACS ports were added this quarter at non-Tesla networks, so drivers of new non-Tesla vehicles need to use their adapters if they want to use Superchargers.
Fixed pricing prevails
Charging operators primarily use fixed pricing (80%), with Time of Use (TOU) pricing making up 16%. Pay-by-time options are rare, used only 4.2% of the time.
California is the only major state where TOU pricing surpasses fixed pricing, while many states, such as Oklahoma, Vermont, and Arkansas, almost exclusively utilize fixed pricing models.
As for the most expensive places to fast charge your EV? The top four metropolitan statistical areas are all in California, with average rates at $0.60 or $0.61 per kWh.
Rural and low-income areas at risk
The Trump administration’s cancellation of the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program poses a significant threat to rural and low-income communities. Loren McDonald, chief analyst at Paren, cautioned, “Our data is a harbinger of less expansion in rural and lower-income markets as CPOs will increasingly focus on urban markets, seeing high utilization, often north of 30%, versus markets with less than 5% utilization.”
‘Charging 2.0’ – a new industry phase
McDonald summed up the report by marking 2024 as a pivotal year, stating, “2024 was a year of mixed news in the US DC fast charging industry, but it will be remembered as a pivotal turn to a new era we are calling ‘Charging 2.0’. Charge-point operators and new players in the industry are increasingly focused on creating a great customer experience, improving reliability of chargers, and reaching profitability – a shift from chasing the availability of incentives, racing to get chargers in the ground, and then crossing your fingers that utilization will grow over time.”
Read more: Trump just canceled the federal NEVI EV charger program
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Tesla (TSLA) released its financial results and shareholders’ letter for the first quarter (Q1) and full-year 2025 after market close today.
We are updating this post with all the details from the financial results, shareholders’ letter, and the conference call later tonight. Refresh for the latest information.
Tesla Q1 2025 earnings expectations
As we reported in our Tesla Q1 2025 earnings preview yesterday, the Wall Street consensus for this quarter was $21.345 billion in revenue and earnings of $0.41 per share.
The expectations had been significantly downgraded over the last month, as analysts were surprised by Tesla’s announcement of much lower deliveries than expected in the first quarter.
Did Tesla meet them?`
Tesla Q1 2025 financial results
After the market closed today, Tesla released its financial results for the first quarter and confirmed that it missed expectations with earnings of $0.27 per share (non-GAAP), and it also missed revenue expectations with $19.335 billion during the last quarter.
This is a big miss for Tesla despite the company admitting to selling a lot more regulatory credits this quarter.
At $595 million in credit sales, Tesla would have lost money without it in Q1 2025:
In short, Tesla is on the verge of being a money-losing company.
We will be posting our follow-up posts here about the earnings and conference call to expand on the most important points (refresh the page to see the most recent posts):
Here’s Tesla’s Q1 2025 shareholder presentation in full:
Here’s Tesla’s conference call for the Q1 2025 results:
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