Investor's Corner
GM reports strong Q1 Earnings, prepares to navigate semiconductor shortage
General Motors (NYSE: GM) reported its Q1 2021 Earnings on Wednesday morning, showing a well-performing financial spreadsheet that was supported by the automaker’s ability to beat Wall Street’s expectations. GM is working on expanding its fleet of all-electric vehicles and has several models planned for release in the coming years, but it will first have to prepare to navigate through a global semiconductor shortage that has caused delays and closures across the automotive industry.
GM reported an adjusted Earnings per Share of $2.25, handily beating the $1.04 that Wall Street analysts estimated according to Refinitiv. Additionally, its Revenue figures fell just short of the analyst expectations. GM reported $32.47 billion, while Wall Street expected $32.67 billion. The company solidified its expectations for the rest of 2021, forecasting $10 billion to $11 billion, or $4.50 to $5.25 per share in adjusted pretax profits. Additionally, the company expects the adjusted free cash flow to be between $1 billion and $2 billion for the year. These expectations and predictions already had the global semiconductor chip shortage factored in and included an expected decrease in earnings of between $1.5 billion and $2 billion. GM also anticipates a decrease of between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion in free cash flow.
Shares of GM were up 3.3%, trading at $57.19 at 10:54 EST.
“The speed and agility of our team are front and center as we move from managing through a pandemic to managing the global semiconductor shortage,” GM CEO Mary Barra said in a letter to shareholders. “This remains a challenging period for the company as we emerge from 2020, but the team continues to demonstrate its ability to manage complex situations.”
Despite the factored decreases in some financial statistics, Barra still expects a strong first half of 2021. The company expects about $5.5 billion in pretax and adjusted earnings, according to the shareholder letter.
“These strong results demonstrate once again the underlying strength of our business, especially in North America and China, and at GM Financial. We continue to execute our strategy and make significant progress on our transition to an all-electric future with the growth opportunities it creates,” Barra added.
GM is beginning to transition its product line to more electric cars while beginning a slow phase-out of gas-powered vehicles. The company has already committed to an all-electric lineup and a stoppage of gas-powered engine production in 2035. Barra’s letter to shareholders outlined the company’s “significant strides” that include:
- We are preparing to launch the redesigned Chevrolet Bolt EV and new Bolt EUV this summer, and we confirmed a high-volume battery-electric Silverado for both fleet and retail customers, with a GM-estimated 400 miles of range on a full charge for certain configurations.
- We unveiled the stunning production version of the Cadillac LYRIQ nine months earlier than planned because of our virtual engineering and software expertise.
- We unveiled a second GMC HUMMER EV model – the GMC HUMMER EV SUV – which will feature in-house developed, software-driven technologies, including CrabWalk, Extract Mode, and many more industry-leading features.
- We continue to expand the availability and capabilities of Super Cruise, the industry’s first true hands-free driver-assistance system.
- We introduced BrightDrop, a business created to help commercial delivery fleets maximize productivity, improve safety and reduce their carbon footprint. We are on track to begin delivering EV600 vans to our first customer, FedEx Express, later this year.
- We announced that Ultium Cells LLC, our joint venture with LG Energy Solution, will begin construction of a new battery cell plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee. It will open in 2023, a year after our Lordstown, Ohio cell plant.
- We signed a joint development agreement and increased our investment in SolidEnergy Systems, one of several companies we are working with to help commercialize lithium-metal batteries, which have incredible potential to deliver even better EV performance, more range, and lower costs for customers.
- We joined new investors Microsoft and Walmart in a $2.75-billion fundraising round for Cruise,
which also announced an agreement with Dubai to deploy up to 4,000 self-driving Cruise Origin
taxis by 2030. - We will build two large EVs for Honda using our Ultium technology – one SUV for the Honda
brand, and one for the Acura brand. - We revealed Ultium Charge 360, an innovative and holistic approach that integrates charging
networks with our mobile apps and other products and services to simplify the charging experience for our EV customers.
GM’s net income was $3 billion in Q1, a huge increase compared to the same quarter in 2020, where the automaker only reported a $294 million income. The large increase in income can be attributed to GM’s strategy to control the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Q1 2020, where some of the company’s factories were shuttered, CNBC said.
Investor's Corner
Tesla Robotaxi gets a massive upgrade in Nevada
Nevada regulators just approved a massive expansion of Tesla’s robotaxi fleet across the entire county.
Tesla’s robotaxi footprint in Nevada just grew by roughly 500 times in a single regulatory vote.
The Nevada Transportation Authority approved Tesla’s full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit on Thursday, clearing the way for the company to deploy up to 5,000 driverless vehicles across Clark County over the next 12 months. The decision came during a four hour general session meeting that Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt watched live and reported on X, noting the vote replaces the interim order that had limited Tesla to just 10 robotaxis on a narrow stretch of the Las Vegas Strip.
EXCLUSIVE: Tesla has just officially received approval for its full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit in Nevada, clearing the way for Tesla to launch a paid public Robotaxi service in Las Vegas.
This officially allows @Tesla to deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis over the next… pic.twitter.com/DPs5UtUlrE
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 20, 2026
That earlier cap, covered here after it surfaced on August 13, came with restrictions that looked stricter than what Tesla runs in Austin: a 45 mph speed ceiling, no airport pickups, and a geofence confined to the Strip corridor. The new approval extends Tesla’s operating authority to all of Clark County, with room to request an even wider geofence across the state.
Tesla representatives at the meeting said they have no intention of putting 5,000 cars on the road right away. Commercial rides are expected to start within 30 days, pending vehicle inspections, insurance filings, and fare approval, the standard steps every robotaxi operator in Nevada has had to clear.
Tesla’s own Robotaxi account replied to the news with a short line, The golden future is upon us.
The timing lines up with Tesla’s broader robotaxi push this month. The company is preparing to open Cybercab rides to the public in Austin as soon as this month, and it opened a sweepstakes for riders to win a seat at the launch event. Tesla filed its original application for a 5,000 vehicle Nevada fleet back in June, a request regulators trimmed to 10 vehicles when they issued the interim order in July. Thursday’s vote effectively grants the number Tesla asked for from the start.
Zoox, the Amazon owned robotaxi operator, has run in Nevada since 2025 and was capped at 100 vehicles before Thursday’s decision. Tesla’s new ceiling puts it well ahead of that comparison on paper, though the company has said its actual fleet size will depend on how quickly FSD v15 rolls out, the software update executives have called the gateway to scaling unsupervised robotaxi operations nationwide.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
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In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.
Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.
The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”
Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”
Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”
Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.
Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.
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Tesla Cybercab uses a unique strategy for picking up the right rider
