Investor's Corner
General Motors emphasizing faster electric vehicle launches after positive 2021 earnings
General Motors (NYSE: GM) is gearing up for a major shift in 2022 thanks to its evolving electric vehicle program, planning for record profit levels that could surge the company into a more well-rounded placement in an increasingly competitive sector. The automaker is preparing for faster vehicle launches, according to CEO Mary Barra, who said more models would come to the market at a quicker pace. GM reported its Earnings for Q4 and its guidance for 2022 last night, sharing expansive details for the coming years, including new models, production plans and start dates, and more information regarding GM’s Cruise investment.
In general terms, General Motors reported a strong Q4 and Full Year 2021 in terms of financials. GM’s 2021 full-year earnings included a net income of $10.019 billion, a net income margin of 7.9 percent, and revenue of over $127 billion, a $4.5 billion increase from 2020. For Q4, GM had a weaker quarter than it did in the same period in 2020. The company reported $33.584 billion in revenue for Q4 ’21, which is nearly $4 billion less than Q4 ’20. Net income also decreased, but the full-year figures and profits undoubtedly outshine the losses for the quarter.
“For the full year, we generated $127 billion in revenue, $14.3 billion in EBIT-adjusted, 11.3% EBIT-adjusted margin, $7.07 in EPS diluted adjusted, and $2.6 billion in adjusted automotive free cash flow,” GM CFO Paul Jacobson said. “In the fourth quarter, we generated $34 billion in revenue, $2.8 billion in EBIT-adjusted, 8.5% EBIT-adjusted margin, $1.35 in EPS diluted adjusted, and $6.4 billion in adjusted automotive free cash flow. Free cash flow in the quarter was largely driven by working capital rewind as we were able to complete and wholesale over 80,000 vehicles that had previously been built without certain components, as well as dividends from GM Financial.”
GM’s Earnings Call was the highlight of the evening as it shed new light on the automaker’s planned expansion of its electric vehicle lineup. “We also recognize that we need to launch more EVs faster,” CEO Mary Barra said during the call. GM plans to launch deliveries of the Cadillac LYRIQ in “less than 60 days.” The LYRIQ will join the GMC Hummer EV, which recently started deliveries, as GM’s two newest electric vehicles for consumer use. In the commercial sector, GM said that production of the BrightDrop EV600 will begin late this year at the company’s CAMI Assembly Plant in Ontario, Canada. The automaker said that the site currently has a production capacity of 30,000 vehicles and should be doubled by mid-decade.
GMC Hummer EV sports its massive size alongside full-size SUV
GM said that the Silverado, Equinox, and Blazer EVs will all begin deliveries in 2023. The three vehicles will contribute to GM’s plan to deliver 400,000 EVs in North America in 2022 and 2023. These plans are supplemented by battery cell and assembly capacity investments in Michigan, which were recently announced. These new facilities “will give [GM] more than 1 million units of EV capacity in North America by the end of 2025, and this includes 600,000 full-size trucks,” Barra added.
Interestingly, Barra held high regard for Cruise, a fully-autonomous ride-sharing company with investors such as GM, Honda, Softbank, Microsoft, and Walmart. Barra said that riding in a Cruise vehicle a couple of weeks ago was “the highlight of my career as an engineer and as the leader of General Motors.”
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“It’s like having an experienced and attentive driver behind the wheel,” Barra said. “Now, as Cruise announced this morning, it is inviting members of the public to sign up for their own driverless rides through a waitlist on the Cruise website. This is the first truly driverless ride-hail service offered to members of the public in a dense urban environment. To maximize its learnings, Cruise will prioritize use cases that are a natural fit for autonomous ride-sharing.”
Barra believes that the first paid rides for Cruise could generate $50 billion by the end of the 2020s.
Semiconductor Forecast
“We saw improved semiconductor availability in the fourth quarter compared to the third quarter, which enabled us to increase our wholesale sequentially while substantially reducing our inventory of vehicles built without certain components,” Jacobson added. GM expects semiconductor availability to improve throughout 2022, reporting that the company has seen stabilization in the semiconductor environment. This leads GM to believe that it can reach a “normalized run rate toward the beginning of the third quarter [2022] with a target of around 800,000 units in North America on a quarterly basis.” This figure includes GM’s combustion engine vehicles.
Questions from Deutsche Bank analyst Emmanuel Rosner prompted Barra and other GM executives to give more information regarding their opinions of the semiconductor shortage and when it could begin to subside. Barra believes that, by the time Q3 and Q4 2022 roll around, “we’re going to be really starting to see the semiconductor constraints diminish.”
Analyst synopsis
GM’s Earnings Call was strong, giving investors more to be excited about in the way of its EV project and ability to avoid semiconductor issues. “We are big believers in the GM EV strategy as it’s all about converting 10%-15% of its customers to EVs by 2025 with 30 new EV models,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives told us. “There are clear challenges, however, with massive resources dedicated towards EVs, we view this as the right move at the right time for Barra & Co.” In terms of keeping up with competitors, namely industry leader Tesla, Ives believes battery tech and GM’s exclusive Ultium platform is the roadmap to success for the Detroit company. “Ultium is the foundational piece of GM’s battery strategy and key to keep up in this EV arms race with Tesla leading the charge,” Ives added.
Ives has a “Buy” rating on GM stock with an $85 price target. Ives is ranked 59 out of 7,776 analysts on TipRanks.
GM shares were down 3.43 percent at the time of writing, trading at $52.22 per share.
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Disclosure: Joey Klender is not a GM Shareholder.
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Quotes provided by the Motley Fool.
SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.
The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.
Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.
The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.
As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.
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Elon Musk
Tesla AI boss reveals how big Optimus is going to get
Tesla’s Optimus chief corrected himself on X, confirming a staggering 10 million robot production target.
![Tesla Optimus Gen 3 [Credit: Tesla]](https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/tesla-optimus-gen3-diner.jpg)
Tesla’s Optimus program has a new number attached to it, after Ashok Elluswamy, the executive who has run the humanoid robot program since June 2025, posted a three word correction on X Thursday, “Correction, 10 million robots.”
The line clarifies the long term annual capacity Tesla is building toward its planned second Optimus production line at Gigafactory Texas, a figure Musk has cited repeatedly since last year’s shareholder meeting.
The scale is worth noting, because ten million robots a year would mean Tesla building more units annually than most countries sell in new cars. Tesla has framed this as a second line, not the first. The buildout is happening in two phases: a roughly one million unit per year line inside Tesla’s Fremont factory, installed on the floor space vacated when Model S and Model X production ended earlier this year, and a much larger dedicated facility under construction at Giga Texas that broke ground on its first steel structure in May. That Texas facility is the one Elluswamy’s correction refers to, and is expected to reach volume production sometime in 2027.
Correction, 10 million robots https://t.co/0z4nyQNTzp
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) July 30, 2026
Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress
Elluswamy took over Optimus from Milan Kovac last summer and has spent the months since talking up the program’s trajectory. Elon Musk has also floated the ten million figure at Tesla’s 2025 shareholder meeting.
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Ending Model S and Model X production to make room for the first Optimus line was one of the more consequential manufacturing decisions in the company’s recent history, retiring two flagship vehicles in favor of a robot that has yet to enter mass production. Musk has previously estimated per unit production costs at $20,000 to $25,000 once Tesla reaches a million units a year, though he hasn’t said what that cost looks like at ten times the volume.
SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.
The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.
SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters
Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.
SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.
With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.
Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.
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Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.
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