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Top questions Tesla investors want answered at the Q4 2022 earnings call

Credit: CNBC/YouTube

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Tesla’s (NASDAQ:TSLA) fourth-quarter and full-year 2022 earnings call is a couple of days away, and investors of the company are already posting their questions for the event’s Q&A session.

Similar to past earnings calls, Tesla is gathering inquiries from investor communications platform Say. As of writing, Say’s webpage for the Tesla Q4 and FY 2022 earnings call focuses on inquiries from retail investors. And based on the questions that have gained the most number of votes so far, it appears that investors are particularly interested in the upcoming Cybertruck, which is expected to start deliveries this year. 

Following are ten of the most voted questions Tesla investors wish to ask this coming Q4 2022 earnings call. 

  1. After recent price cuts, analysts released expectations that Tesla automotive gross margin, excluding leases and reg credits, will drop below 20% and average selling price around $47k across all models. Where do you see average selling price and gross margins after the price cuts?
  2. The Solar Roof product continues to struggle to gain traction. What has Tesla learned from this, and what changes do you foresee in future Solar Roof versions to increase scale? 
  3. Please provide a detailed explanation of where you are on the 4680 ramp. What are the current roadblocks? When do you (expect) to scale to 10,000 vehicles a week? 
  4. Is Cybertruck production still on track for mid-year? 
  5. What kind of margins do you expect for the stationary energy storage business in 2023 and then 2024 and beyond? Separately, will you consider reporting energy volumes in the P&D report? 
  6. What is the US the current production and future 2-year forecast of Tesla energy: Powerwall, Megapack, (and) Tesla virtual power? 
  7. When will Tesla announce production Cybertruck specs and pricing? 
  8. Since Elon started political influencing, polls from Morning Consult & YouGov show Tesla brand favorability declining in 2022 and division along partisan lines. Such brand damage can impact demand. Does Tesla track favorability, and how will any brand damage be mitigated? 
  9. Elon has said previously that FSD Hardware 4 will most likely come first in Cybertruck. Is that still the current plan? Do you expect there to be an upgrade path for Hardware 3 cars to Hardware 4? 
  10. Zach, when do you think Tesla Insurance will become a big enough revenue source to warrant providing more details on the financials of that business so investors can compare it to other insurance companies?

Elon Musk has commented in the past that he is actually fond of Tesla’s retail investors because they have a good grasp of the company’s plans and execution. In the past, Musk has openly stated that Tesla retail investors actually understand Tesla better than Wall Street. And over the years, Say has become the de facto tool for TSLA investors to ask their own questions at the company’s quarterly earnings calls. 

“I do think that a lot of the retail investors actually have deeper and more accurate insights than many of the big institutional investors, and certainly they have better insights than many of the analysts,” Musk said. 

Tesla’s Q4 and FY 2022 earnings call is expected to begin at 4:30 p.m. Central Time/5:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, January 25, 2023. Similar to Tesla’s other quarterly earnings calls, the event will be available for viewing online.  

Disclosure: I own TSLA shares.

The Teslarati team would appreciate hearing from you. If you have any tips, contact me at maria@teslarati.com or via Twitter @Writer_01001101.

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Maria--aka "M"-- is an experienced writer and book editor. She's written about several topics including health, tech, and politics. As a book editor, she's worked with authors who write Sci-Fi, Romance, and Dark Fantasy. M loves hearing from TESLARATI readers. If you have any tips or article ideas, contact her at maria@teslarati.com or via X, @Writer_01001101.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk says flying cars are coming

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Credit: Grok Imagine

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that flying cars will be coming to the market, something that his own company has hinted at previously.

Musk said on X, in response to a post that read, “We were promised flying cars and all we got is infinite superintelligence for everyone,” “You will get flying cars.”

The post rang back to when Musk teased flying and hovering capabilities for the Tesla Roadster, the company’s supercar that has been delayed more times than anyone cares to count. It was set for an unveiling earlier this year, but it was then pushed back to August. There is still no sign of it coming.

However, that does not mean it won’t. But one of the biggest features of the Roadster that was teased was a SpaceX package that featured cold gas thrusters on the rear end that would help with white-knuckle acceleration. Another set would face the ground and would help the Roadster gain small bits of altitude, potentially helpful to jump over obstacles.

Elon Musk hints at Tesla Roadster’s “hovering” abilities in SpaceX package

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But it is not a straightforward thing for Musk. As a serial entrepreneur, he tends to spend his time on major disruptors; currently, his largest projects are artificial intelligence and compute power, as well as SpaceX’s launches that will eventually make life multiplanetary.

In the past, he has been critical of flying cars and has been in favor of tunnels, one of the big reasons he started the Boring Company. In 2017 at a TED talk, he said:

“There is a challenge with flying cars in that they’ll be quite noisy. The wind force generated will be very high. Let’s just say that if something’s flying over your head, if there are a whole bunch of flying cars all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation…You’re thinking, ‘Did they service their hubcap? Or is it going to come off and guillotine me as they’re flying past?’”

However, he’s never been against them. He has also said he’s in favor of both tunnels and flying cars.

Most recently, Musk said that anyone who wants a flying car should be able to get one. This was stated last October on the Joe Rogan Experience:

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“My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars… I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.”

Whether the Roadster will be Tesla’s flying car or potentially another one remains in the mind of Musk. Of course, the Roadster will have to make its way to production lines before we find out.

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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.

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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.

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

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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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Investor's Corner

Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors: Morgan Stanley

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Credit: Tesla

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.”

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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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