Investor's Corner
Tesla starts accepting investor questions for its Q1 2022 earnings call
Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) is expected to hold its Q1 2022 earnings call on April 20, 2022. The event, which would be held at 4:30 p.m. Central Time / 5:30 p.m. Eastern Time, will feature a discussion of the company’s performance in the first quarter, as well as its outlook. Tesla CEO Elon Musk was present in the previous earnings call, but he is yet to announce if he will be attending the upcoming Q1 2022 Q&A session.
The electric vehicle maker will be posting its financial results for the first quarter of 2022 after markets close on Wednesday, April 2022. Despite headwinds in China due to the country’s ongoing Covid outbreak, Tesla seems to have ended the first quarter on a high note. This was hinted at by the company’s vehicle delivery and production results, which revealed that the company manufactured a total of 305,407 vehicles in Q1 while delivering 310,048 worldwide.
In true Tesla tradition, the company is allowing retail and institutional investors to ask questions during the earnings call’s Q&A portion. The questions are compiled by Say, a startup that aims to create and develop investor communication tools. As of writing, only retail investors have placed their inquiries for Tesla, though a good number of them have already been compiled.
The following then are ten of the most notable questions from Tesla’s retail investors for the electric vehicle maker’s Q1 2022 earnings call.
- What is (the) Tesla Construction team busy with these days? Are they planning (an) expansion of existing factories or onto the next set of new Gigafactories? If factories are the product, we would like to see a next factory announcement before the next model.
- Will Berlin and Austin ramp up at a faster rate than Shanghai did – given Tesla is a producing Y, which you have done at scale already at other factories? Can you talk us through some of the major improvements that will make this possible?
- What is the current run rate of 4680 cell production at Fremont and at Giga Texas? What do you expect run rates for 4680 to be in Fremont, Texas, and Berlin at year-end?
- FSD has come a long way. Can Tesla consider launching a geo-fenced fleet in (a) location like Phoenix? While we solve for general autonomy, it would still be great to have at least one location show the world the proof of concept. FSD already performs flawlessly in such locations.
- When can we expect an App Store? What capabilities will you allow developers?
- At (the) Cyber Rodeo, Elon mentioned that a futuristic driverless Robotaxi vehicle is on the roadmap. When can we expect more details on this product offering to be unveiled? Is this something that people can own, or will this only be offered by Tesla as a service?
- What is the current yield of 4680 production at (the) Kato Rd facility & Giga Texas? Tesla had a stockpile of 1 million cells as of January 2022, and it should’ve been already used up for vehicle production. Please share an update on the 4680 ramp.
- Where would the next factory be built?
- Now that Tesla has made such a huge impact on the Texas economy with opening of its factory in Austin, when can we expect to see direct deliveries in the state?
- What customers are you targeting for Tesla Bot?
A look at the questions currently in Say reveals that investors are interested on the company’s key innovations such as its 4680 battery ramp. Future products such as Optimus (Tesla Bot) and a dedicated Robotaxi that Elon Musk teased during the Cyber Rodeo also seem to have caught the interest of TSLA investors. Of course, developments in projects such as Gigafactory Berlin and Gigafactory Texas, both of which were opened recently, are also points of interest.
A full list of Tesla investor questions for the company’s Q1 2022 earnings call could be found here.
Don’t hesitate to contact us with news tips. Just send a message to simon@teslarati.com to give us a heads up.
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Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
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Cybertruck
Tesla Cybertruck production snaps back after ugly supplier fight
Cybertrucks are piling up again at Giga Texas after Tesla’s court win against a parts supplier.
Cybertruck production at Giga Texas is showing its first visible recovery since Tesla sued a supplier last month over withheld manufacturing tooling.
Aerial observer Joe Tegtmeyer flew over the Austin factory Wednesday morning and counted roughly 100 or more Cybertrucks filling the outbound lot, a sharp jump from the thin numbers seen in recent weeks. The flyover came a day after a judge granted Tesla a temporary restraining order against Angstrom Automotive Group, the parts supplier at the center of the dispute.
Tesla filed an emergency lawsuit in late July after Angstrom told the automaker it planned to close the Troy, Texas facility where Tesla’s die-cast tools, trim dies and other Cybertruck stamping equipment were housed. According to Tesla’s complaint, a shipment of 700 finished parts never left the building, and when Tesla sent representatives to retrieve its equipment, accompanied by law enforcement, they were turned away. Angstrom allegedly then asked for an extra $250,000 a week to keep operating, which Tesla’s filing described as holding its own property for ransom.
TESLA: U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Wolfe of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Waco Division granted Tesla a Temporary Restraining Order and Writ of Replevin in its dispute with Angstrom Automotive (Case No. 6:26-cv-00477).
The order authorizes… https://t.co/E1DKcQSxMn pic.twitter.com/LR8aAiV2Og
— S.E. Robinson, Jr. (@SERobinsonJr) August 5, 2026
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The restraining order gives Tesla immediate right of entry to Angstrom’s facility to recover the tooling. It is temporary, with a fuller hearing still to come, but the speed of Wednesday’s rebound suggests the Angstrom shortage was indeed the main bottleneck limiting Cybertruck output. Outbound lot counts are an imperfect measure of actual production, since finished trucks can sit for days before shipping, but a lot that full after a lean stretch is a meaningful signal.
Cybertruck output at Giga Texas has fluctuated all year as Tesla worked through supply issues and introduced new trims, including a cheaper Dual Motor AWD version that drew strong early demand.
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
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