Investor's Corner
Tesla Q1 Earnings Call: The return of superstar CFO Deepak Ahuja
Deepak Ahuja may not be a household name, but he’s a key player in the storied history of Tesla [NASDAQ: TSLA]. He was the company’s first CFO, and was at the financial helm through the near-death experience of 2008 and the triumphant IPO in 2010. Ahuja retired in 2015. Jason Wheeler, Google’s former VP of Finance, took over for Ahuja but recently announced his departure in order to pursue interests in the public sector. In turn, Ahuja came out of retirement to become Tesla’s CFO once again. Today, you’ll hear Ahuja’s voice on Tesla’s much-anticipated earnings call.
Ahuja had originally left a comfortable position at Ford, and moved his family from Michigan to Silicon Valley, to join a company that at the time could only have been described as a quixotic startup. As was the case with other key execs, it was Elon Musk’s sincere commitment that convinced Ahuja to jump into the ocean. “Meeting Elon Musk, and understanding his vision of Tesla, was a game-changing moment in my life,” Ahuja recently told graduates at his alma mater, Northwestern University. “I felt passion about this opportunity in a way that I hadn’t felt before.”
Photo credit: TepperCMU
Tesla’s feats of acceleration tend to get most of the press, but expert financial guidance has been one of the keys to the company’s success from the beginning, so Mr. Ahuja’s contribution may have been (and be) greater than anyone outside the Tesla boardroom will ever know. Ahuja discussed some of his unique personal history and challenges working at Tesla as part of a panel discussion about ‘How to build unicorn companies’ in Silicon Valley.
In a recent presentation at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, Ahuja spoke about the gathering wave of disruption in the traditionally slow-moving auto industry. He discussed three major trends driving the transformation: electric vehicles, battery storage and autonomous driving. “We are at the early part of the steep S curve of innovation in each of these changes, which is what makes it really exciting.”
Above: Clips from Ahuja’s panel discussion (Source footage: diyatvusa / Vimeo)
From the beginning, Tesla has worked not only to make superlative cars, but also to transform the process by which those cars are produced. The company hired the best process and manufacturing engineers it could find. “What that enabled Tesla to do was to build completely new manufacturing processes in a cost-efficient manner, to get a better ROI than the other car companies,” Ahuja said.
For electric vehicles (EVs) to truly compete with legacy vehicles, everyone agrees they need to get cheaper. The key to that, says Ahuja, is reducing the cost of energy storage. He estimates that a cost of $100 per kilowatt hour could be achieved within five years, and predicts that this will be “the natural inflection point at which EVs become an economic no-brainer.” This milestone will be “really transformational” for the industry.
Autonomous driving will also disrupt the motor trade in many ways. Ahuja points out that 95 percent of auto accidents are caused by human error, so autonomous cars will help reduce medical and insurance costs. They will also use transportation infrastructure more efficiently, because cars will be able to travel faster and closer together. “The thing to keep in mind is that self-driving cars don’t have to be perfect to change the world,” says Ahuja. “They just have to be better than human beings.”
A big thanks to EVANNEX for providing us with this story. This story was originally published on their site at EVANNEX.com
Elon Musk
SpaceX just filed for the IPO everyone was waiting for
SpaceX filed its public S-1, revealing $18.7 billion in revenue and billions in losses.
SpaceX publicly filed its S-1 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission on May 20, 2026, making its financial details available to the public for the first time ahead of what could be the largest IPO in history.
An S-1 is the formal document a company must submit to the SEC before going public. It includes audited financials, risk factors, business descriptions, and how the company plans to use the money it raises. Companies are required to file one before selling shares to the public, and it must be published at least 15 days before the investor roadshow begins. SpaceX had already submitted a confidential draft to the SEC in April, which allowed regulators to review the filing privately before it went public.
The S-1 reveals that SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in consolidated revenue in 2025, driven largely by its Starlink satellite internet division, which posted $11.4 billion in revenue, growing nearly 50% year over year. Despite that growth, the company lost about $4.9 billion in 2025 and has burned through more than $37 billion since its founding.
SpaceX just forced Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile to team up for the first time in history
A significant portion of those losses trace back to xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, which was recently merged into SpaceX. SpaceX directed roughly 60% of its capital spending in 2025 to its AI division, totaling around $20 billion, yet that division lost billions and grew revenue by only about 22%.
SpaceX plans to list its Class A common stock on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America leading the offering. The dual-class share structure means going public will not meaningfully reduce Musk’s control, as Class B shares he holds carry 10 votes per share compared to one vote for public Class A shares.
The company is targeting a raise of around $75 billion at a valuation of roughly $1.75 trillion, which would make it the largest IPO ever. The investor roadshow is reportedly planned for June 5.
Elon Musk
Tesla ditches India after years of broken promises
Tesla has ditched its plans to build a factory in India after years of failed negotiations.
Tesla’s long-running effort to establish a manufacturing presence in India is officially over. India’s Minister of Heavy Industries H.D. Kumaraswamy confirmed on May 19, 2026 that Tesla has informed authorities it will not proceed with a manufacturing facility in the country.
Tesla first signaled serious interest in India around 2021, when it began hiring local staff and lobbying the Indian government for lower import tariffs. The ask was straightforward: reduce duties enough for Tesla to test the market with imported vehicles before committing capital to a local factory. India’s position was equally firm, with an ask of Tesla to commit to manufacturing first, then receive tariff relief. Neither side moved, and the talks quietly collapsed.
Tesla to open first India experience center in Mumbai on July 15
India had offered a policy that would reduce import duties from 110% down to 15% on EVs priced above $35,000, provided companies committed at least $500 million toward local manufacturing investment within three years. Tesla declined to participate. The tariff standoff was only part of the problem. Analysts pointed to significant gaps in India’s local supply chain, inadequate industrial infrastructure, and a mismatch between Tesla’s premium pricing and the purchasing power of India’s automotive market as additional factors that made the investment difficult to justify.
First signs of an unraveling relationship came in April 2024, when Musk abruptly cancelled a planned trip to India where he was set to meet Prime Minister Modi and announce Tesla’s market entry. By July 2024, Fortune reported that Tesla executives had stopped contacting Indian government officials entirely. The government at that point understood Tesla had capital constraints and no plans to invest.
The more fundamental issue is that Tesla’s existing factories are currently operating at approximately 60% capacity, making a commitment to building new manufacturing capacity in a new market difficult to defend to investors. Tesla will continue selling imported Model Y vehicles through its existing showrooms in Mumbai, Delhi, Gurugram, and Bengaluru, but local production is no longer part of the plan.
Elon Musk
SpaceX just forced Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile to team up for the first time in history
AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon just joined forces for one reason: Starlink is winning.
America’s three largest wireless carriers, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, announced on On May 14, 2026 that they had agreed in principle to form a joint venture aimed at pooling their spectrum resources to expand satellite-based direct-to-device (D2D) connectivity across the United States in what can be seen as a direct response to SpaceX’s Starlink initiative. D2D, in plain terms, is technology that lets a standard smartphone connect directly to a satellite in orbit, the same way it connects to a cell tower, with no extra hardware required.
The alliance is widely seen as a means to slow Starlink’s rapid expansion in the satellite internet and mobile markets. SpaceX’s Starlink Mobile service launched commercially in July 2025 through a partnership with T-Mobile, starting with messaging before expanding to broadband data. SpaceX secured access to valuable wireless spectrum through its $17 billion deal with EchoStar, paving the way for significantly faster satellite-to-phone speeds.
SpaceX was not shy about its reaction. SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell responded on X: “Weeeelllll, I guess Starlink Mobile is doing something right! It’s David and Goliath (X3) all over again — I’m bettin’ on David.” SpaceX’s VP of Satellite Policy David Goldman went further, flagging potential antitrust concerns and asking whether the DOJ would even allow three dominant competitors to coordinate in a market where a new rival is actively entering.
Weeeelllll, I guess @Starlink Mobile is doing something right! It’s David and Goliath (X3) all over again — I’m bettin’ on David 🙂 https://t.co/5GzS752mxL
— Gwynne Shotwell (@Gwynne_Shotwell) May 14, 2026
Financial analysts at LightShed Partners were blunt, saying the announcement showed the three carriers are “nervous,” and pointed to the timing: “You announce an agreement in principle when the point is the announcement, not the deal. The timing, weeks ahead of the SpaceX roadshow, was the point.”
As Teslarati reported, SpaceX’s next generation Starlink V2 satellites will deliver up to 100 times the data density of the current system, with custom silicon and phased array antennas enabling around 20 times the throughput of the first generation. The carriers’ JV, which has no definitive agreement, no financial structure, and no deployment timeline yet, will need to move quickly to matter.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is targeting a Nasdaq listing as early as June 12, aiming for what would be the largest IPO in history. With Starlink now serving over 9 million subscribers across 155 countries, holding 59 carrier partnerships globally, and now powering Air Force One, the carriers’ joint venture announcement landed at exactly the wrong time to look like anything other than a defensive move.
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