Investor's Corner
Tesla investors want to know about these five things during the Q2 2023 Earnings Call
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) is set to hold its Earnings Call for the second quarter of 2023 tomorrow, and investors are hopeful to learn details about Full Self-Driving licensing, Cybertruck pricing and configurations, Supercharger expansion, and 4680 cell development.
According to the investor platform Say, Tesla shareholders are eager to ask CEO Elon Musk and other executives of the electric automaker about various things that will affect the company’s performance on Wall Street and the overall outlook of the company for the rest of 2023 and beyond.
Here are the five top questions that retail investors are hoping to gain more information on during tomorrow’s call:
- Has any automaker approached Tesla to license FSD?
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- Musk recently said that “Tesla aspires to be as helpful as possible to other car companies,” and indicated that he would be open to licensing Autopilot or Full Self-Driving to rival automakers. With Ford, GM, and others already developing their own programs, Tesla would likely license Autopilot or FSD to a startup company. However, there is always the potential that one company adopting it would catalyze many others to make the same choice, just as it did with Ford’s choice to adopt NACS.
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- Have you considered allowing FSD transferability as a level to allow existing customers to upgrade to a new Tesla instead of being locked into existing cars due to the price of FSD?
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- Tesla has not allowed the transferability of FSD to a new vehicle, and we don’t anticipate this to happen anytime soon. Musk has said FSD’s current price is a bargain compared to what it will be worth when the suite is complete. There is too much money to be made by Tesla from people who want FSD on multiple vehicles, and trading in your car will likely require you to buy the suite again.
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- When will you give more information about out Cybertruck orders? Estimated delivery schedules, pricing, and specifications?
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- We expect Tesla to reveal information about the Cybertruck during this Earnings Call, as the first production units have already rolled off of lines based on images shared by the company last weekend. It is truly unlikely Tesla doesn’t tell customers what they should expect to pay before the delivery event.
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- As you open the Supercharger Network in North America to other EVs, do you plan to accelerate anticipatory investments in Supercharger expansion to avoid congestion and how will you deal with long lead times to upgrade electric T&D services to these areas for multi-megawatt loads?
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- Tesla has a major task on its hands with the Supercharger Network being open to various car companies. Battling congestion will be interesting, especially as these companies are going to be sharing the same 12,000 locations. However, the company is opening a new site every 11 hours, which has improved from every 12 hours, on average, in June, and every 13 hours in May.
NEWS: @Tesla is currently opening an average of one new Supercharger site globally every ~11 hours.
This compares to one opening every ~12 hrs last month, and one every ~13 hrs the month prior to that. @TeslaCharging pic.twitter.com/7GmcPlGQaH
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) July 13, 2023
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- What is the status of the 4680 cell? How far are you from the specs you laid out on Battery Day? When do you expect to achieve what you laid out on Battery Day?
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- Tesla has built 10 million cells in Texas, countless others in Fremont, and the 4680 project is obviously coming along at a reasonable pace. As far as how far the company is from reaching what it laid out in 2020 at Battery Day, there is no need to speculate. It is a matter of getting raw materials and ramping manufacturing to a point that Tesla is not confined on the cells.
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Tesla will report its Earnings tomorrow at market close with the release of its Shareholder Deck. A call with Musk and other executives will follow.
Disclosure: Joey Klender is a TSLA Shareholder.
I’d love to hear from you! If you have any comments, concerns, or questions, please email me at joey@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @KlenderJoey, or if you have news tips, you can email us at tips@teslarati.com.
Tesla has scheduled its Earnings Call for Q4 and Full Year 2025 for next Wednesday, January 28, at 5:30 p.m. EST, and investors are already preparing to get some answers from executives regarding a wide variety of topics.
The company accepts several questions from retail investors through the platform Say, which then allows shareholders to vote on the best questions.
Tesla does not answer anything regarding future product releases, but they are willing to shed light on current timelines, progress of certain projects, and other plans.
There are five questions that range over a variety of topics, including SpaceX, Full Self-Driving, Robotaxi, and Optimus, which are currently in the lead to be asked and potentially answered by Elon Musk and other Tesla executives:
- You once said: Loyalty deserves loyalty. Will long-term Tesla shareholders still be prioritized if SpaceX does an IPO?
- Our Take – With a lot of speculation regarding an incoming SpaceX IPO, Tesla investors, especially long-term ones, should be able to benefit from an early opportunity to purchase shares. This has been discussed endlessly over the past year, and we must be getting close to it.
- When is FSD going to be 100% unsupervised?
- Our Take – Musk said today that this is essentially a solved problem, and it could be available in the U.S. by the end of this year.
- What is the current bottleneck to increase Robotaxi deployment & personal use unsupervised FSD? The safety/performance of the most recent models or people to monitor robots, robotaxis, in-car, or remotely? Or something else?
- Our Take – The bottleneck seems to be based on data, which Musk said Tesla needs 10 billion miles of data to achieve unsupervised FSD. Once that happens, regulatory issues will be what hold things up from moving forward.
- Regarding Optimus, could you share the current number of units deployed in Tesla factories and actively performing production tasks? What specific roles or operations are they handling, and how has their integration impacted factory efficiency or output?
- Our Take – Optimus is going to have a larger role in factories moving forward, and later this year, they will have larger responsibilities.
- Can you please tie purchased FSD to our owner accounts vs. locked to the car? This will help us enjoy it in any Tesla we drive/buy and reward us for hanging in so long, some of us since 2017.
- Our Take – This is a good one and should get us some additional information on the FSD transfer plans and Subscription-only model that Tesla will adopt soon.
Tesla will have its Earnings Call on Wednesday, January 28.
Elon Musk
Tesla locks in Elon Musk’s top problem solver as it enters its most ambitious era
The generous equity award was disclosed by the electric vehicle maker in a recent regulatory filing.
Tesla has granted Senior Vice President of Automotive Tom Zhu more than 520,000 stock options, tying a significant portion of his compensation to the company’s long-term performance.
The generous equity award was disclosed by the electric vehicle maker in a recent regulatory filing.
Tesla secures top talent
According to a Form 4 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Tom Zhu received 520,021 stock options with an exercise price of $435.80 per share. Since the award will not fully vest until March 5, 2031, Zhu must remain at Tesla for more than five years to realize the award’s full benefit.
Considering that Tesla shares are currently trading at around the $445 to $450 per share level, Zhu will really only see gains in his equity award if Tesla’s stock price sees a notable rise over the years, as noted in a Sina Finance report.
Still, even at today’s prices, Zhu’s stock award is already worth over $230 million. If Tesla reaches the market cap targets set forth in Elon Musk’s 2025 CEO Performance Award, Zhu would become a billionaire from this equity award alone.
Tesla’s problem solver
Zhu joined Tesla in April 2014 and initially led the company’s Supercharger rollout in China. Later that year, he assumed the leadership of Tesla’s China business, where he played a central role in Tesla’s localization efforts, including expanding retail and service networks, and later, overseeing the development of Gigafactory Shanghai.
Zhu’s efforts helped transform China into one of Tesla’s most important markets and production hubs. In 2023, Tesla promoted Zhu to Senior Vice President of Automotive, placing him among the company’s core global executives and expanding his influence beyond China. He has since garnered a reputation as the company’s problem solver, being tapped by Elon Musk to help ramp Giga Texas’s vehicle production.
With this in mind, Tesla’s recent filing seems to suggest that the company is locking in its top talent as it enters its newest, most ambitious era to date. As could be seen in the targets of Elon Musk’s 2025 pay package, Tesla is now aiming to be the world’s largest company by market cap, and it is aiming to achieve production levels that are unheard of. Zhu’s talents would definitely be of use in this stage of the company’s growth.
Tesla analyst Andrew Percoco of Morgan Stanley teased the company’s dominance in its self-driving initiative, stating that its lead over competitors is “not even close.”
Percoco recently overtook coverage of Tesla stock from Adam Jonas, who had covered the company at Morgan Stanley for years. Percoco is handling Tesla now that Jonas is covering embodied AI stocks and no longer automotive.
His first move after grabbing coverage was to adjust the price target from $410 to $425, as well as the rating from ‘Overweight’ to ‘Equal Weight.’
Percoco’s new note regarding Tesla highlights the company’s extensive lead in self-driving and autonomy projects, something that it has plenty of competition in, but has established its prowess over the past few years.
He writes:
“It’s not even close. Tesla continues to lead in autonomous driving, even as Nvidia rolls out new technology aimed at helping other automakers build driverless systems.”
Percoco’s main point regarding Tesla’s advantage is the company’s ability to collect large amounts of training data through its massive fleet, as millions of cars are driving throughout the world and gathering millions of miles of vehicle behavior on the road.
This is the main point that Percoco makes regarding Tesla’s lead in the entire autonomy sector: data is King, and Tesla has the most of it.
One big story that has hit the news over the past week is that of NVIDIA and its own self-driving suite, called Alpamayo. NVIDIA launched this open-source AI program last week, but it differs from Tesla’s in a significant fashion, especially from a hardware perspective, as it plans to use a combination of LiDAR, Radar, and Vision (Cameras) to operate.
Percoco said that NVIDIA’s announcement does not impact Morgan Stanley’s long-term opinions on Tesla and its strength or prowess in self-driving.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang commends Tesla’s Elon Musk for early belief
And, for what it’s worth, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang even said some remarkable things about Tesla following the launch of Alpamayo:
“I think the Tesla stack is the most advanced autonomous vehicle stack in the world. I’m fairly certain they were already using end-to-end AI. Whether their AI did reasoning or not is somewhat secondary to that first part.”
Percoco reiterated both the $425 price target and the ‘Equal Weight’ rating on Tesla shares.
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