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Top 5 questions Tesla (TSLA) retail investors want answered in the Q1 2021 earnings call

(Credit: Tesla)

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Tesla’s Q1 2021 earnings call is coming up, and TSLA shareholders only have a day left to vote on questions during the meeting. Below are the top 5 questions retail investors are asking. 

Question 1 & 2 – Dojo and Solar Roof Updates

Retail investor Robert M. submitted two questions that have garnered significant shares and votes. First, he submitted a question about Dojo–the supercomputer Tesla is developing to process vast amounts of data. In November 2020, Elon Musk noted that Version 1 of Dojo was about a year away from ready.

“How is Dojo coming along? Could Dojo unlock an AWS-like business line for Tesla over the next few years?” Robert M. asked. 

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The retail investor also asked about Tesla’s recent Solar Roof price changes. Many Solar Roof customers reported seeing price hikes in their installation quotation in the past few weeks. Musk recently announced that Tesla’s solar products—solar panels and Solar Roof—will be sold with Powerwalls as an integrated system.

“The recent price changes on Solar Roof have been a bit discouraging for customers and investors. Could Tesla share more about Solar Roof challenges and if the outlook [h]as changed at all (i.e., 1,000+ per week?” Robert M asked.

Question 3 & 4 – Bitcoin Payments and FUD from MSM

The next two questions from retail investors with the third and fourth-most shares and votes came from Emmet P. The retail investor asked about Tesla’s plans in the “digital currency space” and wondered when any significant cryptocurrency developments would be revealed.

Earlier this year, Tesla once again broke away from traditional automaker practices when it invested $1.5 billion in cryptocurrency, enabling customers to purchase Tesla vehicles with Bitcoin. Tesla launched Bitcoin payments last month.

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Emmet P.’s second question pertained to the mainstream media’s (MSM) “deceptive [clickbait] headline campaigns,” specifically related to Autopilot and Full Self-Driving. He asked if Tesla had any proactive plans to address the misleading articles published by mainstream media and suggested that the company might consider a “specialty PR” job.

Last week, Consumers Reports released an article about Tesla Autopilot that received massive attention for its questionable content. The article brought mainstream media’s integrity into question again, especially in relation to Tesla. 

Question 5 – Tesla’s Customer Service

The fifth question with the most shares and votes related to Tesla’s efforts to improve customer service and communication. Over the years, Tesla service has been a segment of the company that most customers believe drastic improvements.

“It is extremely frustrating to have to go to Elon’s Twitter to do feature requests and bug report recognition, and I often feel like Tesla[’s] development efforts don’t align with customer needs. Can we please get a Tesla Official community feedback system with up/downvoting?” Kevin P. asked.

Tesla’s Q1 2021 earnings call is scheduled for Monday, April 26, 2021, at 2:30 pm Pacific Time or 5:30 pm Eastern Time. Tesla will release an Update Letter after the market closes on Monday.

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The Teslarati team would appreciate hearing from you. If you have any tips, email us at tips@teslarati.com or reach out to me at maria@teslarati.com.

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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Investor's Corner

Tesla crushes Wall Street expectations, beats delivery estimates by over 15 percent

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Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) beat Wall Street expectations of 406,000 vehicles delivered in Q2 by reporting 480,126 deliveries for the three months ending in June.

Tesla reported it delivered 467,762  Model 3 and Model Y units, while 12,364 Model S, Model X, and Cybertrucks switched hands during the quarter. The Model S and Model X were officially sunset this past quarter and will no longer be part of the company’s Production & Delivery reports moving forward.

The quarter is a pleasant surprise and a good rebound from Q1, when Tesla slightly missed the Wall Street consensus of 365,645 cars by reporting 358,023 deliveries for the first three motnhs of the year.

Energy storage deployments also provided some strength in Tesla’s delivery report, hitting 13.5 GWh for Q2. This is a particular division of Tesla’s business that has been overwhelmingly robust over the past few years, truly being a strong point of the company’s overall model.

For the year, Tesla analysts still predict deliveries to trend in the 1.69 million unit region, a modest 3 to 5 percent increase from the 1.64 million cars the company delivered last year. Tesla will likely return to more sequential and noticeable year-over-year growth as the Cybercab project starts to ramp up considerably in the next few years.

Tesla has some other potential catalysts to spur vehicle deliveries, too. Not only is it expecting Cybercab to truly start making a change in the next few years, but other vehicles could be entering the company’s lineup.

Tesla sends production Cybercab with no steering wheel, pedals to on-road testing

The slightly longer Model Y L has been a highly speculated release candidate in the U.S. It has already done incredibly well in China, and U.S. buyers have been wanting slightly more interior space than the Model Y. Now that the Model X is gone, it is more needed than ever.

Q2 highlights a pretty stable automotive division within Tesla, and no true concerns arise from these figures, especially considering it managed to beat expectations convincingly.

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Investor's Corner

Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’

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Credit: MarcoRP | X

Tesla short seller Michael Burry, the subject of the film “The Big Short,” where he was portrayed by Steve Carell, has revealed he has opened a new bet against the stock.

In a new update to his Substack newsletter in a post titled “Trading Post June 30, 2026,” Burry revealed a new set of bets against Tesla, Caterpillar, NVIDIA, Applied Materials Inc., and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.

In regard to Tesla, Burry wrote:

“And finally I shorted Tesla at 416.22. Happy it jumped back to this level.”

This means Burry likely opened his new short position after the company’s recent rally on Wall Street, which saw Tesla shares sink in mid-May, only to recover to well over the $400 mark. Currently, shares trade at around $427.

The company saw a big Tuesday as shares climbed considerably, over 10 percent. The size of the Tesla short was not provided, nor did Burry give any information on the position’s structure, the number of shares, dollar value, or whether options were used in the short.

The Tesla and SpaceX merger everyone is talking about is quietly building

Over the years, Burry has been one of the more vocal critics of Tesla, calling its share price “media inflated,” and saying it was “ridiculously overvalued” as recently as December.

The company has largely transitioned away from being known as an automotive company and instead is much more widely regarded as an AI play, mostly due to its Full Self-Driving efforts, Optimus robot development, and data collection related to both.

This has not pulled those skeptics away from being vocal about their distaste for how Tesla is valued, but there’s no denying that the company is a global force in many things, including sustainable energy, automotive, and AI.

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Investor's Corner

SpaceX gets initial stock coverage from Tesla’s biggest bull

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SpaceX Starship V3 flight 12
SpaceX Starship V3 flight 12 (Credit: SpaceX)

Wedbush Securities is initiating stock coverage on SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), marking the first comments on the company since it went public several weeks ago. Wedbush and its analyst handling coverage, Dan Ives, are widely bullish on fellow Musk company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).

Ives wrote his first note initiating coverage of SpaceX shares on Wednesday with a $190 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating. The firm believes the company is well positioned off of its IPO because of its wide array of projects, including AI compute power and infrastructure, connectivity projects, and launches.

“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity,” Ives wrote, “Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel and increasing deal flow for its Colossus clusters.”

Elon Musk called it Epic: The full story of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 12

Wedbush leans heavily on Starlink, which they say is the “profitability driver given the strength of its recurring revenue base of ~12 million subscribers as of June 5th.” Ives believes Starlink is still in the “early innings” of penetrating the global telecommunications and broadband market, as it only holds less than a 1 percent share. However, this number is sure to increase over time.

It also highlights the importance of Starship, which it says is an “essential layer” of SpaceX’s overall success. SpaceX developing and displaying the ability to reuse rockets is a major cost and reliability advantage “as it reduces the necessary hardware launch costs while generating a feedback loop for future flights to improve their launch flight rate without accelerating capex spend.”

Finally, SpaceX’s recent AI/Compute projects are also very elementary, Ives writes. It is worth mentioning Wedbush said its $190 price target is derived from a valuation forecast that sees the company yielding roughly $2.48 trillion of implied enterprise value.

There are also some factors that Wedbush did not take into account with its initial coverage. The firm wrote in the note:

“We note that there is optional value coming from Starship’s accelerating scale towards sub-$200/kg unit economics, orbital data centers, and enterprise AI monetization as these factors could drive meaningful upside but these face major hurdles, so we do not take that into account with our valuation.”

SpaceX shares are down just over 2 percent today, trading at around $167 at the time of publication.

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