Elon Musk to bail on Tesla earnings calls

The electric car giant surpassed $1 billion profit for the first time in Q2.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk told investors Monday during the company's second quarter earnings call not to expect him on future calls unless he has something major to announce. 

"I will no longer default to doing earnings call," Musk said, according to Bloomberg. "Obviously I’ll do the annual shareholder meeting, but I think that going forward I will most likely not be on earnings calls unless there’s something really important that I need to say."

Ticker Security Last Change Change %
TSLA TESLA INC. 169.14 +7.01 +4.33%

One important thing Musk had to say during Monday's call was that Tesla surpassed $1 billion profit in Q2 for the first time in the company's history.

TESLA SURPASSES $1B PROFIT FOR FIRST TIME

The electric vehicle maker's second quarter profit came in at $1.14 billion, or $1.02 per share, compared with $104 million or 10 cents a share a year ago, while total revenue came in at $11.9 billion – a 98% year-over-year increase.

Regarding his time management, the billionaire entrepreneur was asked during the call whether he would grant interviews to YouTubers, to which Musk explained that if he is doing interviews, he cannot be doing "other work."

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That "other work" includes not only running Tesla, but overseeing SpaceX and The Boring Company, both of which he founded. He also co-founded Neuralink and Open AI. Earlier this month, Musk told a court he doesn't enjoy being CEO of Tesla, saying, "I rather hate it and I would much prefer to spend my time on design and engineering, which is what intrinsically I like doing."

But not everyone thinks it's a great idea for Musk to skip future Tesla earnings calls. 

Former investment banker and Bloomberg opinion columnist Liam Denning wrote in a piece published late Monday that "$30-odd billion of rival spending a year — along with billions more from Chinese automakers and fresh upstarts such as newly listed Lucid Group Inc. — will have an impact, and soon" for Tesla.

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"Indeed, mass electrification of vehicles, which is Tesla’s guiding objective, depends on there being more than one player in town," Denning continued, adding, "the difficulty, as ever, is that Tesla is priced as a winner taking all."

He concluded: "Musk might want to keep those one-hour slots blocked out in his calendar for a while yet."