Elon Musk disappoints Tesla faithful, pushing back robotaxi reveal date

While the carmaker’s CEO didn’t confirm last week’s Bloomberg report it would be postponed until October, he will almost certainly face questions about it from investors during the second-quarter earnings call scheduled for next Tuesday. 

“Requested what I think is an important design change to the front,” he posted on Monday, “and extra time allows us to show off a few other things.”

He did not go into further detail what those surprises might be, but fans have speculated it could be everything from the upcoming entry car to the all new Roadster. The latter was initially shown off during the Tesla Semi unveil in December 2017, but has since been re-engineered.

In the aftermath of Thursday’s Bloomberg report, investors had been pressing Musk to confirm or deny the story, since it wiped more than 8% off the stock price. Some even demanded the SEC investigate the news agency for market manipulation since it did not name its sources and the news had not been officially confirmed.

Requested what I think is an important design change to the front, and extra time allows us to show off a few other things

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 15, 2024

Musk’s comments came in response to a video posted by Warren Redlich, a Tesla influencer best known for saying he’d happily take a bullet for the entrepreneur. In it, Redlich said his own private contacts told him there would be a major change to the vehicle that engineers—not Musk—suggested would need two months to implement.

Given Musk and Tesla would be motivated to prove the mainstream media wrong, the YouTuber said he wouldn’t yet give up on next month’s unveil: “They are doing their level best to get something that they can show on August 8th.”

While Tesla staff may yet pull off a miracle, it looks as if that date is off the cards. 

Growth narrative in jeopardy until Musk pulled Robotaxi trump card

Musk’s well-timed April announcement of the robotaxi unveiling wasn’t random. It came at a crucial juncture for Tesla, reinvigorating confidence that a challenging 2024 would not mark the start of a worrying new trend but would merely be a speed bump on the way to a $30 trillion market cap.

Until the announcement, investors had feared Tesla’s aging line-up was no longer as competitive as it once was and would increasingly require heavy discounting to generate sufficient sales growth. Even the arrival of the Cybertruck looked like it would underwhelm after launching with a much lower range and much higher price than first promised.

Late last year, Tesla sought to assure the market that its investment story remained fundamentally intact, claiming it was merely going through a rough patch before a wave of new models would accelerate growth thanks to their revolutionary engineering. This would cut the cost of production by half over the current platform that underpins the Model 3 and Y, allowing it to be sold highly profitably despite a low entry price of around $25,000 each.

On April 2, however, cracks began to emerge in that narrative. 

First Tesla shocked the market with Q1 delivery figures that fell well short of even the most bearish forecast. Even Tesla bull Dan Ives called news of Tesla’s first year-on-year contraction in quarterly sales since the pandemic an “unmitigated disaster” that could not simply be explained away.

“We view this as a seminal moment in the Tesla story,” he wrote on April 2. Either Musk turns the story around, or “some darker days could clearly be ahead that could disrupt the long-term Tesla narrative.” 

Robotaxi restored confidence when Musk needed shareholder support

Some 72 hours later, Reuters then dropped a bombshell report that Tesla was scrapping plans to build an entry level car on the promised next-gen vehicle platform. Instead it would prioritize its robotaxi model—a technology most experts believe is years away from full maturity.

Reuters is lying (again)

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 5, 2024

This pivot sparked widespread alarm that millions of vehicles worth of future growth that underpinned investor valuation models just went up in smoke for no clear reason. 

Initially Musk played down the report, claiming that Reuters was not telling the truth. Then out of the blue he announced the Aug. 8 robotaxi unveiling. This nugget of information was enough to put a floor in the stock that prevented a further downward spiral in the price. 

Days later, the CEO would go on to request that shareholders ratify a record pay package now worth $77 billion, and he needed their support right when Tesla was the worst performing stock in the S&P 500.

By the time Tesla published its Q1 earnings later that month, investors had already made up their minds that Musk had flagged to the market the worst was behind it. 

While pushing back the reveal date doesn’t alter that thesis, it does raise the question whether the date had been discussed with anyone in senior management or signed off by Tesla’s board of directors.

Musk did not respond to a request for comment made outside of regular business hours.

Tesla Robotaxi unveil on 8/8

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 5, 2024

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