Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

Numbers:

- Q1 EPS $0.27, Est $0.43, wow, hard to remember a fumble this large for such a big company. This is a big canary in the coal mine for US markets earning season, things are going to get really ugly.

- Q1 Revenue $19.3B, Est $21.7B

- Model 3 deliveries down 12%,

- Model Y deliveries down 12%

- CyberTruck deliveries down 24%

- production of Model 3 down 16%

- production of Model Y down 18%

- regulatory credits $600M for Q1

- powerwall passed 1GW in deliveries for the first time, that's positive

- Q1 gross automotive margins are at 12.5%

Notes:

- could Elon announcing he's leaving TSLA be the biggest single personal catalyst for a companies stock price, since Balmer announced he was leaving MSFT?

- They are providing guidance that tariffs will affect the power business more than the automotive business, which makes sense as North America makes up 5% of global Lithium-ion battery production and China makes up 84% of it

- Cybercab status is now "in construction"

- dropped their old sales guidance

- dropped their prediction that sales would grow on the year

- nothing in the deck about Elon staying on, but they did add a new risk about the changing political climate may affect their sales

- New Texas Lithium refining and cathode production plants are on track to start production next year Watch For:

- Does Elon provide a hard target for when he starts working again?

- Energy storage has been growing, but batteries will be hit hard by tariffs, rare earths, does that hit energy storage yet? or do we see a pump from pulling forward demand to beat tariffs?

- Any tie ins with xAI? Elon seems to be throwing everything he can to pump up xAI's valuation, he clearly has some loans now tied to its price

- Tone of earnings call, Typically earnings calls have been essentially blowing smoke up Elon's ass with no tough questions asked/answered at all.

Even one hard question would indicate that wall street has shifted from the Elon can do no wrong mindset

- Will TSLA blame tariffs for bad sales like other companies have?

- What will they say about a new Tesla models?

- China sales will dominate what the market thinks, Therefor Tesla will almost certainly not break them out,

I was eager to see how the other models performed vs Model Y (thanks for breaking that out!). There has been quite a lot of rationalizing that any softness in Tesla's vehicle sales would be the result of the Model Y redesign. I think we now know that's not true or at least only minimally true based on the numbers you cite.

For that reason I think this being a canary is not quite accurate because there's literally no other company with as much self-inflicted brand damage. What will be interesting to see is the delta between Tesla's poor performance and the other mega caps because you'll able to somewhat infer how much of the damage to Tesla is due to the brand/Elon issues (i.e., if Tesla is down 20% on revenue/earnings and the others are down less, on average, then that gap could be a backhand way to quantify the brand damage).

Of course all that said there is quite a significant amount of brand damage to go around for every well-known American company at the moment due to guilt by association. International sales will be very interesting to see with Apple, imo, likely being the most high-profile casualty of "don't buy US" (other than Tesla, I mean).

edit: added qualification about Tesla at very end

>canary in the coal mine for US markets earning season

Tesla has some unique features with the nazi salute and cars getting torched. I don't think it's a good guide to other companies earnings.

Note that all those delivery numbers are year-over-year, but if you look at the growth through 2024, the drop off in this quarter is more stark.

For example:

Q4-2024 495,570 Q1-2025 336,681

That's down 32%.

Should publicly traded companies be required to notify investors if their financial results are expected to deviate significantly from previous guidance or market expectations? I recall NVIDIA issuing a preliminary announcement before one of their earnings reports a while ago.

they’re supposed to if the deviation is material. that’s what “pre-announcements” are for. but it’s a gray area unless it’s something truly drastic. a 32% QoQ drop probably qualifies, but companies sometimes gamble that the full context will soften the blow on earnings day.

This is incorrect under most cases.

A company is not required to update any previously given guidance and can just let their quarterly reporting speak for itself.

The reason why most companies give guidance, which they re not required to and many companies don't, is to manage wall streets expectations.

So given that, you can see why they'd update their guidance for material changes, though under REG FD they are not required to update guidance once they learn its incorrect.

They do modify their guidance so as to not surprise analysts on earnings releases and again as a way to manage expectations.

But as to the question asked, no they are not required to modify their guidance, even if they learn its not true.

I'm short on Tesla, but I fully expect these brutal numbers to not have a big effect. The Tesla bulls have already said that 2025 will be a "throwaway year" but it doesn't matter because in 2 years we'll all be riding Tesla robotaxis and have an Optimus at home doing the laundry. In the meantime, I fully expect Tesla getting big orders from government agencies, unless Elon has a fallout with his buddy.

Ratner comes to mind ...

Come on, Elon, add FSD at no extra charge to the Cybertruck and I'll buy one. I ain't paying $8K for partial autonomy, and the hardware is already there. It's only fair.

Lidar is there?

Not needed. With sufficient compute 8 cameras are more than enough to build a reliable depth map.

WRONG.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/U1MigIJXJx8

There are other videos trying to replicate some of this and thereby proving this is fake. Not the first time Rober lied about things either.

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