Tesla finally has financial results to support the argument that it is more than a car company. They still don’t go anywhere near justifying the latest run-up in the stock.
The electric-vehicle pioneer’s second-quarter numbers, reported late Tuesday, missed analysts’ expectations at most levels. The automotive gross-profit margin excluding regulatory credits—a closely watched measure of underlying profitability in the core vehicle business—came in at 14.6%, compared with consensus expectations of 16%, according to RBC’s calculation. The stock fell roughly 8% in premarket trading.
A robot future
Although Optimus is not a household brand the same way the Tesla Model 3 or Y are, the concept of humanoid robots has become more popular over the past decade.
Boston Dynamics famously put these machines on the map (and into nightmares) when videos of its Atlas design went viral for moving through life like a human.
More recently, startups in the same space, such as Figure, have attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from the likes of Jeff Bezos.
Between the lines: With competition to build humanoid robots already underway, and pressures on its EV business growing, Musk can’t afford to waste time.
💭 Our thought bubble: The story that Musk wants to tell is that everything Tesla has been working on over the past twenty years has led to this point of expansion.
The humanoid robot combines machinery Tesla’s been perfecting at its gigafactory plants with AI systems that help its cars drive themselves.
And as it (like many other Big Tech companies) tries to wean itself off Nvidia chips by building its own silicon platform — dubbed Dojo — Tesla’s moving toward Apple-esque, fully vertically integrated operations across all its products.
