I don’t know, maybe there’s a strategy here, but if there is, it is not readily discernible.
As you’re undoubtedly aware, Elon Musk treated two analysts to a healthy dose of STFU on the Tesla (TSLA) call Wednesday evening after they made the “mistake” of asking him “boring” questions about trivial matters like capex and demand for the products the company makes. I mean sure, that’s what conference calls are usually for, but not Elon’s calls. No, Elon’s calls are events where you ask “cool” questions about, I don’t know, Mars orbiters and flamethrowers and shit.
The analyst community was profoundly displeased with Musk for dismissing some of their inquiries in favor of questions from the Youtube crowd (literally) and they said as much on Thursday in a series of scathing notes that found Wall Street marveling at just how “truly bizarre” it was that Musk would summarily dismiss representatives of “the providers of capital that Tesla has throughout its history depended upon”, to quote (former) fanboy Adam Jonas from Morgan.
Well Elon wasn’t done – not by a long shot. On Friday, he attempted to “explain” why he dismissed analysts from Bernstein and RBC and in the course of that explanation, accused them of pushing a short thesis on the way to reiterating that they are, collectively, “absurd boneheads” .
He then proceeded to threaten to incinerate shorts with a flamethrower from his “The Boring Company.”
Later on Friday, we learned that Musk actually hung up on the NTSB during a call regarding the fatal accident involving a Model X that was running on Autopilot when it crashed and (literally) burned. Here’s Bloomberg:
Robert Sumwalt, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, called the feisty builder of new-age cars and rockets on April 11 to tell him that blog posts by Tesla Inc. casting blame on the driver of a Model X for a fatal crash had gone too far. The NTSB had earlier warned Tesla not to make statements about the accident while it was being investigated by the board.
Sumwalt then said he was taking the unusual step of kicking the company’s representatives off the investigation.
“Best I remember, he hung up on us,” Sumwalt told attendees of the International Society of Air Safety Investigators’ Mid-Atlantic Regional Chapter dinner Thursday. It was his first public comments on the exchange.
Well on Saturday, Elon was back on Twitter like he left something. Specifically, Carson Block responded to Musk’s flamethrower quip by attempting to remind him that the VW squeeze was in fact the “short burn of the century”.
MW is referring of course to this:
Predictably, Musk was having none of it, and responded as follows:
That comes less than 24 hours after he predicted “unreal carnage” for shorts and advised them to cover now:
I guess what I would be careful of if I were Elon, is giving the impression that you’re disclosing material nonpublic information on Twitter, a Trump-ian folly that could have grave consequences, assuming of course he hasn’t secretly developed a teleportation system that can beam his silly ass to Mars if the Feds come a-knockin’.
But apparently he’s not too worried because he went straight from that to announcing a new candy company and seemingly suggesting that he’s going to rewrite the script on Willy Wonka to make it less “messed up”:
To be fair, this is hardly the first time Musk and Wonka have been mentioned in the same sentence, so I guess this is just him embracing his fate with open arms.
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