Despite revealing the long-awaited "Robotaxi" during Tesla's (TSLA) "We Robot" event on the evening of Oct. 10, the burning questions from Tesla's retail investors ahead of its third-quarter 2024 earnings call have nothing to do with autonomy, robotics, or artificial intelligence.
But less than 24 hours before the call, its CEO Elon Musk displayed that he was still hard at work on another personal venture that had recently tickled his fancy: politics.
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Though his fanaticism for Republican presidential hopeful and former President Donald Trump is well-documented in real life and on social media, his most recent interactions on his platform X (formerly known as Twitter) indicate that a worrying part of his attention is not directed at his electric car/robotics/AI firm.
Elon's pre-earnings spat with a VP hopeful
Related: Tesla stock price slides ahead of Q3 earnings
In remarks during a rally with former President Barrack Obama, Democratic Vice Presidential hopeful Tim Walz dedicated a section of his speech to Trump's "running mate," Elon Musk, for whom he had some choice words.
"Look, Elon's on that stage [in Butler, Pennsylvania], jumping around, skipping like a dips--t [...] you know it," Walz said to a reactive crowd.
Furthermore, he pointed out to the raucous crowd that there might be more nefarious reasons behind their supposed political bromance.
"That guy is literally the richest man in the world spending millions of dollars to help Donald Trump buy an election," Walz said, triggering boos from the crowd.
"Now look, they're saying the quiet parts out loud now because Donald Trump has already promised that he would put Elon in charge of government regulations that oversee the businesses that Elon runs. [...] In other words, Donald Trump, in front of the eyes of the American public, is promising corruption. That's what he's promising."
"I don’t believe he’ll keep many promises, but he’ll keep that one. I guarantee he’ll keep that one."
It’s as if the 🤡 emoji came to life pic.twitter.com/fYOG0adDwF
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 23, 2024
Naturally, such a colorful characterization did not sit well with Elon.
In a post on X timecoded at 3:32 a.m. on Oct. 23, Elon responded with a meme containing an awkwardly screen-capped shot of Walz‘s face with the words “Who am I, Why am I here“ on the top and bottom of the picture.
”It’s as if the 🤡 came to life," Musk said in the text of the post.
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Tesla investors have more important issues on their minds
However, while all of this is happening, the thing keeping Tesla investors up at night has been the progress, or lack thereof, on the fundamental model that was promised to be mentioned at the October 10 event during the company's Q2 earnings call.
In an anonymous Q&A forum opened to retail investors on Say, the top two questions that shareholders raised were about the supposed "affordable," "$25,000 car" that fans and analysts have dubbed the Model 2.
"Is Tesla still on track to deliver the more affordable model next year, as mentioned by Elon earlier, and how does it align with your AI and product roadmap?" the top-voted question reads, representing 2.3 million total shares.
"When can we expect Tesla to give us the ~$25K, non-robotaxi, regular car model?" the second highest-voted question read, representing 1.4 million total shares.
Related: Tesla thinks it's no longer a car company, but it can come back to reality
Many of the top questions reflect shareholders' growing unease about Elon's promises. Other top questions, representing the views of people who hold close to a million shares, concern the yet-to-be-released Tesla Roadster and the Tesla Semi truck.
Musk previously said during Tesla's second-quarter 2024 earnings call that they were going forward with "new models " and "more affordable models" after reports surfaced that the project was killed altogether.
“We’ve updated our future vehicle lineup to accelerate the launch of new models,” Musk said back in April.
“These new vehicles, including more affordable models, will use aspects of the next-generation platform as well as aspects of our current platforms, and we'll be able to produce on the same manufacturing lines as our current vehicle lineup.”
Tesla Inc., which is listed on the NASDAQ as TSLA, is down 2.07% at the time of this writing ahead of its earnings call after the bell Wednesday, trading at $213.48 per share.
Related: Veteran fund manager sees world of pain coming for stocks
