Liam Denning, Columnist

Elon Musk and Tesla Bulls Are So Over This Covid-19 Panic

First-quarter earnings numbers are meaningless, in more ways than one.

April 29, 2020 at 11:53 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

TFW you are over it.
Photographer: PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty Images

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

Tesla’s earnings — as in the numbers, rather than the show — are essentially meaningless.

Case in point: $16 million. That’s Tesla Inc.’s GAAP net income for the first quarter. It was a surprise relative to the consensus estimate. Two things, though: First, that consensus has been dropping like a stone. Second, the earnings are vastly more than explained by a surge in Tesla’s sales of greenhouse-gas emission credits to $354 million, more than double the average for last year1. Those credits also boosted Tesla’s reported gross margin on automotive sales to 25.5% from an underlying 20%, a number that itself lacks details until we get the 10Q filing.