Even the perma-bull crowd of analysts covering Tesla warned of sorely disappointing results in Q1, a view signaled by the poor deliveries for the quarter reported in early April.
But the numbers released after the market close on April 22 were much, much worse than expected.
Automotive sales tumbled 20% over the same period last year to $14 billion. Despite a strong 12-month gain in its industrial and residential battery storage franchise, overall revenues plunged 9%. Falling sales hammered profitability, sending net income down nearly 40% to a piddling $409 million, far below the over $600 million forecast by Wall Street, and one-sixth of what Tesla earned as recently as Q2 of 2023.
When results fall this disastrously short of “consensus,” it’s virtually a given that the stock craters in the days that follow. But Musk staged yet another triumph of showmanship to save the day. On the conference call he declared that, starting in May, he’ll be stepping back from his role as President Trump’s spending hawk at DOGE, and will be “allocating far more time to Tesla.” The world’s richest person also succeeded in shifting investors’ gaze from the miserable new numbers to the rich promise of things to come, declaring that a long-awaited version of the Model Y sports vehicle will arrive later this year, and that Tesla robotaxis will ferry passengers around its hometown of Austin starting in 2026.
So when the NYSE closing bell sounded Thursday, April 24, Tesla shares had jumped 9% from the level prior to the Q1 report to $260. In that day-and-a-half span, Tesla added $67 billion in market cap, raising its valuation to $836 billion.
The rub: Tesla’s shares already looked radically overvalued prior to this unlikely spike. Here’s why.
In the past quarter, Tesla lost money in its ‘hardcore’ businesses
The products Tesla is now producing in Austin, Berlin, and Shanghai explain only a small fraction of its valuation. And their fortunes are falling fast. The rest—which just got even pricier in defiance of the Q1 debacle—might be called the “Musk Hope Premium.”
Following the bad, but not-nearly-as-bad Q4 report, this writer introduced a new concept for measuring Tesla’s repeatable, bedrock earnings generated by its current businesses—almost exclusively comprising cars and batteries, plus a small services unit. To get there, I eliminated such one-time gains as a big tax benefit in the final quarter of 2023, and a noncash profit on the $600 million write-up of its Bitcoin holdings in Q4. I also excluded earnings from the sale of regulatory credits to competing carmakers, a benefit that Musk himself says will prove ephemeral, though how fast it fades remains unpredictable.
What we’ll term these “hardcore” profits show how much of Tesla’s gigantic market cap is justified by what it’s doing now, and how much owes to the “Musk Hope Premium,” the celebrity CEO’s promises for full self-driving software and vehicles for Tesla buyers, and commercial robotaxis. So far, those assurances have proved a constantly receding horizon.
To get the “hardcore” number, I started with net earnings of $409 million, and subtracted after-tax profits from the sale of regulatory credits. That result is $433 million, and accounts for over 100% of Tesla’s total profits. By my calculus, Tesla lost $13 million making and selling cars and batteries in Q1. It’s the first time that’s happened since 2020.
For the past four quarters, Tesla has posted a “hardcore,” hopefully “repeatable” number of $3.5 billion. Hence, it’s now selling at an adjusted P/E of 240 (the $836 billion valuation divided by my profit number of $3.5 billion). By the way, at its peak in 2022, Tesla’s “hardcore number” for the year was almost $12 billion, over three times what it achieved in the past 12 months.
Let’s give the car-battery business a P/E of 20, twice the global industry average, just to be generous. That puts the worth of its currently up-and-running operations at $70 billion. The entire difference of $766 billion is essentially a blind vote of confidence that Musk will deliver years of earnings growth from here seldom witnessed in the annals of capitalism and never achieved by a player of Tesla’s age and size.
If you want a 10% return from here, Tesla’s stock price would need to double from today’s $260 to $520 in seven years. Of course, Musk’s machine nearly got there a couple of months back. But the future looks a lot dimmer now than it did in the heady days following Trump’s election. Hitting the mark means Tesla’s market cap must also double, to over $1.6 trillion. At a, once again, generous forecast of a 30 P/E, the net earnings required are well over $50 billion. Cars won’t do it. Tesla would need to earn half of what Apple generates now on products that haven’t advanced from the drawing boards and prototypes to the showrooms.
It looks like Musk once again is fogging investors’ minds
The Tesla Q1 press release blamed the miserable performance on “uncertainty in the automotive and energy markets [that] continues to increase as rapidly evolving trade policy adversely impacts global supply chain and cost structure of Tesla and our peers.” In other words, Tesla is blaming Musk’s boss in the White House.
In the movie musical The Music Man, slick salesman Harold Hill charmed the good townspeople in mythical River City into paying up for carloads of trombones and clarinets that were always just about to arrive. Hill’s wordplay instilled visions of a glorious marching band that intoxicated his audience. The Music Man’s got nothing on Elon Musk.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
