Car wreck: What to believe, Musk’s promises or Tesla terrible results for Q1?

Even the perennially bullish 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.

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 non-cash profit on the $600 million write-up of its Bitcoin holdings in Q4. I also eliminated earnings from the sale of regulatory credits to competing carmakers, a benefit that Musk himself says will prove ephemeral. 

What we’ll call these hardcore profits show how much of Tesla’s gigantic–currently $812 billion–market cap is justified by what it’s doing now, though its present business is declining, and how much owes to Musk promises for full self-driving vehicles and software and robotaxis. So far, those assurances have proven a constantly receding horizon.

In the past quarter, Tesla lost money on "hardcore" businesses

To get to that number, I started with net earnings of $409 million, and subtracted its after-tax profit from the sale of reg credits. That figure is $433 million, and accounts for over 100% of Tesla’s total profits. For the past four quarters, Tesla’s posted a “hardcore,” hopefully “repeatable” number of $3.5 billion. Hence, it’s now selling at an adjusted P/E of over 230 (the $812 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 $742 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 stock price would need to double from today’s $235 to $470 in seven years. Of course, Musk’s machine got there just a couple of months ago. But the future looks a lot dimmer now than it did in the heady days following Trump’s election. Hitting the worth 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 franchises that today remain the realm of gauzy assurances.

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’s blaming Musk’s boss in the White House. But in the minds of Tesla fans, Musk once again saved the day. The Q1 statement announced the EV giant would indeed launch the long-awaited, affordable, apparently all-new Model Y by mid-2025, and introduce a fleet of robotaxis in its hometown of Austin, Texas in 2026.

The market’s cheering, at least for now. In after-hours trading on April 22, Tesla gained 3.5% following a 4.6% jump during the day. In the movie musical “The Music Man,” slick salesman Henry Hill charmed the good townspeople in the mythical city of 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 great marching band that intoxicated his audience.

The Music Man’s got nothing on Elon Musk. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com