Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) Q2 2024 Earnings Conference Call July 23, 2024 5:30 PM ET

Company Participants

Travis Axelrod - Head of Investor Relations
Elon Musk - Chief Executive Officer
Vaibhav Taneja - Chief Financial Officer
Lars Moravy - Vice President-Vehicle Engineering
Ashok Elluswamy - Director-Autopilot Software

Conference Call Participants

Will Stein - Truist Securities
Ben Kallo - Baird
Alex Potter - Piper Sandler
Dan Levy - Barclays
Ferragu Pierre - New Street
Colin Rusch - Oppenheimer
Colin Langan - Wells Fargo

Travis Axelrod

Good afternoon, everyone and welcome to Tesla's Second Quarter 2024 Q&A Webcast. My name is Travis Axelrod, Head of Investor Relations and I’m joined today by Elon Musk; Vaibhav Taneja, and a number of other executives.

Our Q2 results were announced at about 3.00 p.m. Central Time in the Update Deck we published at the same link as this webcast. During this call, we will discuss our business outlook and make forward-looking statements. These comments are based on our predictions and expectations as of today. Actual events or results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those mentioned in our most recent filings with the SEC. During the question-and-answer portion of today's call, please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Please use the raise hand button to join the question queue.

Before we jump into Q&A, Elon has some opening remarks. Elon?

Elon Musk

Thank you. So to recap, we saw large adoption exploration in EVs, and then a bit of a hangover as others struggle to make compelling EVs. So there are quite a few competing electric vehicles that have entered the market. And mostly they’ve not done well, but they’ve discounted their EVs very substantially, which has made it a bit more difficult for Tesla. We don’t see this as long-term issue, but really -- fairly short-term. And we still obviously firmly believe that EVs are best for customers and that the world is headed for a fully electrified transport, not just the cars, but also aircrafts and boats.

So many challenges. The Tesla team did a great job executing and we did achieve record quarterly revenues. Energy storage deployments reached an all-time high in Q2, leading to record profits for the energy business. And we are investing in many future projects, including AI training and inference and great deal of infrastructure to support future products.

We won't get too much into the product roadmap here, because that is reserved for product announcement events. But we are on track to develop -- to deliver a more affordable model in the first half of next year. The big -- really by far the biggest differentiator for Tesla is autonomy. In addition to that, we've scale economies and we're the most efficient electric vehicle producer in the world. So, this, anyway -- while others are pursuing different parts of the AI robotic stack, we are pursuing all of them. This allows for better cost control, more scale, quicker time to market, and a superior product, applying not to -- not just to autonomous vehicles, but to autonomous humanoid robots like Optimus.