Elon Musk Says He May Skip Future Tesla Earnings Calls

Ed Ludlow and Brian Eckhouse, Bloomberg News

Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., waves while departing court during the SolarCity trial in Wilmington, Delaware, U.S., on Tuesday, July 13, 2021. Musk was cool but combative as he testified in a Delaware courtroom that Tesla's more than $2 billion acquisition of SolarCity in 2016 wasn't a bailout of the struggling solar provider. , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- Elon Musk dropped a bit of a bomb on Tesla Inc.’s earnings call: He won’t necessarily be doing the quarterly calls going forward.

“I will no longer default to doing earnings call,” Tesla’s chief executive officer said during the company’s second-quarter earnings call Monday. “Obviously I’ll do the annual shareholder meeting, but I think that going forward I will most likely not be on earnings calls unless there’s something really important that I need to say.”

Answering a question on whether he’d do interviews with YouTubers, Musk argued that there’s only so much time in the day and if he’s doing interviews, he can’t be doing “other work.”

Over the years Musk himself has been a central feature of the calls. For example, on a call in April last year, he went on a profane rant and accused authorities of “fascist” orders. On a call in 2018, Musk said the line of questioning from Wall Street analyst Toni Sacconaghi of Sanford C. Bernstein was “Boring, bonehead” questions. “We’re going to YouTube. These questions are so dry. They’re killing me,” he said.

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