Tesla CEO Elon Musk certainly isn’t one to shy away from making big promises.
On the company’s earnings call Wednesday, the billionaire entrepreneur said his company was on track to perform a coast-to-coast autonomous drive in three months and that he might set a goal of producing a million units a year of the as-yet-unveiled Model Y compact SUV. .
That target might be surprising to some, given that the electric automaker has fallen well short of production targets for its newest Model 3 vehicle. The company, which originally expected to make 5,000 of the cars *a week,* only delivered 1,550 in total during the fourth quarter.
Still Christian Prenzler, vice president of business development at Teslarati, says, the high expectations are par for the course for the chief executive.
“We’re talking about Elon Musk. Yesterday, he’s launching the world’s most powerful rocket and then lands it,” he told Cheddar after earnings. “It’s not a matter of if he can deliver these vehicles, it’s a matter of whether it’s going to happen in this quarter, the next quarter, or in the following quarter.”
“It’s mostly about how Tesla’s going to tackle these challenges over the next year as they ramp up production.”
Tesla said it still expects to make 5,000 Model 3s a week by the end of the second quarter, a target set in January after already being pushed back a few times before that. The company has faced issues with inexperienced workers and in the production of batteries used in the cars. And some analysts fear that as it tries to ramp up manufacturing, it’s going to quickly burn through the $3.4 billion in cash it has on its balance sheet.
For the fourth quarter, Tesla reported its biggest ever loss of $675 million. In after-hours trading, Tesla shares were basically unchanged at $344, having closed at $345.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
William Falcon, CEO and Founder of Lightning AI, discusses the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how everyday people can use AI in their lives.
U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum “will not go unanswered,” European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen vowed on Tuesday, adding that they will trigger toug
The Trump administration has ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop nearly all its work, effectively shutting down the agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage-lending scandal. Russell Vought is the newly installed director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought directed the CFPB in a Saturday night email to stop work on proposed rules, to suspend the effective dates on any rules that were finalized but not yet effective, and to stop investigative work and not begin any new investigations. The agency has been a target of conservatives since President Barack Obama created it following the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
