Yahoo News Tesla: Musk talks production, pricing and Cybertruck at the company's annual meeting
It was business as usual at Tesla’s (TSLA) annual meeting last night, peppered with commentary from CEO Elon Musk across a number of topics like car production, supply chain and pricing, and of course the status of the Cybertruck.
A number of proposals were put to shareholders to vote on, key among them management’s desire for a 3 for 1 stock split, which was approved by shareholders. Based on yesterday’s closing price the new share price would be around $308.
Musk’s presentation to shareholders started with revealing the company had recently just produced its 3 millionth vehicle. Musk also said is attempting to achieve a 2 million vehicle run rate by the end of the year.
Musk also gave his best guess about the future of production. “What about the next 10 years? I’ll be surprised if it’s not over 100 million in 10 years,” Musk said.
Musk also stated that the ideal number of factories would be twelve, meaning the company has a long way to go. Currently it has gigafactories in Fremont, Shanghai, Austin, and Berlin, along with battery and solar operations in Nevada and Buffalo, NY.
As for its next factory, Musk hinted it could be in north of the border. After a number of attendees suggested several locations, Musk said, “We got a lot of Canada. I am half Canadian, maybe I should?” Musk previously had said Tesla was looking at locations in North America for its next factory.
Pricing, supply chain, and the economy
Musk also gave investors more color on his thoughts on pricing, supply chain, and the economy. Last Friday Musk tweeted that he is seeing pricing coming down for certain components. Musk elaborated more on that, claiming that Tesa gets “a fair bit of insight into where prices of things are going over time because when you’re making millions of cars, you have to purchase commodities many months in advance of when they’re needed,” and from that vantage point, he believes the country is “past peak inflation.”
Musk continued with his prognostications, predicting that the U.S. is likely in for a “relatively mild recession.” He did however add a grain of salt to this claim, warning that making predictions about the economy is usually a “recipe for disaster.”
Speaking of pricing and inflation, the question came up of the status of Tesla’s Cybertruck pickup, quite possibly the automaker’s most highly anticipated vehicle. Musk said the CyberTruck was still slated for mid-2023 production at Giga Austin, though he warned things there were some changes.
“Cybertruck pricing, it was unveiled in 2019, and the reservation was $99. A lot has changed since then, so the specs and the pricing will be different,” Musk said, “I hate to give sort of a little bit of bad news, but I think there's no way to sort of have anticipated quite the inflation that we've seen and the various issues.”
Musk did not say what specifications would change for the Cybertruck.
As for a few odds and ends, Musk said Tesla AI Day part 2 was slated for September 30th, that FSD (Full Self Driving) Beta software will hopefully have a widespread release by the end of this year, and that as far as succession plans go, he intends to stay at Tesla so long as he is useful to the company.
Also at the meeting, board members Ira Ehrenpreis and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson were also re-elected as directors of the board; however, proposals to shorten board member terms to two years instead of three, and to shift board voting from supermajority to a simple majority failed. Martin Viecha, Tesla’s head of investor relations, said these two proposals failed to pass because less than two-thirds of shareholders failed to vote on these measures, which is a required threshold.
For more on Tesla’s annual meeting, a recording of the webcast can be viewed here.
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Pras Subramanian is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on Twitter and on Instagram.
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