After over a month of trending downward, Tesla (TSLA) stock has finally picked up some momentum. This week, shares have been rising fairly steadily and it seems to be due to the company’s recent all-hands meeting.
CEO Elon Musk hasn’t been spending much time at Tesla lately, but on Friday, March 21, he addressed the company and provided employees with a rundown regarding his plans. His decision to speak to his staff makes sense, as his absence from Tesla’s facilities has likely left many team members concerned.
During the all-hands meeting, Musk laid out why he is optimistic about Tesla’s future, touting Tesla’s progress and taking the opportunity to seemingly congratulate himself. He also discussed plans to expand further into areas of technology beyond electric vehicles (EVs).
However, Musk failed to mention something that has likely been on the minds of many Tesla employees lately, leaving a key question unanswered.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently held an all-hands meeting but didn't discuss some pressing topics.
A lot left unsaid at the Tesla all-hands meeting
Much of Musk’s initial statements from the all-hands meeting were exactly what anyone who follows his work would expect. He boasted that Tesla has produced over seven million vehicles, predicting that the number could reach ten million next year, if this rate of progress continues
Musk also discussed Tesla’s plans to expand its robotic endeavors, highlighting a future in which people have their own personal humanoid robotic assistants. He compared them to the droids made famous in the Star Wars film franchise but claimed that Tesla’s Optimus would be even better.
“It’s worth noting that Tesla remains the company of choice for people to work for,” he stated. “So we get millions of applications per year for a very small number of spots. And we continue to be the leading organization, along with SpaceX, for engineering talent in the world and also for manufacturing talent.”
All this seems to be par for the course for Musk. He’s never shied away from setting extremely high expectations for consumers and investors, even if it means missing an overly ambitious deadline and temporarily setting stock prices back.
After the meeting, TSLA stock started picking up momentum, seemingly on attention from retail investors who felt reassured by Musk’s statements. But one of the most important takeaways from the Tesla all-hands event may have been what Musk didn’t say.
Recently, Tesla has been in full focus on reports that $1.4 billion has mysteriously disappeared. Even for a company with such vast resources, that’s a significant amount of money and may be concerning both to regulators and investors.
“Compare Tesla’s capital expenditure in the last six months of 2024 to its valuation of the assets that money was spent on, and $1.4bn appears to have gone astray,” reports the Financial Times. “The sum is big enough to matter even at Tesla, and comes at a moment when attention is returning to the group’s underlying numbers, now that its fully diluted stock market valuation has crashed from $1.7tn to below $800bn.”
The all-hands meeting would have given Musk a perfect opportunity to provide context on any misunderstandings or misallegations. But he has been silent on the missing $1.4 billion and did not issue any statements to his company, raising further questions.
The world is wondering where Tesla’s $1.4 billion went
Given how free Musk often is with sharing information, many investors are likely wondering why that much money is going unaccounted for and if they should be concerned. If it were a technical error, Musk likely would have acknowledged it, as he wouldn’t have needed to hide anything.
That said, several accounting experts have discussed plausible explanations for the missing billions that might not be visible on a Tesla balance sheet. As Fortune reports:
“You would expect the relevant numbers to add up for a domestic company with no big asset sales or impairments, said Tim Morrison, an accounting professor at Notre Dame and former audit partner at Ernst & Young. Tesla, of course, sells cars around the world and has factories on three continents.“
Morrison also notes that if Tesla simply had incorrect numbers on the sheet cited by the Financial Times, it would indeed be a red flag. However, if that were the case, it seems that Musk wouldn’t have a problem admitting it, as it would likely reassure investors that nothing is wrong.
Reports also indicate that it may be due to Tesla’s excessive artificial intelligence (AI) spending, which Musk made clear at the all-hands meeting isn’t going to stop anytime soon. However, until Tesla can clear up where the unaccounted for $1.4 billion went, many investors are likely going to have questions.
