Tesla’s second-quarter earnings fell 32% from record levels in the first quarter, with the company reporting a net profit of $2.26 billion on Wednesday. The earnings report comes more than a month after CEO Elon Musk said he had a “super bad feeling” about the economy and that the company had to lay off about 10% of its workforce. The company has not been immune to global supply chain issues and financial woes. Earlier this quarter, Tesla was forced to temporarily shut down its Gigafactory in Shanghai to comply with pandemic restrictions, leading to a rare drop in delivery numbers. The company delivered 254,000 vehicles this quarter, down 18% from the previous quarter. Tesla also announced a hiring freeze and began laying off workers earlier this month, including 229 employees who worked on Tesla’s driver assistance technology, Autopilot. Tesla reported its quarterly earnings amid Musk’s ongoing history with Twitter, which sued the billionaire for breaching an agreement to buy the social media platform. A trial is scheduled to begin in October. In its earnings report, Tesla said the company continues to experience production slowdowns due to supply chain and other issues that have limited its ability to consistently operate its factories at full capacity. While the Shanghai Gigafactory was fully and then partially shut down for much of the quarter, the company reported a record monthly production level at that location. Due to uncertainty about when the lockdown in Shanghai will be lifted, Musk said Tesla unloaded 75% of its bitcoin reserves to maximize its cash position. “This shouldn’t be taken as some kind of verdict on bitcoin,” Musk said on an earnings call on Wednesday. “We haven’t sold any of our dogecoins.” However, bitcoin prices fell after Tesla reported earnings on Wednesday. However, Musk said the company is not heavily focused on cryptocurrencies. “It’s not something we think about a lot,” Musk said on the call. “It’s a parallel demonstration…Tesla’s fundamental asset and the reason we’re doing this is to bring the day of sustainable energy sooner. This is our goal. We are neither here nor there for cryptocurrency.” Musk also revealed that the company’s newest factories in Berlin and Texas are losing “billions of dollars right now” as supply chain issues halted production. “Just trying to keep the factories running for the last couple of years has been a very difficult thing, as the supply chain disruptions have been severe, like extremely severe,” Musk said in an interview in May. “The last two years have been an absolute nightmare of supply chain disruptions, one after another, and we’re still not out of it.” However, Musk sounded optimistic on Wednesday about the state of the economy in the coming months. “I would take that with a grain of salt … I think inflation will come down towards the end of this year.” Musk also said the company remains on track to launch a beta of a full self-driving feature by the end of the year, despite the recent departure of Andrej Karpathy, a key member of Tesla’s autonomous technology team and senior director of artificial intelligence. . Reuters contributed to this post
