Alert – Elon Musk ‘acted like a little baby’ during Tesla’s terrible earnings call and ‘blamed high interest rates’ as profits fell to $1.85 billion, sending shares tumbling 15%

Elon Musk was ‘close to tears’ as he struggled to defend Tesla’s crashing profits to angry investors, prompting analysts to ask ‘is the story over?’

The backlash has been growing since the world’s richest man blamed interest rates for a 44 percent drop in net profits at a ‘terrible’ earnings call with shareholders on Wednesday.

Shares of the stock have slumped 15 percent in their worst week of the year after tycoon admitted ‘we dug our own grave’ with their long-delayed fully electric ‘Cybertruck’.

But it was his lack of ideas that angered investors long accustomed to allowing the tech visionary the benefit of the doubt.

‘For a leader to cry about the economy rather than funneling that and coming up with a plan is pathetic,’ YouTuber Kevin Paffrath told Yahoo Finance.

‘We need to know the light is at the end of the tunnel rather than hearing a complaining CEO who’s not actually providing that path.’

The famously emotional billionaire ‘acted like a little baby’, according to Paffrath, blaming rising interest rates for delays to the planned $10 billion Mexican gigafactory which will churn out batteries for his fleet of electric vehicles.

And he insisted it was the spiraling prime rate, which has risen from 3.5 to 8.5 percent in the last 18 months, which had crippled demand for his cars.

‘If interest rates remain high or if they go even higher, it’s that much harder for people to buy the car,’ he told his audience.

‘They simply can’t afford it.’

The company’s share of the electric vehicle market has slumped from 60 to 50 per cent in the last six months despite slashing prices by a quarter, with the cost of a Model Y sport-utility vehicle, now starting at $44,000.

There was more good news for consumers as Musk’s new CFO Vaibhav Taneja insisted that ‘reducing the cost of our vehicles is our top priority’.

Profits at the company fell to $1.9 billion in the three months to September, down $1.4billion on a year earlier.

Tesla’s year-over-year revenue growth was the weakest since the pandemic hit in the second quarter of 2020, and third-quarter earnings fell 37% to 66 cents per share, the lowest in two years.

In all it reported $23.4 billion in sales for the second quarter, down from analyst forecasts of roughly $24.2 billion.

Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives told businessinsider.com the call was a ‘mini disaster’, with Musk remaining silent about his company’s progress in developing its long promised autonomous vehicles.

‘We heard from a much more cautious Musk who focused on higher interest rates, AI investments, and highlighting the difficult path for Cybertruck production over the next 12 to 18 months,’ he added.

Musk has penciled in November 30 as the launch date for the Cybertruck but its price and final specifications are still a mystery.

It is four years since he showed off the prototype during an embarrassing launch event at which its ‘shatterproof’ window broke.

He has described it as a vehicle that will ‘change the look of the roads’, with ‘better utility than a truck with more performance than a sports car’.

But he told investors on Wednesday that it will be up to 18 months before it becomes a ‘positive cash flow contributor’.

‘Demand is off the charts,’ he insisted.

‘We have over one million people who have reserved the car, so it’s not a demand issue, but we have to make it, and we need to make it a price that people can afford, insanely difficult things.’

‘The blood, sweat and tears that will be required to achieve that is just staggering.’

He promised to further ‘invest significantly in AI development,’ but there was no repeat of his boasts about its ‘potential to make Tesla the most valuable company in the world by far’ with ‘fully autonomous cars at scale and fully autonomous humanoid robots’.

Shares in the company remain 96 per cent up on the start of 2023 but the company’s long honeymoon with market makers may be coming to an end.

‘No more rose-colored glasses,’ Wells Fargo analyst Colin Langan wrote in a note to investors.

‘How can we defend a ‘growth’ stock that appears ready to enter its 2nd consecutive year of earnings decline?’ asked Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas.

‘Five percent auto revenue growth, collapsing margins and trading at 200x FCF,’ concluded Toni Sacconaghi of Bernstein.

‘Is the story broken?’