Tesla’s $16 Million Profit

Tesla’s Q1 2020 earnings call was Wednesday. By all accounts, the company crushed it. They turned a $16 million profit, which Car and Driver marks as the first time the company has ever turned a profit in Q1.

The Tesla roller coaster ride has been and up and down for years. The nadir was perhaps when short-sellers baited Elon Musk into tweeting that he would take the company private. That tweet violated all sorts of SEC guidelines and was a bit of a PR disaster. Around the same time, the company periodically came within months or even weeks of bankruptcy.

Flash forward a few years and today Tesla is back on top as the America’s most valuable (and most profitable) care company.

Keep in mind, of course, that by just about any other metric — revenue, units, employees — GM and Ford are an orders of magnitude bigger than Tesla.

But Wall Street seems to think Tesla’s small profit in the present is a prelude to much bigger profits in the future.