A day after being chastised by large sections of the media for his eccentric behavior at the company’s latest earnings call, Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk acknowledged that it was ‘foolish’ of him to ignore serious questions about the company’s financials from Wall Street analysts during the event. “I should have answered their questions, live”, Musk tweeted Friday.
True. And once they were on the call, I should have answered their questions live. It was foolish of me to ignore them.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 4, 2018
However, far from being apologetic for his boorish behavior, the belligerent billionaire followed up his apparent admission of folly by firing off a bunch of retaliatory tweets as part of a long and often cringe-worthy tweetstorm, calling those questions ‘dry’, ‘absurd’ and ‘boneheaded’, among other colorful adjectives. He also dismissed as ‘sell-side analysts’ the attendees who were questioning him about the losses that have been piling up at Tesla over the years.
The reason the Bernstein question about CapEx was boneheaded was that it had already been answered in the headline of the Q1 newsletter he received beforehand, along with details in the body of the letter
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 4, 2018
Meanwhile, even as Musk tries to fend off allegations of eccentric behavior during Tesla’s latest earnings call, a new report from Bloomberg now suggests that his actions at the event might not have been an isolated incident after all. According to the report, Musk last month abruptly hung up on NTSB chairman Robert Sumwalt, after the latter had called him to say that Tesla representatives were being kicked off the investigations into the fatal Model X crash that killed 38-year-old Apple engineer, Walter Huang, in March.
Tesla on April 11 had issued a statement saying that it ‘withdrew’ from the crash probe, only to be corrected the flowing day by the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), which released its own statement revealing that the company had actually been removed from the investigations by the agency.
