Elon Musk’s apology meant more than Tesla’s Q2 report

Investors seemed ready to
cheer on Tesla CEO Elon Musk again after he apologized to an
analyst on Wednesday.
AP

• Investors bid up Tesla’s stock Wednesday after the
  company reported its second-quarter results.
• At least on the surface, there didn’t seem to be much
  to cheer, given the company’s large loss and big cash
  outflow.
• But CEO Elon Musk apologized to an analyst on the
  company’s earnings call, and investors seemed to lap that
  up.
• The move seemed to restore the faith of investors and
  fans in Musk — and faith is what Tesla lives on.

All seems to be well again with the Elon Musk personality cult.

Tesla’s stock is soaring once more. And all it seemed to take was

an apology from Musk.

Tesla shares were up a bit after the company reported its
second-quarter results, but they really took off after Musk
apologized to the analyst Toni Sacconaghi at the start of Tesla’s
conference call. That seemed to assure investors and fans alike
that Musk was sane, stable, and back in charge.

“There’s no excuse for bad manners, and I was kind of violating
my own rule in that regard,”
Musk said, blaming lack of sleep and 120-hour workweeks for
dismissing a question of Sacconaghi’s during a previous call.

Since Musk took over control of Tesla, the company’s success has
relied in large part on investors’ and customers’ faith in him.
They’ve been able to overlook all kinds of things that would have
sunk just about any other tech company — the massive ongoing
losses, the recurring need to return to the capital markets to
raise more capital, the repeated production problems and
shortfalls — just because of their belief in Musk.

But that faith seemed to be shaken in recent months. Even as
Tesla was struggling to ramp up production of its Model 3
vehicle, Musk was acting more and more erratically. He lashed out
at Sacconaghi and another financial analyst,
journalists — including my colleague Linette Lopez — a

whistleblower, and
even a cave diver who helped rescue trapped children in
Thailand.

When some might rightly have expected him to be focused on fixing
the bottlenecks at his factory, he
vowed to help out with that cave rescue as well as
to help solve the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

Amid growing concern about Musk’s behavior and the ability of
Tesla to ramp up production of the Model 3 …

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