Here are the takeaways from today’s Morning Brief, which you can register to receive every morning in your mailbox accompanied by:
Sound the alarm: We’re about to get a post-results Elon Musk sighting.
The annual Milken Conference, held at the Beverly Hills Hilton, is the media’s version of the Oscars. It’s fancy, expensive (no goody bags given to us commoners – we couldn’t accept them anyway!) and it’s busy. You never know who you’ll meet at the patio coffee bar. And you end up leaving with more knowledge about something than when you arrived.
This year’s conference promises to be true to its origins.
Former President Bill Clinton is on the speaker list and will likely have a few choice words about the upcoming presidential election. Sports greats Magic Johnson and Alex Rodriguez participate in panel discussions, as does investing titan Ken Griffin of Citadel.
Your Yahoo Finance team, Akiko Fujita, and Yasmin Khorram will be there, reporting live early from inside the hotel. Our coverage begins at 9:00 a.m. ET on Yahoo Finance, featuring a host of interviews with big names moving the market.
Of all the actions we’ll be taking part in, it’s probably Musk’s entry into this star-studded program that will intrigue us the most. The CEO of Tesla (TSLA) will be speaking at 5:00 p.m. PT Monday with the famous (and conference host) Michael Milken.
Musk is a very busy guy, to say the least, and isn’t exactly a regular on the annual conference scene. He notoriously hates the World Economic Forum in Davos, for example.
So I suspect he comes armed with a few items to get his chest off his chest, as he should.
While Tesla’s stock is up 22% since its late April earnings report on hopes of a potential cheap electric vehicle, the flow of information beyond those numbers has been terrible.
The company is in complete layoff mode (although it wants to expand with a new electric vehicle, AI and robots…), laying off its HR manager and its entire Supercharger department – despite the impact on partners such as General Motors (GM). The much-delayed Cybertruck has been subject to a major recall.
Tesla seems more in chaos mode than ridicule mode – and the Street would generally agree.
“We believe our concerns about the earnings trajectory remain well-founded, based on Tesla’s new pragmatic approach to new models raising difficult questions and creating considerable execution risk while leaving upside potential limited volumes,” said Emmanuel Rosner, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, in a client note.
Here’s a list of points Musk needs to discuss — and be clear about — to justify the stock rally, in this participant’s opinion. Whether he does that, who knows? The room is full of great thinkers, and he can wax poetic about life on Mars or evil robots that might…
