The Tesla, Inc. Q1 2024 earnings call was fascinating in how Tesla representatives drew on carefully phrased statements to appease and turn around what was then a largely disgruntled shareholder group. The revisionist language within the earnings call took coexisting, diverse, and sometimes sharply clashing accounts of Tesla’s recent financial performance and, somehow, recreated them into new and appealing promises.
Let’s look at some of the language choices Elon Musk used this week during the earnings call to determine a bit more fully why and how so many people in the Tesla network have been pacified.“We navigated several unforeseen challenges…”in the shareholder letter and included the Red Sea conflict, the arson attack at Gigafactory Berlin, and the gradual ramp of the updated Model 3 in Fremont.
This interesting revisionist language choice, when considered reflectively, means that in a logical sense difference is disregarded and, as a result, equivalences emerge illogically. It’s athat Tesla’s vehicle fleet did not grow nearly as much as the number of Superchargers, service vehicles, and Tesla locations did.