Month: April 2020

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.

Autonomous Dozers

I have a three year-old boy who, like most three year-old boys everywhere, is in love with construction equipment. He’ll watch construction sites for hours. He can’t even put on his own socks, but he can distinguish between a dozer, a digger, a front-loader, a crane, and a backhoe.

I stumbled across this writeup of Built Robotics, a San Francisco-based construction equipment maker. Their homepage features a rotating model (I think it’s a model?) of an autonomous dozer. I have to get one of those for my kid.

It’s interesting that their autonomous dozers feature cabs, although the video on their website shows an operator on foot controlling driver-less equipment via iPad.

Anyhow, pretty cool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYj2JqL1dJM