Tesla reports earnings after the bell Wednesday

Electric vehicle maker Tesla plans to report fourth-quarter results after market close on Wednesday.

Here’s what analysts were expecting as of Wednesday morning, according to Refinitiv:

• Earnings (adjusted): $1.13 per share
• Revenue: $24.16 billion

In the year-ago quarter, Tesla reported revenue of $17.72 billion and adjusted earnings of $2.52 per share.

Earlier this month, Tesla reported vehicle delivery and production numbers for the fourth quarter of 2022 that set a new record for the company, but fell shy of the company’s goals and analysts’ expectations, despite having cut prices on its cars in December to spur customers to take deliveries before the year’s end.

Tesla reported 405,278 vehicle deliveries and production of 439,701 vehicles in the period ending December 31, 2022. Full year deliveries amounted to around 1.31 million, a record for Tesla, after the company started production at its new factories in Austin, Texas, and Brandenburg, Germany.

Last year, Musk said the factories were akin to “money-burning furnaces” in an interview with an owners’ club posted to YouTube in June.

So far in 2023, Tesla has continued to cut prices on its cars around the world, upsetting customers in the US and China who recently bought new Teslas at higher prices, and triggering an instant decline in used Tesla prices in the US as well.

Tesla solicits questions ahead of their earnings calls via a site called Say.com from both retail and institutional investors.

Among other things, investors on that site say they want to know what the recent price cuts will do to Tesla’s automotive gross margins, how much the company expects to grow sales of its cars in 2023, and when Tesla plans to start mass production and deliveries of its long-delayed, sci-fi inspired, pickup truck the Cybertruck.

Throughout the fourth quarter of 2022, shareholders also sought answers from Tesla and Elon Musk about his intentions at the automaker as the price of Tesla shares declined. Tesla’s share price has dropped more than 40% over the past six months. 

Musk is currently splitting his time, attention and resources between Tesla, SpaceX, the defense contractor where he is CEO, and Twitter, the social media business he recently acquired.

The celebrity CEO sold billions of dollars worth of his Tesla holdings last year, including $3.6 billion in the fourth quarter, in part to finance the Twitter deal, which closed in late October 2022. He immediately appointed himself “Chief Twit,” and CEO there.

Since taking over Twitter, he has made sweeping changes to the business and the service, including allowing people who had been permanently suspended from the platform to come back online.

Musk’s moves at Twitter, and his political statements on the social media platform, have correlated with a sharp decline in Musk’s and Tesla’s reputation, especially among liberal- to very liberal-leaning people in the US, according to research by YouGov shared with CNBC.

This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.