Musk goosed Tesla’s stock by leaking Tesla’s estimate unit sales

Whitney Tilson’s email to investors discussing Anton Wahlman on Tesla’s estimate unit sales for Q3.

Musk goosed Tesla’s stock last week by leaking that he hoped the company would book sales of over 100,000 cars in Q3.

Get Our Activist Investing Case Study!

Get The Full Activist Investing Study In PDF

Q2 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc

I asked Anton Wahlman for his thoughts on this and he replied:

My 97,000 estimate from a long time ago looks like it will end up fairly close to the end result, as it looks like 101,000 in total for the company (all models, all geographies).

In Q3 Tesla benefitted from initial Model 3 sell-in quantities to right-hand-drive markets (UK, Australia, New Zealand, etc.) as well as the EV incentive from the Netherlands being reduced after December 31, so those sales will likely decline by as much as 99% come January 1. It's hard to tell when the market will discount these phenomena, if at all – or if nothing gets discounted until each situation is reported, after the fact, cold turkey.

The stock could advance if the company prints any tiniest amount over what they did last quarter (95,400 units), but keep in mind that margins/profitability is a different matter altogether. It could retreat (materially) if the bottom line is no good, but we won't know this until 3-4 weeks thereafter. And who knows what we’ll find in the 10-Q, which usually comes out five days after the financial report.

Here’s my breakdown of estimate unit sales by month, model, and country:

And for the Model 3 alone, here is the breakdown (real and estimated numbers):