Detroit voted overwhelmingly for Vice President Kamala Harris, but investors in “Detroit” backed President-elect Donald Trump. Shares in General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. jumped on news of Trump’s election win, with GM reaching a new high for the year and Ford up by almost 6% on Wednesday, more than double the S&P 500 Index’s gain.
If Elon Musk sold plug-in hybrid vehicles, he surely wouldn’t call them plug-in hybrid vehicles, or PHEVs, or anything else that sounds coined by an engineer. Far too clunky. Surely “Cyborgtruck” would offer a more futuristic spin on these marriages of gasoline and batteries?
Big Tech is going nuclear in its pursuit of artificial intelligence. Power-hungry datacenters are just one part of a broader freak-out over how the US grid will handle even bigger loads including electric vehicles and re-shored factories, plus withstand extreme weather, all while decarbonizing at a reasonable cost.
The key moment during the Tesla Inc. robotaxi event Thursday night came when a member of the audience interrupted Chief Executive Elon Musk’s spiel about the benefits of autonomous vehicles. He had just opined about Airbnb-like fleets of money-earning robotaxis that you could care for like a shepherd tends their flock — stirring stuff, this — presaging “a glorious future” when someone shouted: “When will they be available?”
Guys, you were so close. If it wasn’t for that last little bounce of Wall Street optimism on the last day of September, Tesla Inc.’s latest sales figure would have beaten estimates — just.
Gold is what you buy when everything isn’t goldilocks. Inflation, deflation, war, pestilence — gold is a certain anxious state of mind made tangible in a seductive but mostly useless metal. In a weird spin, gold has been enjoying a goldilocks period itself, hitting a new record last week. More that that, it seems almost immune to things that would usually drag it down.
Jay Powell: Federal Reserve Chair, soft-landing pilot … car dealer extraordinaire?
The new thing in electricity is datacenters. The new new thing is … coal?
“Fracking” is an expletive in environmental circles. Yet the spirit of shale is creeping into a business with transformational potential for the energy transition. Schlumberger NV, the industrial giant best known for sucking oil and gas from shale, the seabed (and other places besides), this week announced a breakthrough in direct lithium extraction, or DLE.
The all-in view of Tesla Inc. was summed up in a line from a report this summer by one of the more all-in analysts covering the company: “The car is to Tesla what the video game chip is to Nvidia.
Labor Day weekend, marking the end of the US summer driving season, is typically the year’s last hurrah for gasoline producers. This year, the high-fives were reserved for drivers (and White House occupants): The average pre-long weekend pump price was down 13% from last year after gasoline refining margins collapsed in August. Pump prices have eased further this week.
California wants some insurance against pump prices. But in proposing that oil companies there hold a minimum stockpile of fuels, the state is also, and less obviously, seeking insurance against the complications of its own energy policies. In seeking to kill off gasoline demand but ensure suppliers stay engaged for years to come, the state is confronting one of the central challenges of the energy transition.
Earlier this year, around the time Nvidia Corp.’s market cap eclipsed that of the entire S&P 500 energy sector, I wrote about whether oil and gas stocks might offer a decent hedge when AI-fever breaks. The past several weeks have offered a test.
A fifth of Americans are on the hook for an 833% jump in the cost to ensure the lights stay on. The folks being paid that premium, mostly electricity generators in this instance, face that most welcome of problems: What to do with a windfall.
Tesla Inc. is, according to its promoters — very much including Chief Executive Elon Musk — an artificial intelligence giant trapped in a carmaker’s body. That much was evident from quarterly sales and production numbers, and the market’s reaction to them, on Tuesday morning.
It’s a tough gig portraying the world’s third-richest person as a victim, but Tesla Inc.’s board of directors are giving it a go.The question is whether the company’s institutional shareholders will be intimidated into buying that story at a pivotal vote on June 13.
The US is somehow home to the most valuable electric vehicle producer in the world and, simultaneously, an also-ran in the race for EVs. How did that happen?
Artificial intelligence is shining its aura on one of the most benighted corners of the stock-market. While two AI hardware firms top the S&P 500 leaderboard so far this year — Super Micro Computer Inc. and Nvidia Corp. — a close third is Constellation Energy Corp...
How bad is 2024 going so far for Tesla Inc.? Well, its stock is down more than Boeing Co., making it the worst performer in the S&P 500 Index.
The fervor for all things AI has finally spread to a sector whose own heady start-up phase came about 160 years ago: Pipelines.
Not to say Warren Buffett’s folksy observation this weekend on the US oil business is incorrect, but it gets something awfully incorrect...
Tesla Inc. is a car manufacturer that pitches itself, very successfully, as a technology hothouse. So perhaps it will take the most tech-like step possible in 2024: Announce a big stock buyback.
May 17, 1995, a Wednesday, was a historic day for energy stocks. Not that they acted that way: Like the oil price — about $20 a barrel — they were flat. The action was elsewhere: Technology stocks overtook the energy sector’s weighting in the S&P 500 for the first time that day.
Natural gas used to sell itself. Emitting less nasties than coal, including carbon dioxide, plus being cheap and homegrown, it was once hailed by former President Barack Obama as a “bridge fuel.”
The energy transition requires subsidies, policy support and technological progress. Above all, though, it needs people to literally buy into it, and nothing exemplifies that better than electric vehicles.
Henceforth, no company should ever say they are experiencing a slowdown. Tesla Inc. has redefined this experience as being “between two major growth waves.”
Denied the dubious spectacle of a cage match between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the world may yet be treated to a contest pitting the Tesla chief executive against an underdog from Indiana.
Stock buybacks are the perfect target for the United Auto Workers. The freest of free cash flow, they may as well be a billboard saying: “So many dollars, we don’t know what to do with them!”
This week saw the release of another ode to the genius of Elon Musk, gushingly accepting his pronouncements at face value. Also, Walter Isaacson published a book about him.
Tesla Inc.’s latest results gave bulls a lot of what they wanted: An earnings beat, tantalizing shots of the Cybertruck, and an “internal projection of Dojo compute power,” referring to the in-house supercomputer.
Price cuts work — but only up to a point. This is about all one can glean from Tesla Inc.’s latest quarterly sales numbers, announced Sunday. The struggle between growth and margins, which defined the first half of 2023, has yet to be resolved.
The bankruptcy of Lordstown Motors Corp. is, in one sense, almost numbingly straightforward: Five years into existence, and having burned through more than $1 billion, it had delivered a sum total of six electric pickups.
Oil prices were, understandably, unmoved. In terms of barrels flowing and who runs Russia, nothing had changed. And the oil market is used to drama, even drama of what might be called Wagnerian proportions.
It pays to parse the language of any company’s earnings report, but perhaps more so for Tesla Inc. You could say it’s in the corporate genes.
Tesla investors begin the new year trying to escape the shadow of 2022, when more than $670 billion of value was wiped out.
Just two months ago, Elon Musk speculated that Tesla Inc. would eventually be worth twice as much as Saudi Arabian Oil Co. — AKA Saudi Aramco, AKA the biggest listed company in the world with a market capitalization (then) of $2.1 trillion.
President Joe Biden’s administration outlined a new rule in October whereby the Department of Energy could buy oil for future delivery — most likely 2024 — at fixed prices to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Ever since Elon Musk launched his takeover of Twitter Inc., fans of Tesla Inc. have worried about the genius getting distracted. And during the new Twitter’s first six weeks — has it only been that long? — Musk has certainly come across a bit distracted. Addled, even.
Once again, we are on the cusp of a nuclear renaissance. Actually realizing one requires something nuclear power isn’t known for: Speed.
In between dabbling in geopolitics and buying-rejecting-no-really-buying Twitter, Elon Musk runs a car company.
It’s October and we’ve avoided slipping into a third world war for almost eight months, so we have that going for us.
The phrase “$10 gas” is liable to put Americans in the hospital.
Six of the largest Western oil producers — BP Plc, Chevron Corp., ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil Corp., Shell Plc and TotalEnergies SE — are expected to generate free cash flow, after capital expenditure, of $163 billion this year.
You might think that the IPO of electric-truck wunderkind Rivian Automotive Inc. — with its valuation soaring past $100 billion on zero revenue — perfectly captured the madness in autos in 2021.
It’s been one year since the bombshell announcement of positive test results for Pfizer Inc.’s Covid-19 vaccine jolted stocks higher. Since that day, no sector has soared faster than energy.
The first car I ever owned was electric. I had driven many regular rentals up to that point. But having lived most of my life in London and then New York, owning never appealed; both cities offered cheaper forms of masochism (I’m told).
There is a strong case to be made that such dividends in such an inherently volatile business as oil is asking for trouble.
