- Elon Musk bemoaned the downsides of running a public company in an X Spaces livestream Thursday.
- "There's immense pressure… to not have a bad quarter," he told ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood.
Elon Musk sounded off on public companies Thursday, saying that as Tesla CEO he has to prioritize meeting shareholders' short-term expectations above anything else.
"There's immense pressure on a public company to not have a bad quarter," he told ARK Invest CEO on an X Spaces livestream. "This can actually result in a less efficient operation where you're going to great lengths at the end of the quarter not to disappoint people."
"We feel like we have a sort of moral obligation not to have a bad quarter and disappoint people… I've lost count of how many times I was delivering cars until midnight on New Year's Eve, personally," Musk added.
Tesla's share price dipped after each of the three quarterly earnings reports it released this year, with investors spooked by signs the EV maker's ongoing price war has chipped away at its profit margins.
The stock is up 107% year-to-date despite those so-so results, with the AI frenzy and hopes of a Federal Reserve pivot on interest rates powering its gains.
Musk, who took the social media site then known as Twitter private in a $44 billion deal last October, has been flagging the downsides of running a public company for over a decade.
In a 2013 email to SpaceX employees, he said that one downside is that publicly traded stocks "go through extreme volatility, both for reasons of internal execution and for reasons that have nothing to do with anything except the economy."
Musk has also repeatedly clashed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates US public markets, since Tesla listed on the Nasdaq back in 2010.
In 2018, he agreed to pay a $20 million fine and allow a company lawyer to sign off on his social media posts to settle the financial watchdog's complaint about a now-infamous tweet where he said he'd secured the funding necessary to take Tesla back into private ownership.
Musk did acknowledge that there are some benefits to public companies Thursday, saying that listing Tesla on a stock exchange had "allowed us to clean up our capital structure" and enabled the company to better incentivize its employees by granting them stock options.
In the 1 hour, 40-minute livestream with ARK's Wood he also discussed his role in founding OpenAI, mapped out a roadmap for X becoming a financial platform, and shared his vision for xAI's chatbot, Grok.