Tesla, Meta, IBM: 3 earnings call shout-outs that left us thinking

Earnings season is in full swing, and Big Tech calls are about more than the heavy use of “superintelligence,” which some read as a bid to please the White House after it reportedly disliked the term “artificial intelligence.”

Here are three moments from the earnings calls of Tesla (TSLA), Meta (META), and IBM (IBM) on late Wednesday that stuck with us.

Tesla

Much of the focus today is on Tesla cutting its capital spending plans for this year to $20 billion from the $25 billion it guided to three months ago. A key factor appears to be that its Optimus robots need more training before they’re released into the real world.

Elon Musk said investors should think of Optimus as a baby:

“A big difference with Optimus versus the cars is we don’t have this vast fleet of cars from which we can gather training data. With Optimus, we have to bootstrap it by making the robots and having them do self-play, which is really how a human learns to navigate the world. You can see this when you have a toddler, and they grow up, and initially, they’re sort of wobbly, and they don’t know how to do things. Eventually they learn to wipe their own ass, which is a big milestone. As anyone who’s had kids knows. Then they learn to read and do all sorts of things and be able to do these things. They learn this by playing. We actually need Optimus to play at scale in order to have it be really good at tasks in the real world.”

Meta

Are early users of Meta’s (META) Muse AI agent overspending? Mark Zuckerberg’s comments on credit limits during the earnings call suggest they might be.

That raises a bigger question: Could AI agent shopping end badly for retailers and banks, in the form of unpaid debts and write-offs?

“The most common use case for Muse is shopping, with more than a quarter of people who are using Muse engaging in this with an average purchase size of over $200,” Zuckerberg said on the call. “Plaid told us that they hadn’t seen activity like they’re seeing with their connector on any other service before. In the first week, we had to work with Stripe to raise credit limits since the volumes were above what any of us expected.”

IBM

IBM (IBM) CEO Arvind Krishna seemed to be in a better place this earnings call compared to three months ago, which came on the heels of a shock earnings warning that sent the stock reeling.

It was interesting to hear Krishna call out some C-suite concerns about the current spending on AI tools:

“I think what we are seeing is that at least larger enterprises are becoming a lot more cognizant and a lot more aware of what is the true ROI of all of their AI spend. They are also getting worried if some of the AI spending completely out of control with no real return. But the way I have always characterized it is, there is no question to us, and this is the advice I give every C-suite member that I meet, that what we are trying to give people on AI, the productivity, the advantages of AI, the way it is going to change work, is very real. Let me not make any confusion around that.”

Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance’s Executive Editor, host of the Sozzi Unleashed morning show and the Power Players with Brian Sozzi podcast, and a member of Yahoo Finance’s editorial leadership team.