Elon, on the Record

Tesla reported a record quarterly profit this evening, and CEO Elon Musk sounded as confident as ever about Tesla's continued success in the increasingly crowded electric vehicle market. On a conference call with investors tonight, he said: "I'd say more likely than not, that in 2022, Model Y is the best-selling car or truck of any kind in the world." The Model Y is Tesla's mid-priced crossover vehicle released last year. It starts at about $51,000.

Here are more highlights from Musk, which I pulled from Sentieo's transcript of tonight's earnings call: 

On autonomous driving: 

Full self-driving continues to make great progress. But there's definitely one of the -- I think one of the hardest technical problems that exists, that's maybe ever existed. And really, in order to solve it, we basically need to solve a pretty significant part of artificial intelligence, specifically real-world artificial intelligence. And that sort of AI needs be compressed into a fairly small computer -- a very efficient computer that was designed, but nonetheless, a small computer that's using on the order of 70 or 80 watts. So this is a much harder problem than if you were had say 10,000 computers in a server room or something like that.

But it is a hard problem because we are actually solving something quite fundamental about artificial intelligence, where we basically have to solve real-world vision AI ...  So it's really quite tricky, but I am highly confident that we will get this done. 

On supply chain issues: 

So Q1 ... had some of the most difficult supply chain challenges that we've ever experienced in Tesla and same difficulties with supply chain parts -- over the whole range of parts. Obviously, people have heard about the chip shortage. This is a huge problem. But then in addition to that example, we had quite a difficulty scaling production in China because we're unable to get critical engineers there because of Covid quarantine restrictions. 

On finding new business opportunities: 

Right now, people think of Tesla as a car company or energy company. I think long term, people will think of Tesla as much as an AI robotics company as we are a car company or an energy company. I think we are developing one of the strongest hardware and software AI teams in the world. ... Look at the evolution of what technologies we developed. we developed them in order to solve the problem of self-driving ...The software out there was really quite primitive for this task. And so we built the team from scratch and have been developing what we think is probably the most advanced real-world AI in the world. ...  So a long story. But I think, yes, probably others will want to use it too, and we will make it available.

On Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies: 

So as I noted in our opening remarks, we've announced Tesla did invest $1.5 billion into Bitcoin in Q1, and then we subsequently sold a 10% stake in that. ... 

We're certainly watching it very closely at Tesla, watching how the market develops, listening to what our customers are saying. But thinking about it from a corporate treasury perspective, we've been quite pleased with how much liquidity there is in the Bitcoin market. So our ability to build our first position happened quickly. When we did the sale later in March, we also were able to execute on that very quickly. And so as we think about kind of global liquidity for the business in risk management, being able to get cash in and out of the market is something that I think is exceptionally important for us. So we do believe long term in the value of Bitcoin. 

Despite posting impressive numbers, Tesla's stock was down 2% in late-trading tonight. Barron's Al Root has more on the earnings report here.