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On Jan. 30, 2019, Elon Musk launched one of his more unheralded innovations in the business world: He began Tesla’s (TSLA) earnings conference call with questions from retail investors.
On Tuesday, Reddit (RDDT), whose message boards helped fuel the 2021 meme stock rally, will report its first quarterly results since going public and launch its own innovation of a sort, taking questions from the investing public that will be posted, but where else, on Reddit.
Since Tesla’s call back in 2019, we’ve seen several companies take a different approach to explaining their results.
Robinhood (HOOD), to no one’s surprise, has been at the forefront of remaking these quarterly updates, beginning their own calls with questions from retail investors. The company will report its latest quarterly results on Wednesday.
In 2021, Robinhood also acquired Say Technologies, the company behind say.com, the service that powered shareholder-submitted calls for Tesla back in 2019.
Coinbase (COIN), which, like Robinhood, made its public market debut in 2021 with a focus on its retail users and investors, began its call last week with questions from shareholders.
And AMC (AMC), one of the most prominent companies in the meme stock craze, mixes in several questions from shareholders during its quarterly call. Its meme stock counterpart GameStop (GME), for its part, hasn’t taken questions from analysts or shareholders following quarterly results since December 2020.
And taking questions from investors isn’t the only way conference calls have changed through the years.
Years before Tesla’s move to bring in shareholder questions, Netflix (NFLX) began its own innovation in the space, tasking a single analyst or IR exec with hosting what it calls an “earnings interview.” The company continues the practice today.
This past weekend, many investors spent hours listening to Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A, BRK-B) CEO Warren Buffett hold court with shareholders inside a basketball arena in Omaha, Neb. Berkshire has never hosted quarterly earnings calls.
Over the years, the rules have considerably changed regarding how analysts can interact with company management and how companies communicate with the investing public.
In short, more people have more information, and fewer people know anything special.
Corporate communications has boomed. Sell-side research has dwindled. And the research arms of financial firms now resemble media companies, complete with newsletters, podcasts, and their own personalities.
When Musk took his first question from shareholders, the appeal was immediately apparent.
According to a transcript from S&P Global Market Intelligence, the first question was about “service,” which Musk had already addressed “at length,” according to Tesla’s IR head Martin Viecha.
The next question resembled much of the fare executives are accustomed to responding to from Wall Street analysts — “How are you feeling about demand right now across the product line?”
In the five years since this call, the rise of the retail investor and the “meme stock” movement has continued to reshape this quarterly ritual. And Musk, for his part, has turned holding a colorful earnings call into an art form.
Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that at the end of Tesla’s earnings call last month Viecha announced that it would be his last.
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