Author: azeeadmin

Tesla’s relationship with bitcoin is not a dalliance, according to the comments made by the company’s CFO and dubbed “master of coin” Zach Kirkhorn during an earnings call Monday. Instead, the company believes in the longevity of bitcoin, despite its volatility.

Tesla invested $1.5 billion in bitcoin this quarter and then trimmed its position by 10%, Kirkhorn said during the company quarterly earnings call. That sale made a $101 million “positive impact” to the company’s profitability in the first quarter, he added. Tesla also allows customers to make vehicle deposits and final vehicle purchases using bitcoin. 

Tesla turned to bitcoin as a place to store cash and still access it immediately, all while providing a better return on investment than more traditional central bank-backed safe havens. Of course, the higher yields provided by the volatile digital currency comes with higher risk.

Tesla bucks the trend of the more cautionary Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell who noted back in March at virtual summit hosted by the Bank for International Settlements that the Fed considers crypto speculative assets that are highly volatile and therefore not useful stores of value. That matters because the basic function of currency is its ability to store value. He also noted that digital currencies are not backed by anything and compared it to gold and not the dollar.

From Kirkhorn:

Elon and I were looking for a place to store cash that wasn’t being immediately used, try to get some level of return on this, but also preserve liquidity, you know, particularly as we look forward to the launch of Austin and Berlin and uncertainty that’s happening with semiconductors and port capacity, being able to access our cash very quickly is super important to us right now.

And, you know, there aren’t many traditional opportunities to do this or at least that we found and and talking to others that we could get good feedback on, particularly with yields being so low and without taking on additional risk or sacrificing liquidity. Bitcoin seemed at the time, and so far has proven to be a good decision, a good place to place some of our cash that’s not immediately being used for daily operations or maybe not needed till the end of the year, and be able to get some return on that.

Tesla is watching the digital currency closely, Kirkhorn said, noting that there is a lot of reason to be optimistic.

“You know, thinking about it from a corporate treasury perspective, we’ve been quite pleased with how much liquidity there is in the bitcoin market,” he said. “Our ability to build our first position happened very 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.”

While Tesla did trim its position in March, Kirkhorn added that the company’s intent is to hold what it has long term and to continue to accumulate bitcoin from transactions from its customers as they purchase vehicles. Musk, who also goes by Technoking, announced in March that Tesla would accept bitcoin as a form of payment in the United States.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk wants to turn every home into a distributed power plant that would generate, store and even deliver energy back into the electricity grid, all using the company’s products.

While the company has been selling solar and energy storage products for years, a new company policy to only sell solar coupled with the energy storage products, along with Musk’s comments Monday, reveal a strategy that aims to scale these businesses by appealing to utilities.

“This is a prosperous future both for Tesla and for the utilities,” he said. “If this is not done, the utilities will fail to serve their customers. They won’t be able to do it,” Musk said during an investor call, noting the rolling blackouts in California last summer and the more recent grid failure in Texas as evidence that grid reliability has become a bigger concern.

Last week, the company changed its website to prevent customers from only buying solar or its Powerwall energy storage product and instead required purchasing a system. Musk later announced the move in a tweet, stating “solar power will feed exclusively to Powerwall” and that “Powerwall will interface only between utility meter and house main breaker panel, enabling super simple install and seamless whole house backup during utility dropouts.”

Musk’s pitch is that the grid would need more power lines, more power plants and larger substations to fully decarbonization using renewables plus storage. Distributed residential systems — of course using Tesla products — would provide a better path, in Musk’s view. His claim has been backed up in part by recent studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which found that the U.S. can reach a zero-carbon grid by more than doubling its transmission capacity, and another from Princeton University showing that the country may need to triple its transmission systems by 2050 to reach net-zero emissions.

Musk is imagining a radically different electricity grid system than the one we have today, which is centrally controlled and run by grid operators, independent organizations such as the California Independent System Operator or the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. It’s a vision that is riddled with bureaucratic and logistical challenges. Utilities and regulatory policy would need to solve how to handle a large influx of so-called “distributed energy resources,” such as solar panels on residential roofs, which may run contrary to utilities’ long-established business models.

It’s important to note that whether renewables-plus-storage will be alone sufficient to decarbonize the energy grid is a contentious question. Many experts believing that the land use demands, storage requirements and intermittency issues of renewables may make their role as the country’s primary electricity generator a pipe dream. But Musk has long been bullish on the renewables-plus-storage model, tweeting last July that “physics favors electric transport, batteries for stationary storage & solar/wind for energy generation.”

Apple’s latest software upgrade brings a big change, Roku accuses Google of anti-competitive behavior and Brex raises a big funding round. This is your Daily Crunch for April 26, 2021.

The big story: iOS 14.5 brings privacy changes and more

Apple released the latest version of its mobile operating system today, which includes the much-discussed App Tracking Transparency feature, allowing users to control which apps are sharing their data with third parties for ad-targeting purposes.

Other new features include Watch unlocking (which could help users avoid the annoying “I can’t unlock my phone with my masked face!” phenomenon), new emojis and more.

The tech giants

Roku alleges Google is using its monopoly power in YouTube TV carriage negotiations — Roku is alerting its customers that they may lose access to the YouTube TV channel on its platform after negotiations with Google went south.

Lyft sells self-driving unit to Toyota’s Woven Planet for $550M — Under the acquisition agreement, Lyft’s so-called Level 5 division will be folded into Woven Planet Holdings.

Apple commits to 20,000 US jobs, new North Carolina campus — Apple this morning announced a sweeping plan to invest north of $430 billion over the next five years.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Brex raises $425M at a $7.4B valuation, as the corporate spend war rages on — The company has also put together a new service called Brex Premium that costs $49 per month.

Founded by Australia’s national science agency, Main Sequence launches $250M AUD deep tech fund —  Main Sequence’s second fund will look at issues including healthcare accessibility, increasing the world’s food supply, industrial productivity and space.

Mighty Networks raises $50M to build a creator economy for the masses — The company is led by Gina Bianchini, the co-founder and former CEO of Ning.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Founders who don’t properly vet VCs set up both parties for failure — Due diligence isn’t a one-way street, and founders must do their homework to make sure they’re not jumping into deals with VCs who are only paying lip service to their value-add.

How Brex more than doubled its valuation in a year — An interview with CEO Henrique Dubugras about that giant funding round.

There is no cybersecurity skills gap, but CISOs must think creatively — Netskope’s Lamont Orange doesn’t buy the idea that millions of cybersecurity jobs are going unfilled because there aren’t enough qualified candidates.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

How one founder partnered with NASA to make tires puncture-proof and more sustainable — This week’s episode of Found features The SMART Tire Company co-founder and CEO Earl Cole.

What the MasterClass effect means for edtech — MasterClass copycats are raising plenty of funding.

Hear about building AVs under Amazon from Zoox CTO Jesse Levinson at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 — We’ll hear more about Zoox’s mission to develop and deploy autonomous passenger vehicles.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Apple’s latest software upgrade brings a big change, Roku accuses Google of anti-competitive behavior and Brex raises a big funding round. This is your Daily Crunch for April 26, 2021.

The big story: iOS 14.5 brings privacy changes and more

Apple released the latest version of its mobile operating system today, which includes the much-discussed App Tracking Transparency feature, allowing users to control which apps are sharing their data with third parties for ad-targeting purposes.

Other new features include Watch unlocking (which could help users avoid the annoying “I can’t unlock my phone with my masked face!” phenomenon), new emojis and more.

The tech giants

Roku alleges Google is using its monopoly power in YouTube TV carriage negotiations — Roku is alerting its customers that they may lose access to the YouTube TV channel on its platform after negotiations with Google went south.

Lyft sells self-driving unit to Toyota’s Woven Planet for $550M — Under the acquisition agreement, Lyft’s so-called Level 5 division will be folded into Woven Planet Holdings.

Apple commits to 20,000 US jobs, new North Carolina campus — Apple this morning announced a sweeping plan to invest north of $430 billion over the next five years.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Brex raises $425M at a $7.4B valuation, as the corporate spend war rages on — The company has also put together a new service called Brex Premium that costs $49 per month.

Founded by Australia’s national science agency, Main Sequence launches $250M AUD deep tech fund —  Main Sequence’s second fund will look at issues including healthcare accessibility, increasing the world’s food supply, industrial productivity and space.

Mighty Networks raises $50M to build a creator economy for the masses — The company is led by Gina Bianchini, the co-founder and former CEO of Ning.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Founders who don’t properly vet VCs set up both parties for failure — Due diligence isn’t a one-way street, and founders must do their homework to make sure they’re not jumping into deals with VCs who are only paying lip service to their value-add.

How Brex more than doubled its valuation in a year — An interview with CEO Henrique Dubugras about that giant funding round.

There is no cybersecurity skills gap, but CISOs must think creatively — Netskope’s Lamont Orange doesn’t buy the idea that millions of cybersecurity jobs are going unfilled because there aren’t enough qualified candidates.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

How one founder partnered with NASA to make tires puncture-proof and more sustainable — This week’s episode of Found features The SMART Tire Company co-founder and CEO Earl Cole.

What the MasterClass effect means for edtech — MasterClass copycats are raising plenty of funding.

Hear about building AVs under Amazon from Zoox CTO Jesse Levinson at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 — We’ll hear more about Zoox’s mission to develop and deploy autonomous passenger vehicles.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

After a years-long crypto winter, it been the spring of NFTs, but as digital art prices sober up after an explosion in sales, blockchain founders are looking to find more stable opportunities in the space that can grow over time even as speculative interest in NFTs shifts.

One particular interest has been using NFTs to reshape the creator economy in a manner that actually benefits artists more than the platforms that host their work. A new flavor of this pursuit comes from the recently launched S!NG (pronounced sing) which has built a platform around simply letting user upload files to their servers and time-stamp those uploads on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s a dead-simple mechanic with an ambitious framing, ensuring that artists maintain credit for their work as they create it.

The team behind the app sees a future where artists use the platform as an autosave for their intellectual property during the creative process, enabling them to scribble down notes or upload a quick demo and save those moments on the blockchain, a step that they hope can eliminate or expedite rights disputes for creators that can point to a clearly time-stamped breadcrumbs trail. By virtue of the app’s name, it’s clear that they are aiming to attract songwriters and musicians in particular but the company’s onboarding also showcases wider ambition in the creator world, enabling users to designate if they are a photographer, writer or programmer as well.

“You have the best of both worlds with very public witnesses to a very private event,” says CEO Geoff Osler. “Your content is never out there, but you can have this massive attestation to the fact that it exists at a certain point in time.”

The app itself is pretty straightforward. After uploading a piece of media, be it a photo, video, audio or text file, users can tack on additional files, make note of additional collaborators or add notes before submitting it and christening the work on the blockchain. The file itself is private with a hash hosted on the blockchain while the encrypted files are stored on S!NG’s AWS servers, so creators don’t need to worry about their early ideas being served up to a public audience. A concern here for early adopters is what happens if the blockchain startup eventually goes under and those servers go with it, but that’s an issue facing plenty of startups that are backing the underlying media files of NFTs on centralized servers.

Rights disputes might be something more top-of-mind to those who have spent substantial time in their specific creative industry, compared to to budding artists who are likely wholly concerned with getting their work seen in the first place. While public links allow a work’s origins to be tracked down once it’s complete and ready for public consumption, S!NG’s aim is to develop those moments earlier in the development of a work and aid artists who might be involved with more collaborative creative processes where ownership of ideas can appear more obfuscated from a legal standpoint.

“If I get something stolen from me, I’ve got a team that’s going to defend me and they’re probably going to win or settle any claims, but if you’re a 16-year-old kid, you don’t have that ability so that’s what we want to provide, but more as a deterrent,” musician and advisor Raine Maida tells TechCrunch. “I think when you see the S!NG watermark or you see that it’s saved and shared through the wallet.. you don’t have to understand blockchain but you’ll know S!NG is that company that protects you.”

For the time being, non-fungible token-based legal defenses are probably a bit unusual, but the team’s founders believe that blockchain-based ownership proofs will be entering case law organically just as technology like DocuSign has been accepted.

If the company can successfully push creators to weave the S!NG platform into their toolkits, the startup will have plenty of ripe opportunities to capitalize on in the incredibly young blockchain creator space. While many artists may see the NFT space as a speculative cash grab, the company’s founders seem wholly focused on sidestepping hype for the time being and building something that artists can find lasting value in.

“Frankly I don’t give a shit about all of this crazy NFT stuff with things selling for a bazillion dollars,” Osler says. “I’m interested in the small artist who has 1,000 fans who will eagerly pay up $15 to keep that person in business.”

After a years-long crypto winter, it been the spring of NFTs, but as digital art prices sober up after an explosion in sales, blockchain founders are looking to find more stable opportunities in the space that can grow over time even as speculative interest in NFTs shifts.

One particular interest has been using NFTs to reshape the creator economy in a manner that actually benefits artists more than the platforms that host their work. A new flavor of this pursuit comes from the recently launched S!NG (pronounced sing) which has built a platform around simply letting user upload files to their servers and time-stamp those uploads on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s a dead-simple mechanic with an ambitious framing, ensuring that artists maintain credit for their work as they create it.

The team behind the app sees a future where artists use the platform as an autosave for their intellectual property during the creative process, enabling them to scribble down notes or upload a quick demo and save those moments on the blockchain, a step that they hope can eliminate or expedite rights disputes for creators that can point to a clearly time-stamped breadcrumbs trail. By virtue of the app’s name, it’s clear that they are aiming to attract songwriters and musicians in particular but the company’s onboarding also showcases wider ambition in the creator world, enabling users to designate if they are a photographer, writer or programmer as well.

“You have the best of both worlds with very public witnesses to a very private event,” says CEO Geoff Osler. “Your content is never out there, but you can have this massive attestation to the fact that it exists at a certain point in time.”

The app itself is pretty straightforward. After uploading a piece of media, be it a photo, video, audio or text file, users can tack on additional files, make note of additional collaborators or add notes before submitting it and christening the work on the blockchain. The file itself is private with a hash hosted on the blockchain while the encrypted files are stored on S!NG’s AWS servers, so creators don’t need to worry about their early ideas being served up to a public audience. A concern here for early adopters is what happens if the blockchain startup eventually goes under and those servers go with it, but that’s an issue facing plenty of startups that are backing the underlying media files of NFTs on centralized servers.

Rights disputes might be something more top-of-mind to those who have spent substantial time in their specific creative industry, compared to to budding artists who are likely wholly concerned with getting their work seen in the first place. While public links allow a work’s origins to be tracked down once it’s complete and ready for public consumption, S!NG’s aim is to develop those moments earlier in the development of a work and aid artists who might be involved with more collaborative creative processes where ownership of ideas can appear more obfuscated from a legal standpoint.

“If I get something stolen from me, I’ve got a team that’s going to defend me and they’re probably going to win or settle any claims, but if you’re a 16-year-old kid, you don’t have that ability so that’s what we want to provide, but more as a deterrent,” musician and advisor Raine Maida tells TechCrunch. “I think when you see the S!NG watermark or you see that it’s saved and shared through the wallet.. you don’t have to understand blockchain but you’ll know S!NG is that company that protects you.”

For the time being, non-fungible token-based legal defenses are probably a bit unusual, but the team’s founders believe that blockchain-based ownership proofs will be entering case law organically just as technology like DocuSign has been accepted.

If the company can successfully push creators to weave the S!NG platform into their toolkits, the startup will have plenty of ripe opportunities to capitalize on in the incredibly young blockchain creator space. While many artists may see the NFT space as a speculative cash grab, the company’s founders seem wholly focused on sidestepping hype for the time being and building something that artists can find lasting value in.

“Frankly I don’t give a shit about all of this crazy NFT stuff with things selling for a bazillion dollars,” Osler says. “I’m interested in the small artist who has 1,000 fans who will eagerly pay up $15 to keep that person in business.”

After a years-long crypto winter, it been the spring of NFTs, but as digital art prices sober up after an explosion in sales, blockchain founders are looking to find more stable opportunities in the space that can grow over time even as speculative interest in NFTs shifts.

One particular interest has been using NFTs to reshape the creator economy in a manner that actually benefits artists more than the platforms that host their work. A new flavor of this pursuit comes from the recently launched S!NG (pronounced sing) which has built a platform around simply letting user upload files to their servers and time-stamp those uploads on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s a dead-simple mechanic with an ambitious framing, ensuring that artists maintain credit for their work as they create it.

The team behind the app sees a future where artists use the platform as an autosave for their intellectual property during the creative process, enabling them to scribble down notes or upload a quick demo and save those moments on the blockchain, a step that they hope can eliminate or expedite rights disputes for creators that can point to a clearly time-stamped breadcrumbs trail. By virtue of the app’s name, it’s clear that they are aiming to attract songwriters and musicians in particular but the company’s onboarding also showcases wider ambition in the creator world, enabling users to designate if they are a photographer, writer or programmer as well.

“You have the best of both worlds with very public witnesses to a very private event,” says CEO Geoff Osler. “Your content is never out there, but you can have this massive attestation to the fact that it exists at a certain point in time.”

The app itself is pretty straightforward. After uploading a piece of media, be it a photo, video, audio or text file, users can tack on additional files, make note of additional collaborators or add notes before submitting it and christening the work on the blockchain. The file itself is private with a hash hosted on the blockchain while the encrypted files are stored on S!NG’s AWS servers, so creators don’t need to worry about their early ideas being served up to a public audience. A concern here for early adopters is what happens if the blockchain startup eventually goes under and those servers go with it, but that’s an issue facing plenty of startups that are backing the underlying media files of NFTs on centralized servers.

Rights disputes might be something more top-of-mind to those who have spent substantial time in their specific creative industry, compared to to budding artists who are likely wholly concerned with getting their work seen in the first place. While public links allow a work’s origins to be tracked down once it’s complete and ready for public consumption, S!NG’s aim is to develop those moments earlier in the development of a work and aid artists who might be involved with more collaborative creative processes where ownership of ideas can appear more obfuscated from a legal standpoint.

“If I get something stolen from me, I’ve got a team that’s going to defend me and they’re probably going to win or settle any claims, but if you’re a 16-year-old kid, you don’t have that ability so that’s what we want to provide, but more as a deterrent,” musician and advisor Raine Maida tells TechCrunch. “I think when you see the S!NG watermark or you see that it’s saved and shared through the wallet.. you don’t have to understand blockchain but you’ll know S!NG is that company that protects you.”

For the time being, non-fungible token-based legal defenses are probably a bit unusual, but the team’s founders believe that blockchain-based ownership proofs will be entering case law organically just as technology like DocuSign has been accepted.

If the company can successfully push creators to weave the S!NG platform into their toolkits, the startup will have plenty of ripe opportunities to capitalize on in the incredibly young blockchain creator space. While many artists may see the NFT space as a speculative cash grab, the company’s founders seem wholly focused on sidestepping hype for the time being and building something that artists can find lasting value in.

“Frankly I don’t give a shit about all of this crazy NFT stuff with things selling for a bazillion dollars,” Osler says. “I’m interested in the small artist who has 1,000 fans who will eagerly pay up $15 to keep that person in business.”

What is the biggest opportunity for proptech founders? How should they think about competition, strategic investment versus top-tier VC firms, and how to build their board? What about navigating regulation?

We sat down last week with Brendan Wallace, co-founder and general manager of Fifth Wall, and Hippo CEO Assaf Wand for an episode of Extra Crunch Live to discuss all of the above.

Extra Crunch Live goes down every Wednesday at 3 p.m. ET/noon PT. Our next episode is with Forerunner’s Eurie Kim and Oura CEO Harpreet Rai, and you can check out the upcoming schedule right here.

In the meantime, dive into the wide-ranging conversation we had with Wallace and Wand. You can find the full video, including the ECL Live pitch-off, below.

Investing in the board

The first step in running a useful and beneficial board is determining who should be on that board, and that starts with the first round of capital investment and carries on forever.

One of the strategic benefits of Fifth Wall as an investor, according to Wallace, is that the firm was built specifically with strategic LPs in the real estate realm, allowing the firm to connect portfolio companies with massive incumbent players in the industry. Incumbents get access to new tools and software, portfolio companies get big customers, and Fifth Wall gets to reap the benefits of both. It’s a rare win-win-win.

We asked Wand about how he chose his investors, and how to weigh the value of a top-tier VC firm and a strategic angel investor, for example.

He explained that there is no right answer to a question like that, but it should always be thoroughly discussed by the team. One of the benefits of having a top-tier VC firm on board is that it has a signaling effect, helping you to recruit early team members and open doors.

Another week another big tech hearing in Congress. With a flurry of antitrust reform bills on the way, Democratic lawmakers are again bringing in the some of the world’s most powerful tech companies for questioning.

In the next hearing, scheduled for Tuesday, April 27 at 10 AM ET, the Senate Judiciary’s subcommittee on privacy and technology will zero on concerns about algorithmic amplification. Specifically, the hearing will explore how algorithms amplify dangerous content and shape user behavior on social platforms.

The subcommittee’s chair Sen. Chris Coons previously indicated that he would bring in tech CEOs, but Tuesday’s hearing will instead feature testimony from policy leads at Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

The hearing might prove a unique opportunity to hold YouTube’s feet to the fire. In spite of being one of the biggest social networks in the world — one without much transparency about its regular failures to control extremism and misinformation — YouTube seldom winds up under the microscope with Congress. The company will be represented by Alexandra Veitch, YouTube’s regional director of public policy.

In past big tech hearings that manage, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has generally appeared on behalf of YouTube’s parent company. But Google is a massive entity and concerns specific to YouTube and its policies generally get lost in the mix as lawmakers go after Pichai for concerns around Google’s search and ads businesses.

In a stylistic repeat of last week’s adversarial app store hearing, which featured Apple as well as some of its critics, misinformation researcher Dr. Joan Donovan and ex-Googler and frequent big tech critic Tristan Harris will also testify Tuesday. That tension can create deeper questioning, providing outside expertise that can fill in some lapses in lawmakers’ technical knowledge.

Policy leads at these companies might not make the same flashy headlines, but given their intimate knowledge of the content choices these companies make every day, they do provide an opportunity for more substance. Tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey have been dragged in to so many hearings at this point that they begin to run together, and the top executives generally reveal very little while sometimes playing dumb about the day-to-day decision making on their platforms. The subcommittee’s ranking member Ben Sasse (R-NE) emphasized that point, stating that the hearing would be a learning opportunity and not a “show hearing.”

Democrats have been sounding the alarm on algorithms for some time. While Republicans spent the latter half of the Trump administration hounding tech companies about posts they remove, Democrats instead focused on the violent content, extremism and sometimes deadly misinformation that gets left up and even boosted by the secretive algorithms tech companies rarely shed light on.

We haven’t seen much in the way of algorithmic transparency, but that could change. One narrowly-targeted Section 230 reform bill in the House would strip that law’s protections from large companies when their algorithms amplify extremism or violate civil rights.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has also hinted that a different approach might be on the horizon, suggesting that users could hand-pick their preferred algorithms in the future, possibly even selecting them from a kind of third-party marketplace. Needless to say, Facebook didn’t indicate any plans to give its own users more algorithmic control.

With any major changes to the way platforms decide who sees what likely a long ways off, expect to see lawmakers try to pry open some black boxes on Tuesday.

Today after the bell American electric car company Tesla reported its Q1 2021 financial performance. The company lost modest ground on the stock market after its news broke.

For the broader electric vehicle and battery startup market that has pursued many SPAC-led combinations in recent months, the generally positive Tesla trailing results could prove a boon, underscoring continued market demand for their category’s hardware.

Turning to the numbers, in the first three quarters of the year, Tesla generated revenues of $10.389 billion, gross profit of $2.215 billion, and net income of $438 million.

Tesla earned adjusted net income of $1.052 billion, leading to diluted, non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.93. The street had expected the company to report $10.29 billion in revenue and adjusted earnings per share of $0.79. Shares of Tesla are off around 1% in after-hours trading, after the company reported its top and bottom-line beat.

Tesla grew sharply compared to its year-ago period, in which the company generated $5.985 billion in top-line revenue, leading to just $68 million worth of net income. Compared to that year-ago period, Tesla’s Q1 2021 saw its revenues expand by 74%, its automotive gross margin improve by just under 1% (95 basis points), its aggregate gross margins better themselves by slightly less (70 basis points), and its net income explode 1,850% while its adjusted net income grew by an also-impressive 304%.

In the same period four month period, Tesla’s operating cash flow came to $1.641 billion. The company can comfortably self-fund at that pace of cash generation. That’s underscored by the fact that Tesla closed its first quarter with cash and cash equivalents worth a total of $17.1 billion.

Tracking neatly with its 75% revenue growth was automotive production growth of 76% in the first quarter, with the company producing 180,338 cars, far above its year-ago Q1 tally of 102,672 units. Deliveries of vehicles rose 109%, to 184,877, over the same timeframe.

The company’s solar, and energy storage businesses also posted material growth: Solar deployments rose 163% to 92 megawatts, while storage deployment rose 71% to 445 megawatt hours.

Turning to outlook, Tesla told investors in its deck that “over a multi-year horizon, [the company expects] to achieve 50% average annual growth in vehicle deliveries.” The company added that it anticipates Tesla Semi deliveries to commence this year, adding another revenue line to the company’s product mix.

Looking ahead, investors expect Tesla adjusted net income to rise to $0.99 per diluted share this quarter, off of revenues totalling $11.39 billion.