SpaceX the Alan Notes

Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, said: ‘We’ve had 38, 000 reservations for the Powerwall, 2, 500 for the Powerpack … It seems to have gone super viral.’ Photograph: Patrick T Fallon/Reuters

Asked why, Musk said he preferred a different question. “Let me just talk a little more broadly to the response to the Powerwall and the Powerpack, because that’s the question you should be asking: the response has been crazy, ” he said. “We’ve had 38, 000 reservations for the Powerwall, 2, 500 for the Powerpack.” He said those reservations represented an average of 10 batteries for the Powerpack and more than one for the Powerwall.

“We have to triage our responses to those who want to be a distributor, ” Musk said. “It’s like, crazy off the hook. It seems to have gone super viral.”

Asked what kinds of margins investors could expect from the company’s gigantic new battery investment, Musk stalled briefly, but gave the analyst quizzing him a very high prediction: “Once we get the Gigafactory up and running and get the economies of scale working, this is just a guess right now, but maybe it’s something like 20%.”

The electric goods company reported raking in $1.10bn in revenue this quarter, $1.06bn of it from car sales, but it is the batteries that dominated the discussion on Tesla’s results call.