#HighFinance

Despite a year-over-year sales drop in the fourth quarter of 2018, a higher average transaction price spurred by growth in high-margin vehicle sales in North America returned better than expected Q4 earnings for General Motors.

The company’s strong showing comes as its overseas ventures sank and headwinds gathered at home and abroad; mainly, predictions of a slower 2019. That’s GM’s outlook, too, which explains why CEO Mary Barra isn’t backpedaling on her plan to shutter five North American plants.

With Fiat Chrysler’s third-quarter earnings report, released Tuesday, the automaker showed it could improve on the boosted North American profitability seen under late CEO Sergio Marchionne.

The automaker posted an EBIT (earnings before taxes and interest) profit margin of 10.2 percent in the region, helped by heady Jeep and Ram sales and the 2016 decision to cull its unpopular small cars. That’s up from the record 8.4 percent margins seen in the second quarter of last year, and a 51 percent increase from Q3 2018.

Good times? Overall, yes, but net profit took a hit from last year’s 3.0-liter EcoDiesel saga. FCA expects to pay the federal piper for its undeclared auxiliary emissions control devices, with a dollar figure now attached to its penance.

China, Europe, and South America all conspired to sink Ford’s profits in the third quarter of 2018, with the automaker posting a 37 percent net income drop compared to the same quarter a year ago.

The earnings report came the same day Ford announced the creation of a standalone Chinese business unit, Ford China. Dismal overseas performance didn’t come as a shock, however, as these headwinds were also felt in previous quarters, albeit not as strongly. That hasn’t stopped a barrage of questions directed at CEO Jim Hackett over how he plans to build a successful operation outside of America’s borders.

After hiring financial advisors earlier this year, a move many believed was a precursor to an initial public offering (IPO), Volvo parent company Geely now claims the waters are too choppy to float any shares in the resurgent Swedish automaker.

First reported by the Financial Times this past weekend, the Chinese holding company says there’s too many uncertainties and headwinds in the industry right now. Thus, no Volvo stock for you. The biggest uncertainty is the one that’s keeping automakers on edge the world over.

Today’s installment of “This Week in Elon” sees the Tesla CEO appear on the top-rated Joe Rogan Experience podcast and partake in drug consumption that’s legal in the state in which it was filmed. One hopes Musk didn’t pile into his Model S afterwards and drive away while baked.

Normally, what happens in an executive’s private life remains private until it hits the papers ahead of an impending trial, or perhaps fills the pages of a tell-all bestseller. This being Musk, however, questionable antics seem to occur all the time, usually in a public forum, and shareholders, analysts, and no doubt the company’s board aren’t too pleased with it.

It’s not on the same level as Lee Iacocca showing up on the Merv Griffin Show and railing a line of blow, but Musk’s podcast appearance, combined with two high-profile departures, sent Tesla shares tumbling.

Ford’s been wringing its corporate hands over stock prices for ages. While the market itself is generally rising, the Blue Oval seems to perpetually find itself in Wall Street’s basement. It is arguable that lackluster performance on this front cost Mark Fields his job earlier this year.

Things are not looking up in that department. Yesterday, FoMoCo’s credit rating was cut to Baa3 by Moody’s Investors Service, just a single notch above junk status.

Fear not, there’ll be plenty of moaning about short sellers in the weeks and months — and probably years — to come. Late Friday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk pulled an about-face, issuing a blog post in which he claimed a couple of weeks of study revealed he shouldn’t take his publicly traded automaker private.

Apparently, the trip from “funding secured” to “the funding totally would have been there”* (not a direct quote) takes 17 days.

In a story that’s been developing for some time now, Fiat Chrysler is inching closer to shedding its component supplier, Magneti Marelli.

According to a report, a private equity firm is reportedly in talks with the automaker to buy the parts business. This is a shift in direction for FCA which, in the past, was seemingly focused on spinning off Magneti Marelli rather than completing an outright sale.

Save for some uplifting production news, Tesla Motors is still fighting an uphill battle. CEO Elon Musk’s earlier claim that the company would go private has gotten him into trouble with the Securities Exchange Commission — since it looks as if the automaker hasn’t procured the necessary funding to make that happen.

However it doesn’t appear as if Norway’s sovereign wealth fund will be the outlet to pick up that tab. Trond Grande, deputy CEO of the Norwegian fund, declined to say whether Tesla had approached the fund about going private. “We don’t have a view on that,” he said before adding “We want to be invested in companies that make money.”

The correct ending to this headline should read “…We’d All Lose Our Lunch.” Especially this month.

Tesla investors are taking a wild ride of late, with CEO Elon Musk’s Aug. 7th “secured funding” tweet and subsequent stock spike giving way to a hands-in-the-air plunge as the funding for his go-private plan remains on the missing persons list. Couple that with a very concerning New York Times interview and increasing skepticism from analysts, and you’ve got the makings of a standout attraction at Six Flags.

A truly bizarre rumor is just one of the issues facing Tesla CEO Elon Musk as questions swirl following the August 7th announcement that he wants to take the publicly traded company private.

As the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission looks into Musk’s claim that there’s “funding secured” for the potential buyout, Musk was forced to confront a claim involving, of all things, a rapper, drugs, and spontaneous tweeting. Always a sideshow with this company…

The financial world, on the other hand, wants to know more about this Saudi business.

Like a Netflix original movie with lots of action but a threadbare plot, Elon Musk’s plan to take Tesla private has some glaring holes. The largest of which is how he’ll finance the buyback of stock (at $420 a share) to make his dream possible.

The list of people who’d like to know where exactly the money’s coming from is a long one, but at the top of the list is the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission — followed, apparently, by Tesla’s own board of directors.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has returned to Twitter, this time to issue an apology to British cave diver Vernon Unsworth. Musk had maintained radio silence on the social media platform ever since calling the Thailand cave rescuer a “pedo” in response to comments Unsworth made about the viability of his hastily prepared mini-sub. Musk later added that he’d bet money that his accusation was true.

The weekend tweets were subsequently deleted.

Yes, it’s a wholly ridiculous situation, but imagine yourself in Unsworth’s shoes. The diver claimed he received calls from lawyers in the UK and United States, and was considering legal action against Musk upon his return to Britain. Meanwhile, major Tesla investors entertained their own thoughts — troubling ones, as Musk’s out-of-the-blue attack on a man widely regarded as a hero raised serious questions about his leadership.

There’s a term in Canadian politics — “bozo eruption” — that, according to Wiktionary, refers to the moment when a politician or public figure says something “especially ill-considered and foolish, and which has negative repercussions for that individual and for his or her affiliated group.”

In Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s case, the eruptions seem to be ramping up. Each outburst — be it May’s dismissive earnings call, in which he called analysts’ queries “boring” before taking questions from a YouTuber, or this past weekend’s bizarre assertion that one of the Thailand cave rescuers (and Musk mini-sub disliker) is a pedophile — has a negative, if hazy, impact on the automaker’s stock price.

The most recent utterance didn’t disappoint, but it seems that pissing off Wall Street types is more consequential than accusing international heroes you’ve never met of sex crimes.

The small San Francisco startup bought by General Motors in 2016 could generate a lot of money for the automaker in the near future.

According to sources who spoke to Bloomberg, GM wants to unlock the value of its self-driving Cruise Automation division (officially GM Cruise LLC) — a 50-person company valued at $600 million at the time of purchase. Japan’s SoftBank, which recently pledged a $2.25 billion investment in the division, now values Cruise at $11.5 billion.

To put that figure into context, GM’s market capitalization hovers around $50 billion. The word “Cruise” should be accompanied by an old-timey cash register sound.