Now Elon Musk tells analysts he won't answer their 'boring' questions. Cheerio $2bn!

Tesla took a dive as a result but most investors' views won't have changed: Elon and his car maker are either revolutionaries or they're wearing the emperor's new clothes

Elon Musk: No fan of analysts' questions (AFP/Getty)

Damn I love Elon Musk!

In the dry world of business news he’s the best entertainment we have. He’s even more fun than watching TSB boss Paul Pester’s train wreck of a Treasury Committee appearance, and if you like watching arrogant CEOs getting a kicking that was pretty good fun.

Elon’s latest foray into the spotlight left his electronic car maker Tesla an incredible $2bn (£1.5bn) lighter in terms of its market value.

Its tumble followed an earnings call described by analysts as “bizarre”, “strange” and “weird” in which the Musk-eteer refused to answer their “boring” financial questions and instead turned to a YouTuber to discus “the future”. Before you read on, you might want to reread that with the tune from 2001: A Space Odyssey in your mind. Got that? Good.

Now, the shares had barely moved following the release of the results statement in which the company reported a record loss of $709.6m for the three months to 31 March. That was nonetheless better than analysts had forecast and the same was true of the revenues.

The stock only fell out of bed in the wake of the call, and the blizzard of notes roasting Mr Musk that filled up investors’ inboxes in its wake. At this point it’s worth noting that most of those notes didn’t contain many changes to the writers’ recommendations. Buyers among them were mostly still buyers.

In one sense I actually don’t blame Elon for getting fed up with some of them.

Analysts’ questions are sometimes boring, if not actually irrelevant. I’ve listened in to any number of their calls in which I’ve found myself struggling to stay awake. Half the time they seem to completely miss the point, focussing instead on obscure details that seem all but irrelevant to how business X or business Y is going to do over the long term and how it should be viewed by investors.

Sometimes they seem designed to show just what a clever clogs a particular analyst is. To be fair, journalists sometimes do that too, especially when CNN or Sky News are filming a press conference.

It is true that some of them are very sharp, and pick up problems at the companies they cover way before anyone else does. But they’re in the minority.

If you doubt that just look at the buy ratings on companies like RBS or Carillon shortly before they went pop. Sometimes it happened because the analysts were put under subtle, or less than subtle, pressure to keep a potential client for their employers sweet. Sometimes it was because they just weren't very good.

It would still have been easier for our Elon to play the game with them. He could probably have palmed the more irksome questions off on to his finance guys. A lot of CEOs do that.

If you want a quiet life, and an $2bn extra on your share price, that’s what you do even if it is “dull”.

But Musk, with his $2.6bn package, is no ordinary CEO. And Tesla is no ordinary company.

He is either a visionary genius, or he's having a laugh at his investors' (vast) expense. You either buy into the story that Tesla is going to be the next big thing, a revolutionary business that shakes up motor transport transport for a generation and is worthy of a valuation that puts it within spitting distance of General Motors despite a tiny fraction of the output. Or you think its shares are just so much worthless paper, the investment equivalent of the emperor's new clothes. There is no in between.

Set against that, the views of analysts, even the good ones, are basically an irrelevance.

The share price’s reaction to the call does suggest that it has put a few more investors into the second camp than were there before.

But only a few. Tesla is still worth close to $50bn despite the behaviour of its boss.