Elon Musk fires back, defends behavior on recent Tesla earnings call

Elon Musk has been acting strange lately -- but he swears it's all for a legitimate reason.

The embattled Tesla CEO clarified his remarks on the latest Tesla earnings call in a Friday morning tweetstorm, explaining why he dismissed two critical questions from analysts by calling them "boring" and "boneheaded." Tesla shares to lost more than five percent after the call.

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Musk claims that the questions that were ignored were from short-sellers "who were trying to justify their Tesla short thesis." He also says, "They are actually on the opposite side of investors."

But as CNBC points out, that's not exactly true. The questions that Musk ignored were from Sanford Bernstein's Toni Sacconaghiand RBC's Joseph Spak, who both have "hold" ratings on the Telsa stock -- which implies that they are both taking a long position.

CNBC also reports that Musk decided to take several questions from a 25-year-old retail investor and owner of a YouTube channel, Galileo Russell, which is unusual because questions on earnings calls are traditionally reserved for analysts, professional investors, and sometimes media. The YouTube personality later bragged about his inclusion on the earnings call in a video posted to his channel.

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To Musk's credit, in his erratic tweetstorm that included several tweets to critics and random people on Twitter, he did acknowledge in a tweet that he shouldn't have dismissed the analysts. "And once they were on the call, I should have answered their questions live. It was foolish of me to ignore them," he said.

As for whether this is the last of Musk's strange behavior, that seems unlikely.

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