Tesla (TSLA) Tops Q3 Estimates as Net Income Falls 43% to $787 Million

Update 19:31 UTC: Musk said on the call he wants Optimus output to reach 20,000 units a week but conceded that will take at least a year because the design keeps changing, naming the robot's hand as the hardest hardware problem; deliveries to outside customers are pencilled in around the end of 2027, after Tesla…

Q3 Revenue Beats, Profit Falls 43%

Tesla (TSLA) released its third-quarter 2026 results after the US market close on Wednesday, and the print came in ahead of estimates with a visibly smaller profit underneath. The company's shareholder briefing filed with the SEC shows revenue of $28.05 billion, effectively flat year over year, and net income attributable to common shareholders of $787 million, a 43% decline from a year earlier. Adjusted earnings reached $0.48 per share against the $0.43 consensus compiled by LSEG, while revenue cleared the $27.9 billion estimate. On a GAAP basis, earnings per share fell from 32 cents to 22 cents. The shares nonetheless dropped more than 3% in after-hours trading once the numbers landed. The auto business, still the core, turned in $20.56 billion of revenue, down 3% year over year, and the company attributed the weakness to lower average selling prices plus a battery supply squeeze that left it unable to build enough vehicles to meet demand. Energy generation and storage fell 16% to $2.88 billion, while services and other revenue grew 33% to $4.61 billion and did much of the offsetting. Operating income fell 56% to $718 million, a 2.6% operating margin, even as gross margin improved 1.6 percentage points to 19.6%. Capital expenditure more than doubled to $4.73 billion, up 110%, free cash flow fell 62% to $1.53 billion, and quarter-end cash, equivalents and short-term investments stood at $45.45 billion. Delivery and production data rounded out the quarter: 486,532 vehicles delivered, down 2%, against 464,391 produced, up 4%, alongside 13.7 GWh of storage deployments. Active FSD subscriptions rose 67% to 1.74 million, and quarterly sales set records in Canada, Japan, Taiwan and Australia. Those records did not offset competitive pressure from BYD and Xiaomi in Asia and Europe, or the demand hit from the loss of a US federal EV tax credit last year.

Beneath the headline numbers, the quarter's profit was helped by crypto and complicated by SpaceX. Tesla booked a $288 million mark-to-market gain on its bitcoin holdings, worth $224 million after tax, which more than covered a $142 million valuation loss on its SpaceX shares. The company's digital assets carrying value rose from $674 million at the end of June to $962 million at the end of September, and with no trades confirmed during the period, the disclosed stash of 11,509 BTC implies an end-of-quarter price of roughly $83,600 per coin. Tesla has held the remaining coins since selling most of its position in Q2 2022, nearly four years of uninterrupted ownership. Capex guidance was also cut to about $20 billion for the year from the previous outlook above $25 billion.

Robotaxi Promises and a SpaceX Silence

Elon Musk used the earnings call to lay out the autonomous roadmap while staying quiet on the merger question that has hung over both of his companies. On robotaxis, he said the fleet will not move the numbers this quarter, should become noticeable in Q2 2027 and could be a big deal by the third or fourth quarter of next year, eventually accounting for most passenger miles in countries without regulatory restrictions or protectionist barriers. Tesla's vice president of Autopilot, Ashok Elluswamy, added that some customer vehicles could receive the unsupervised version of FSD around the second quarter of 2027. Texas motor vehicle records already list 362 Model Y robotaxis and 449 Cybercabs authorized for driverless operation. Chief financial officer Vaibhav Taneja flagged charging, repairs and cleaning as the cost lines to watch as the service expands, and Musk has said the vast majority of Cybercabs will be Tesla-owned and run as transport-as-a-service rather than sold to buyers. On Optimus, the briefing notes the humanoid robot has entered production on a line at the Fremont factory, though Musk cautioned that substantial work remains on AI, mechanical design, reliability and operating time, problems he expects to be resolved around the end of 2027. The merger silence carried its own weight. A day earlier, at a SpaceX investor call, Musk said combining the two companies could make sense and confirmed that both boards have formed special committees to study a possible deal; prediction markets briefly put the odds near 56% earlier this month. At the Tesla call he offered nothing new, saying he had already “said everything that should be said.” The two companies already share a planned semiconductor plant in Grimes County, Texas, that involves Intel, along with work on the refreshed Roadster. The company also said FSD, priced at $99 a month in the US, is driving demand in markets where it is available as it works with regulators on approvals elsewhere.

Musk said on the call he wants Optimus output to reach 20,000 units a week but conceded that will take at least a year because the design keeps changing, naming the robot's hand as the hardest hardware problem; deliveries to outside customers are pencilled in around the end of 2027, after Tesla missed an earlier goal of roughly 10,000 robots in 2025. On robotaxis, vice president of vehicle engineering Lars Moravy said Tesla is "trying to get Cybercabs to customers by the end of this year, 2026," with every unit built so far destined for its own fleet and no price announced beyond a target under $30,000. On the merger, Musk noted a deal requires support from holders of 50% of all outstanding Tesla shares, a threshold he called "quite a high hurdle," and the December 3 annual meeting carries no vote on the matter.

Tesla (TSLA) last trades at $370.19, down 2.65% over the past 24 hours and sitting at the low end of a $370.00 to $395.70 range, according to COINOTAG data. COINOTAG's composite scores put the nearest support at $369.30, rated 88/100 and layered with the 20-, 50- and 100-day EMAs, with resistance at $383.53 rated 94/100. Perpetual open interest stands at $67.75 million, funding reads 0.0015%, RSI sits near neutral at 51.9, and the daily trend is still an uptrend. For a company of Tesla's market cap, one quarter rarely decides the trend; the level the post-earnings trade turns on first is that $369.30 support (as of 03:30 UTC).