Tesla’s (NASDAQ:TSLA) first-quarter earnings call comes at a pivotal point for the electric car maker. Following a record-setting Q4 2018 that saw new highs for production and deliveries, Q1 2018 saw a drop in the company’s vehicle production and deliveries. Since then, the stock has been weighed down as reservations emerged about the company’s capability to sustain its profitability, which it attained in the third and fourth quarter of 2018.
Tesla announced a net loss of $702 million for the first quarter, translating to a loss of $4.10 per share. The company also listed $4.5 billion in revenue, which is below Wall Street expectations.
For today’s earnings call, Elon Musk and Tesla’s executives are expected to address questions surrounding the company’s financial standing and its capability to pursue its ongoing projects such as Gigafactory 3 in China and the Tesla Pickup Truck, among others. Questions from retail investors aggregated by investor communication firm Say are also expected to be included in the Q&A session.
The following are live updates from Tesla’s Q1 2019 earnings call. Fellow Teslarati reporter Dacia Ferris and I will be updating this article in real-time, so please keep refreshing the page to view the latest updates on this story.
Simon 15:35 PT: And that’s a wrap. Thanks for joining us on this Live Blog of Tesla’s Q1 2019 earnings call, everyone! Check out our coverage of Tesla’s Q1 2019 Update Letter here too, for more details on the electric car maker’s performance in the first quarter.
Dacia 15:32 PT: Thanks everyone! Let’s decide on a new soundtrack to rev up while waiting for next earnings call, shall we? I went down the 90s rock YouTube hole today. Open for better ideas. #justsaying
Simon 15:30 PT: Gigafactory 3 will likely be a huge piece in the Tesla puzzle. Elon Musk notes that by the end of the year, Tesla is aiming for a production rate of around 1,000 Model 3 per week, or maybe even 2,000 per week. “We expect multiple battery suppliers for Shanghai Giga,” Musk said, responding to a question about battery partners for the upcoming facility.
Dacia 15:30 PT: Elon says he gets daily photos of the Gigafactory 3 progress in Shanghai. “It looks like we’ll reach volume production by the end of this year…that’s what it looks like right now. If it’s not then, it will be shortly thereafter.”
Dacia 15:29 PT: “Our goal is the make our cars as affordable as possible,” Elon responds to a question about the logic of the pricing changes during the quarter. “The $39,500 Model 3 just really hit the sweet spot,” he says, referring to sales of the $35,000 Model 3.
Dacia 15:26 PT: “The upgraded powertrain for the S,X was at a significant cost down,” Elon says about the recent refresh. They took parts from the Model 3 that were highly efficient.
Dacia 15:25 PT: A Battery Investor Day in the future? “I think we’ll have another autonomy day later this year to go over cell and battery development in greater detail,” Elon says in response to a question on future chemistry and form factor changes in batteries.
Dacia 15:24 PT: Adding on Tesla Model Y reservations. “People read too much into this…we aren’t playing up the Model Y because it isn’t in production. You can’t read too much into it,” Elon notes as he responds to longtime TSLA bear David Tamberrino from Goldman Sachs.
Simon 15:24 PT: On Model Y reservations. “We’re not playing up Model Y because it is not in production,” Elon Musk says. “We don’t comment on future price changes,” he adds.
Dacia 15:22 PT: “Sales to a country overseas are affected by when the ship arrives,” Elon explains, citing that delays make it seem like something is wrong, when its just the ship schedule. GDP fluctuations resulting from ship deliveries are not accurate measures, he reiterates.
Dacia 15:20 PT: “We will continue to ADD stores in locations that are no brainers and close them…where the foot traffic doesn’t fall below the cost of having the store,” Elon admits and explains. People misunderstood “all sales online” to mean “all stores are closing.” I’ll admit, I thought that, too at first.
Simon 15:19 PT: On Tesla store closures. “I think Tesla is specifically didn’t handle the messaging of that well. We certainly will continue to have stores, and we will continue to add stores, provided that they are in locations with high foot traffic, and in areas with people with our target market. We will close stores where they are incredibly hard to find, and where foot traffic of potential customers is low. I think it’s just common sense,” Musk said.
Dacia 16:15 PT: “Tesla today is a far more efficiently operating organization than we were a year ago,” Elon doubles down on not needing additional capital. He says technically they did raise some capital for Gigafactory 3 in Shanghai.
Dacia 15:14 PT: “I don’t think raising capital should be a substitute for making the company work more effectively…we should be frugal with capital…. We need to be on a Spartan diet… It’s not the right time to raise capital,” Elon says on whether Tesla would be better served by better cash flow with raised capital. “I don’t think capital has been a constraint on our growth so far…I would have raised capital if I thought so,” he adds.
Dacia 15:10 PT: “There really do seem to be different market segments,” Elon says in response to a question about Model 3 cannibalizing Model S and X. Owners really just want to replace the car they have, not buy M3 over Model S,X, he concludes.
Dacia 15:08 PT: “I would prefer we were private,” Elon admits. He cites Warren Buffett, saying having a public company is like having someone stand outside your home and shout its price/value every day. He nonetheless admits that he does not have a solution for the issues that come from public company pressures.
Dacia 15:05 PT: On Full Self-Driving safety, Tesla will keep reporting their findings and numbers at “a broad brushstroke level”…”We do give some information to insurance companies to reduce rates,” Elon says, meaning FSD safety data to lower auto insurance rates for Tesla owners.
Dacia 15:03 PT: “We think it is important to unwind this wave [of deliveries] because it ends up being optimizing for one quarter but adding a lot of difficulty and not a great experience for customers,” Elon says. “We did adjust our pricing in Q1 which puts pressure on our margin,” Kirkhorn adds. Once all the unwinding is done, they feel confident profitability will return in Q3.
Simon 15:03 PT: Tesla appears to have absorbed the blows in the first quarter to ensure that the following quarters will be smoother. A return to 100k/year for Model S and Model X appears to be in the future.
Dacia 15:01 PT: On questions about weak demand in US — Elon sees demand returning to normal in the near future. “I don’t have a crystal ball…my impression is demand is quite solid,” he says. Retooling decreased production in Q1…ramping back up in Q2. “We will exit Q2 in higher production than Q1 on the S,X,” Kirkhorn chimes in.
Dacia 14:58 PT: “I’m a fan of tents, like real, hardcore tents. Not Boy Scout tents (which are fine),” Elon says, referring to adding space for Model Y production at Fremont. He’s confident they’ll find the space for it (not necessarily confirming it will made in tents).
Dacia 15:56 PT: “The SR+ Model 3… is just an incredibly compelling vehicle,” Elon touts. The upgraded S,X — it’s kind of a game changer. We are out of the Q1 winter hangup for new car sales (people don’t like buying cars in winter), all positive factors for the future, he says. “Overall, I feel pretty good about where things are headed.”
Dacia 15:54 PT: On Model Y production: Model Y production location being decided soon, per Elon. Close call between Nevada or Fremont. Decision in next few weeks.
Simon 14:54 PT: On the Tesla Semi, Elon Musk and Jerome Guillen note that the prototypes of the all-electric long-hauler are performing great. Production will likely be on Reno, NV. “The prototypes are working amazingly well,” says Elon.
Dacia 15:53 PT: How soon will owners get the new FSD upgrade? Elon said there’s no need for it for 2-3 months. Features will then be released that will have use for the FSD.
Simon 14:51 PT: Some questions from retail shareholders are addressed. The company notes that it is just waiting for the necessary approvals from the SEC with its Maxwell acquisition. On Tesla’s own insurance program, Elon says yes, the company will be rolling out one, hopefully in a month. “It will be much more compelling than anything out there,” Elon Musk said.
Dacia 15:45 PT: Model 3 growth margin declined slightly – pricing adjustment and product offering mixup both part of that decline, per Kirkhorn. Our product lineup has a good deal of excitement.
Simon 14:44 PT: The CFO notes that in spite of the launch of the Standard Range Model 3, a significant portion of Model 3 orders in the United States still correspond to the Long Range versions of the vehicle.
Dacia 15:43 PT: “The global expansion of Model 3 was a huge theme within the quarter,” Zachary Kirkhorn, Tesla’s new CFO begins his comments. Two key themes he cites: On the cash front $2.2 billion ending balance, reduction from payment of convertible note which was investment into service and systems; Q1 challenges aren’t expected to continue, and cash balance will increase.
Simon 14:41 PT: Zachary Kirkhorn, Tesla’s new CFO takes the floor. He describes how the first quarter of 2019 was a complex time for Tesla’s finances. Tesla is tracking in April the largest amount of deliveries in the company’s history.
Dacia 15:40 PT: – Elon now touts the Model S, X upgrades that were just released last night, highlights the free Ludicrous Mode upgrade for loyal customers. Motor Trend test drove the enhanced Model S from SF to LA on one charge – Elon compares it to a gas powered car, citing Model S’s superiority.
Simon 14:38 PT: Elon emphasizes that Model 3 international ramp is only beginning. He also mentions the improvements for the Model S and X, which include adaptive suspension, better range, and better charging speeds.
Dacia 15:38 PT: “We believe over time, we will be the best selling premium car in the world…In March we set a record for the highest car sales, period,” Elon says. He sounds positive, despite the report. Cites people paying more for a Model 3 than they’ve ever paid for another car because they **want** one.
Dacia 14:33 PT: “We believe we’ll have the most profitable autonomous taxi on the market,” Elon Musk says. Half of all deliveries occurred during the final 10 days of Q1, “which was an insane undertaking, basically,” he adds.
Simon 14:34 PT: Elon Musk takes the floor. Elon discusses Tesla’s Autonomy Day and reviews the points outlined during the event. Elon also discussed “good challenges” in Q1, particularly in terms of Model 3 deliveries in Europe and China. Highlights that half of Q1’s deliveries happened in the final 10 days of Q1 2019.
Simon 14:31 PT: And we are starting. No Elon Time today. Tesla Senior Director, Investor Relations Mr. Martin Viecha takes the floor.
Simon 14:30 PT: Welcome to our live blog for Tesla’s Q1 2019 earnings call. The electric car maker posted a loss of $702 million in Q1, which missed Wall Street estimates. It will be interesting to see how Elon Musk and Tesla’s other executives address these updates in the upcoming Q&A session.
Dacia 14:30 PT: Well, it’s said in some circles that when Tesla releases an earnings report late…it’s not gonna be happy news. Theory holds up today, but profitability is expected in Q3. We’ll see what Elon decides come then.
Investor's Corner
Tesla Robotaxi gets a massive upgrade in Nevada
Nevada regulators just approved a massive expansion of Tesla’s robotaxi fleet across the entire county.
Tesla’s robotaxi footprint in Nevada just grew by roughly 500 times in a single regulatory vote.
The Nevada Transportation Authority approved Tesla’s full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit on Thursday, clearing the way for the company to deploy up to 5,000 driverless vehicles across Clark County over the next 12 months. The decision came during a four hour general session meeting that Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt watched live and reported on X, noting the vote replaces the interim order that had limited Tesla to just 10 robotaxis on a narrow stretch of the Las Vegas Strip.
EXCLUSIVE: Tesla has just officially received approval for its full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit in Nevada, clearing the way for Tesla to launch a paid public Robotaxi service in Las Vegas.
This officially allows @Tesla to deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis over the next… pic.twitter.com/DPs5UtUlrE
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 20, 2026
That earlier cap, covered here after it surfaced on August 13, came with restrictions that looked stricter than what Tesla runs in Austin: a 45 mph speed ceiling, no airport pickups, and a geofence confined to the Strip corridor. The new approval extends Tesla’s operating authority to all of Clark County, with room to request an even wider geofence across the state.
Tesla representatives at the meeting said they have no intention of putting 5,000 cars on the road right away. Commercial rides are expected to start within 30 days, pending vehicle inspections, insurance filings, and fare approval, the standard steps every robotaxi operator in Nevada has had to clear.
Tesla’s own Robotaxi account replied to the news with a short line, The golden future is upon us.
The timing lines up with Tesla’s broader robotaxi push this month. The company is preparing to open Cybercab rides to the public in Austin as soon as this month, and it opened a sweepstakes for riders to win a seat at the launch event. Tesla filed its original application for a 5,000 vehicle Nevada fleet back in June, a request regulators trimmed to 10 vehicles when they issued the interim order in July. Thursday’s vote effectively grants the number Tesla asked for from the start.
Zoox, the Amazon owned robotaxi operator, has run in Nevada since 2025 and was capped at 100 vehicles before Thursday’s decision. Tesla’s new ceiling puts it well ahead of that comparison on paper, though the company has said its actual fleet size will depend on how quickly FSD v15 rolls out, the software update executives have called the gateway to scaling unsupervised robotaxi operations nationwide.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.
Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.
The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”
Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”
Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”
Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.
Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.
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