Investor's Corner
Tesla $TSLA Q2 2020 results: Recurring profit, beats Wall St. as business matures, S&P 500 in focus
Tesla’s (NASDAQ:TSLA) second-quarter earnings for 2020 saw the electric car maker post $6.036 billion in revenue, beating estimates from Wall Street. The results, which were discussed at length in an Update Letter, were released after the closing bell on Wednesday, July 22.
Tesla’s second quarter was hit by the pandemic. Yet despite the ongoing pressures from the coronavirus outbreak, Tesla managed to deliver over 90,000 vehicles in Q2, thanks to the Model Y building momentum in the United States and the Model 3 hitting its stride in China.
The following are the key points in Tesla’s Q2 2020 Update Letter.
REVENUE
Tesla reported revenue of $6.036 billion for the first quarter, beating Wall Street’s expectations. In contrast, Wall St. expected Tesla to report revenue of $5.146 billion, less than the $5.985 billion that the company reported in the first quarter. In comparison, Estimize, a crowdsourced platform that aggregates estimates from analysts, executives, fund managers, and academics, is a bit more optimistic, expected Tesla to post a revenue of $5.443 billion.
PROFITABILITY
Tesla reported a GAAP operating income of $327 million; 5.4% operating margin in the second quarter. A $104 million GAAP net income and $451 million non-GAAP net income was also reported by the company. With this, Tesla has achieved four quarters of profitability.
EARNINGS
Tesla shareholders saw non-GAAP earnings per share of $2.18 in the second quarter. In comparison, Wall Street expected Tesla to report a loss of $0.14 per share. Interestingly enough, Estimize’s numbers stand opposite to Wall Street, with the platform expecting Tesla to post a profit of $0.19 per share.
CASH
Tesla posted a $535 million increase in its cash and cash equivalents in the second quarter to $8.6B, while generating positive free cash flow of $418M. These, according to the electric car maker, will allow it to take on the second half of 2020 with a stronger stance.
“Our business has shown strong resilience during these unprecedented times. Despite the closure of our main factory in Fremont for nearly half the quarter, we posted our fourth sequential GAAP profit in Q2 2020 while generating positive free cash flow of $420M,” Tesla wrote.
KEY HIGHLIGHTS
- Next US Gigafactory site selected; preparations underway
- Increased Model S range to 402 miles (EPA)
- Model Y and China-made Model 3 production rates continue to increase
- 500,000 target unit deliveries for 2020 reaffirmed
- Tesla Semi deliveries planned for 2021
With such results, Tesla is poised to qualify for inclusion into the S&P 500, which requires a company to post four quarters of profit. The potential inclusion of Tesla into the index stands to benefit TSLA stock, as funds that are tracking and benchmarking against the S&P 500 would likely have to purchase shares. Such a scenario would likely push Tesla to new heights.
The results of Tesla’s second quarter earnings have been received enthusiastically by TSLA shareholders. As of writing, TSLA stock is trading 5.37% at $1,677.82 per share.
Tesla’s Q2 2020 Update Letter could be accessed below.
Q2’20 Update by Simon Alvarez on Scribd
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
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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