Investor's Corner
Tesla short-seller and TSLA bull face off in classic Bull vs. Bear debate
The Quoth the Raven podcast recently hosted a debate between notable Tesla bear and SeekingAlpha contributor Montana Skeptic and Tesla bull and YouTube host Galileo Russell. Over the hourlong session, both bull and bear discussed issues from Tesla’s financial status, competition from other carmakers, and the company’s future.
MontanaSkeptic1 is an outspoken Tesla critic and a supporter of the bear thesis against the company. An interview with QTR on Seeking Alpha states that Montana has a JD from Yale Law School and manages a $1 billion portfolio. After graduating from Yale, Montana has 30 years experience as a trial lawyer. Montana also notes that he did not take a bearish stance on Tesla from the start. Rather, he states that after reading the company’s filings, he was reminded of Enron, an American energy, and commodities company that went defunct in 2001 after a scandal caused by accounting fraud.
Galileo Russell, on the other hand, is 25 years old but is a self-confessed “finance geek” who has a bullish stance on Tesla. Galileo studied Finance & Entrepreneurship at New York University – Leonard N. Stern School of Business. He currently runs a YouTube channel called HyperChange TV, where he discusses stocks such as TSLA, SNAP, AMZN and other tech companies. Galileo first made waves after he predicted Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods months before it was announced, but more recently rose to fame after having 23 minutes of airtime with Elon Musk during Tesla’s Q1 2018 earnings call.
The debate between the Tesla bull and bear adopted a structured format, with Montana and Galileo getting an equal amount of time to state their case for a particular topic. The hourlong debate started with a discussion on whether Tesla’s CapEx would be sufficient for the company’s future projects like the Model Y, Tesla Semi, Solar Roofs and its other upcoming products, followed by Tesla’s market share and sales in the United States. Elon Musk’s behavior on social media was also discussed. During these rounds, each side presented a number of compelling arguments, with Montana Skeptic pointing out Tesla’s losses every quarter and Galileo arguing that becoming a profitable car maker requires a heavy time investment. Both reached a consensus that Elon Musk should be more restrained on Twitter.
Ultimately, however, the Tesla bull focused on the long-term prospects of Tesla, as well as the potential of the company in the future, while the bear case is founded on skepticism that Tesla could deliver a $35,000 Model 3, the China Gigafactory, and compete with profitable automakers that have a proven history of manufacturing at scale. The final arguments of Montana and Galileo summed up their stance on the electric car maker.
“I think Tesla is just extraordinarily weak. It lives from capital raise to capital raise. But for a capital raise, it is always on the brink of insolvency. I think that other automakers have a huge advantage. They have a portfolio of products, and those products are largely profitable, and the fact that they are compelled to make EVs that don’t make economic sense, and would never be bought other than as niche performance products, absent huge subsidies. That makes a huge difference. They would be able to outpace Tesla. The interior of the Model 3 has become tired. It was never all that luxurious, and I think it won’t be the aspirational car much longer, especially when these other cars hit the market, and this is happening,” Montana said.
“If you see Tesla’s business unfold and that’s why if you compare them to all the old metrics and look at how much money they’re losing now, you’ve missed the entire story because you’re failing to appreciate just how rapidly Tesla is growing. This is a Silicon Valley company. Software is eating the world. Software is eating every single aspect and niche of the way we build cars, what’s in cars, how they run, how we interact with our cars. This is a totally, fundamentally different set of skills than building an internal combustion engine,” Galileo said.
Listen to the full Montana Skeptic vs. Galileo Russell debate in a recording of the Quoth the Raven podcast below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=190&=&v=LqKEP6j0qe0
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS –Â $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues –Â $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow –Â $1.444 billion
- Profit –Â $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Elon Musk
Tesla Earnings: financial expectations and what we should to hear about
In terms of discussions, Tesla earnings calls are usually a great time to get some clarification on the company’s outlook for its current and future projects.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) will report its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 this evening after the market closes, and analysts have already put out their expectations from a financial standpoint for the company’s first three months of the year.
Additionally, there will be plenty of things that will be discussed, including the recent expansion of the Robotaxi program, the Roadster unveiling, and Full Self-Driving (Supervised) approvals across the globe.
Financial Expectations
Wall Street consensus expectations put Tesla’s Earnings Per Share (EPS) at $0.36, while revenues are expected to come in around $22.35 billion.
This would compare to an EPS of $0.27 and $19.34 billion compared to Tesla’s Q1 2025. Last quarter, EPS came in at $0.50 on $29.4 billion of revenue.
Tesla beat analyst expectations last quarter, but the next trading day, the stock fell nearly 3.5 percent. We never quite can gauge how the market will respond to Tesla’s earnings; we’ve seen shares rise on a miss and fall on a beat.
It really goes on the news, and investor consensus, it seems.
What to Expect
In terms of discussions, Tesla earnings calls are usually a great time to get some clarification on the company’s outlook for its current and future projects. Right now, the big focus of investors is the Robotaxi program, the Roadster unveiling, and what the outlook for Full Self-Driving’s expansion throughout Europe and the rest of the world looks like.
Robotaxi
Tesla just recently expanded its unsupervised Robotaxi program to Dallas and Houston, joining Austin as the first cities in the U.S. to have access to the company’s ride-hailing suite.
Tesla expands Unsupervised Robotaxi service to two new cities
Some saw this move as a quick effort to turn attention away from a delivery miss and an anticipated miss on earnings. However, we’ve seen Tesla be more than deliberate with its expansion of the Robotaxi suite, so it’s hard to believe the company would make this move if it were not truly ready to do so.
The company is also working to expand its U.S. ride-hailing service outside of Texas and California, and recently filed paperwork to build a Robotaxi-exclusive Supercharger stall.
Expansion is planned for Florida, Nevada, and Arizona at some point this year, with more states to follow.
Roadster Unveiling
The Roadster unveiling was slated for April 1, and then pushed back (once again) to “probably late April,” according to Elon Musk.
It does not appear that the Roadster unveiling will happen within that time frame, at least not to our knowledge. Nobody has received media or press invites for a Roadster unveiling, and given the lofty expectations set for the vehicle by Musk and Co., it seems like something they’d want to show off to the public.
The Roadster has become a truly frustrating project for Tesla and its fans; evidently, there is something that is not up to the expectations Musk and others have. Meanwhile, fans are essentially waiting for something that is six years late.
At this point, also given the company’s focus on autonomy, it almost seems more worth it to just cancel it, remove any and all timelines and expectations, and surprise people with something crazy down the line, maybe in two or three years. There should be no talk of it.
Full Self-Driving Global Expansion
We expect Musk and Co. to shed some details on where it stands with other European government bodies, as it recently was able to roll out FSD (Supervised) to customers in the Netherlands.
Spain is also working with Tesla to assess FSD’s viability as a publicly available option for owners.
With that being said, there should be some additional information for investors as they listen to the call; no talk of it would be a pretty big letdown.
Optimus
There will likely be a date set for the Gen 3 Optimus unveiling, and we’re hopeful Tesla can keep that date set in stone and meet it. Not reaching timelines is a relatively minor issue, but a company can only do this for so long before its fans and investors start to lose trust and disregard any talk about dates.
It seems this is happening already.
Optimus has been pegged as Tesla’s big money maker for the future. The goals and expectations are high, but it is a privilege to have that sort of pressure when investors know the company’s capability.
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
