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Tesla Stock Soars 16+% in 1 Day
Tesla’s Model S sedan is red hot.
By Silicon Valley standards, 10-year-old Tesla Motors is middle-aged. But in the world of automotive startups, it’s just crossed a threshold few fledgling companies ever get near: profitability. Late last night California time — in time to make it clear this was no April Fools joke — the company announced it has delivered 4750 cars in the first quarter and expected to report an accounting profit when it announces its official results next month. While the company’s vehicles lack engines, in the past 6 months, it’s begun to hit on all cylinders:
- Shipments of the Model S sedan begin late last year with 2400 delivered in the fourth quarter. The company nearly doubled that in the next 3 months.
- Tesla launched its high-speed “Supercharger” charging stations, which allow recharging half the battery pack in about 30 minutes. Last week, it announced plans to expand the network in the Pacific northwest, Texas, Illinois, and Florida, while improving coverage in the initial regions in the northeast and California.
- The company announced a plan to pay back its Department of Energy loan 5 years ahead of schedule, by the end of 2017. This $465 million loan, part of the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, was essential to the launch of the Model S and came at a time when Tesla’s future was very much in doubt.
Today, though, that future looks bright enough that the naysayers holding more than 30 million shares short may be wishing they were betting against something else. CEO Elon Musk mentioned on Twitter last week that he had a big announcement to make regarding Tesla (due tomorrow) and clarified last night that this isn’t it: “Also, some may differ, but imo the Tues news is arguably more important,” he wrote. Depending on the nature of that, I may be back with another post.
There was some more interesting news in yesterday’s press release on profitability. The company canceled an option to buy the Model S with the smallest battery, a version that retailed for just around $52,000 after the federal tax credit. Why? Lack of demand. It seems only 4% of buyers were opting for that smallest configuration. They’ll still get it, but instead of producing a battery that small, Tesla will sell them a car with the mid-sized battery and disable part of the capacity in software. If owners — present or future — wish to upgrade to the larger capacity, Tesla will allow them to purchase some software magic to make it happen. The mid-sized battery offers a range of just over 200 miles per the EPA and the smallest battery has about 2/3 the capacity. Given there was a $10,000 gap between the two, it’s noteworthy that people were rejecting the smallest battery so clearly.
This points out the radically different approach Tesla is taking versus Nissan with the Leaf and really everyone else building electric vehicles right now. The two sizes of Tesla people are choosing are 200+ mile vehicle while the other brands are sold as 70-80 mile commuter vehicles. Apparently, a “tweener” that gets around 140 miles wasn’t something Tesla customers wanted and might not be appealing to much of anyone as it doesn’t really address the “go almost anywhere” problem Tesla is solving and doesn’t really do much for commuters. (More than 80% of commutes in the U.S. can be made roundtrip in a Leaf.)
In addition to eliminating the small battery, Tesla also decided to build access to the Supercharger network in every car. It was already standard with the largest battery and is still an option with the smaller one, but now you can decide to add the option after purchase because — again — it’s a software change. The Superchargers are free “fill-ups” along highway corridors, but those with the smaller battery will pay $2000 for the privilege. This software-upgradeable car might not be as much of a milestone as a 200+ mile EV is, but it has already become a hallmark of the way Tesla works and really shows how Silicon Valley DNA can be an important part of this 21st century automaker.
When the company announced its earnings last quarter, the news actually disappointed investors. On some level, that was odd because the quarter inherently represented a transition where production was ramping up and it would be hard to really get a sense of what the business looked like on a steady-state basis. This quarter, however, is going to provide a very real snapshot into Tesla as a business. Through the rest of 2013 and well into next year, the company is likely to look as it does this quarter, with small improvements in unit shipments and gross margin over each quarter until the company begins delivering its Model X crossover late in 2014. None of that is likely exciting to watch, but it is likely to be material financially.
If deliveries do creep into the range of 6000-7000 per quarter — which is expected — and the company hits its gross margin goal of 25% by year end, this quarter’s profit is going to be pretty small compared to the ones set to come. It’s this kind of steady profitable growth upon which you build a company that will be around for a long time to come. And with the focus on larger batteries and more Superchargers, Tesla seems to be saying its cars are going to run long and far as well.
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.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
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 – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
- Profit – $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
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
