Investor's Corner
Morgan Stanley stops Tesla (TSLA) equity coverage, Elon Musk tempers social media use
Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA) is up ~3% in early Tuesday trading amid reports that Morgan Stanley has stopped its equity coverage of the company. As of writing, Morgan Stanley’s website currently shows that Tesla had been moved from “Equal-weight” to “Not Rated.”
Neither Tesla nor Morgan Stanley has issued a formal statement about why the financial firm ceased its coverage of the electric car maker. Nevertheless, speculations have now emerged that Tesla might have reached an agreement with Morgan Stanley to have the investment bank serve as a financial advisor for the company’s possible privatization. Just last week, analyst David Tamberrino revealed that Goldman Sachs is serving as a financial advisor to Tesla for the company’s go-private initiative. Prior to the release of Tamberrino’s update, Goldman Sachs also stopped its equity coverage of Tesla.
Apart from Morgan Stanley possibly serving as a financial advisor to the electric car maker, reports also emerged that Norway’s wealth fund could stay as a Tesla investor even if the company goes private. This was addressed by Trond Grande, the deputy CEO of Norway’s $1 trillion wealth fund in a statement to Reuters. Norway’s wealth fund had a 0.48% stake in the carmaker as of the beginning of 2018, which is worth about $253 million.
“The priority is to try to preserve the value for the fund. That is the priority. If that means that the fund will be invested in a company that has been delisted for a period of time, that could happen,” Grande said.
Tesla stock had been particularly volatile since Elon Musk tweeted earlier this month that funding had been secured for the company to go private at $420 per share. Immediately after Musk’s Twitter announcement, Tesla stock soared, closing the day up 11% at $379.57 per share. Tesla stock has taken a steady trek down in the days that followed, as questions emerged about the source of funding Musk mentioned in his tweet. The company’s stock hit a low of $288.20 on Monday’s early day trading, before recovering and ending the day at $308.44 per share.
There is little doubt that Tesla’s current volatility was caused in no small part by Elon Musk’s social media activities. Had Musk not announced that funding was secured for Tesla’s privatization on Twitter, the CEO would have escaped much of the criticism being directed towards him today. And this is not the first time Musk’s social media activities affected Tesla’s stock either. When Musk had a row with a British cave explorer about his efforts to help rescue a stranded soccer team in Thailand, for example, Musk’s Twitter activities partly fueled a drop in Tesla stock. In an interview with Bloomberg‘s Tom Randall last month, Elon Musk mentioned that he would try to temper himself more on social media, particularly Twitter.
“I have made the mistaken assumption—and I will attempt to be better at this—of thinking that because somebody is on Twitter and is attacking me that it is open season. And that is my mistake. I will correct it,” he said.
Today, Elon Musk appears to have taken a significant step towards tempering his social media use even further. Musk has been using Twitter and Instagram to post updates about his companies and his personal life, but today, his Instagram page appears to have been taken offline. Navigating to Musk’s page, which had 8.4 million followers, now shows a page stating that the profile might have been deleted.
Elon Musk’s use of social media is pretty much a double-edged sword for Tesla. On the one hand, it enables him to interact with his company’s fans and customers directly, but on the other hand, it could also result in him causing harm to Tesla stock. As more pieces of the puzzle seemingly emerge with regards to Tesla’s privatization, it appears that the deletion of Musk’s Instagram page might be a step towards the CEO adopting a more cautious online stance on the company’s privatization.
As of writing, Tesla stock is showing more recovery, up 3.23% at $318.41 per share.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
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 – $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
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 gets a massive order for the Semi: 370 units and $100M
Tesla begins factoring international designs in Full Self-Driving visualization
