Investor's Corner
Tesla’s Q2 Earnings Call and how it differs from 2020’s in a big way
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) is set to report Earnings for Q2 2021 later today. Just a year and four days after it revealed its financial performance for Q2 2020, its performance during the second quarter of this year is vastly different from that of last year. With an emerging need for the company’s vehicles and energy products, along with the potential to extend its quarterly profitability streak to eight consecutive quarters, let’s take a look at how the two quarters have differed and what is expected from analysts on the day of the call.
Q2 2020 vs. Q2 2021
Tesla’s Q2 2020 remains one of the biggest “what-ifs” in Tesla’s short and storied history. While the company was riding a wave of momentum due to its three straight reported quarters of profitability, speculation persisted that Tesla might have had issues extending this streak in Q2 ’20. It was a simple enough reason as well. The COVID-19 pandemic was ripping through the world, and Tesla, despite its apparent immunization when it comes to the global semiconductor shortage, was prone to uncertainty at its manufacturing plants that spanned from Buffalo to Shanghai.
The pandemic shut down the company’s main production facility in Fremont for most of the quarter. It affected the company’s trending growth of production throughout its vehicle manufacturing facilities, and Tesla reported lower production figures than in Q1 2020, dropping from 102,627 to 88,272. Deliveries, however, increased from 88,400 to 90,650.
Tesla navigated a difficult Q2 with better-than-anticipated numbers, beating Wall Street expectations with $6.036 billion in revenue, eclipsing Wall Street estimates of $5.146 billion.
In terms of deliveries and production figures, Tesla continued growth, rising from 180,338 production and 184,800 deliveries in Q1 2021 to 206,421 and 201,250 in Q2. These numbers were attributed to the mass-market Model 3 and Model Y, accounting for an overwhelming percentage of each category for each of 2021’s quarters so far. The Model S and Model X were not being produced during Q1, and deliveries of the Model S Plaid started in Q2. The Model X delivery timeline has not been detailed, but Tesla’s website states the vehicle is set to begin deliveries in January-February 2022.
Situations were vastly different from Q2 ’20 to Q2 ’21. Last year’s second quarter was widely up in the air on what Tesla would report. Its ability to hit profitability once again wasn’t much of a shock to Tesla bulls, but others were impressed by the continuing growth story despite tough economic times. The Q2 showing may have contributed to the automaker’s stock soaring into the stratosphere. Already on an upward trend, the stock would continue to increase in value, peaking out at $900.40.
What analysts are saying on the day of Tesla Earnings
Analysts have already put forth their expectations for Tesla’s Earnings Call later today, but some are still putting in their last two cents as market close comes closer.
Tesla investor and former critic Jim Cramer stated earlier today that he expects CEO Elon Musk to talk about competition and the upcoming release of the Tesla Cybertruck. Cramer sees Tesla’s imminent entrance into the pickup market as the company’s introduction to disrupting Ford’s domination of the U.S. passenger truck sector.
“What he [Elon] has to deal with for the first time is competition,” Cramer said. “Let’s see what he does with the challenge of others,” he added, sprinkling in details about Lucid’s introduction to the New York Stock Exchange earlier today.
Oppenheimer’s Colin Rusch, interestingly, said that the firm isn’t “super concerned about results this quarter.” Instead, Oppenheimer will be paying close mind to Tesla’s updates of the ongoing construction projects in Austin, Texas, and Germany at Giga Berlin, along with the progress of Full Self-Driving. “From a technology perspective, the progress on autonomy is really the heart of the matter if you’re making a bullish bet here,” Rusch said to Yahoo Finance.
Tesla recently announced that it would offer a $200 per month subscription version of the $10,000 Full Self-Driving suite. Rusch said there is potential for between 10 and 20 million customers during the latter half of this decade. “You get to some pretty heavy numbers from a cash flow perspective, and I think that’s what’s going to be at stake here for the next couple years.”
$TSLA Performance on Earnings Day
At the time of writing, Tesla stock was up over 2.1%, or $13.60, trading at around $656.88. The stock was up over 3% earlier in the day. The anticipation for an extended profitability streak and potential updates regarding the 4680 battery cell, Giga Texas, and the Cybertruck, may have contributed to the increase in price ahead of the call.
Tesla will report its Earnings for Q2 2021 tonight at 5:30 PM EST, 2:30 PM PST. Prior to the call, Tesla will issue its Q2 2021 Update Letter on the Investor Relations website.
Disclosure: Joey Klender is a TSLA Shareholder.
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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