Investor's Corner
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2022 earnings results: Analysts’ revenue estimates met, EPS expectations exceeded
Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) posted its second-quarter 2022 earnings report after markets closed today. The results, which were discussed in the Q2 2022 Update Letter, were released after the closing bell on Wednesday, July 20, 2022.
Tesla faced headwinds in the second quarter, with the company producing a total of 258,580 vehicles and delivering 254,695. Tesla’s figures could be attributed to Giga Shanghai’s Covid-related shutdowns in April, which cost the company several weeks’ worth of vehicle production.
The following is a quick overview of Tesla’s Q2 2022 results.
REVENUE
Tesla posted total revenues of $16.934B billion with a gross profit of $4.234B billion. In comparison, analysts expected Tesla to post revenue of $16.9 billion. Overall, Tesla’s revenue grew 42% year-over-year.
EARNINGS PER SHARE
Tesla posted non-GAAP earnings per share of $2.27 per share. In comparison, analysts were expecting Tesla to post adjusted earnings per share of $1.83.
CASH
Tesla posted operating cash flow less CAPEX of $621 million in the second quarter. In total, the company was able to add $0.88 billion in its cash and cash equivalents to $18.3 billion in Q2 2022. Tesla noted that it converted approximately 75% of its Bitcoin purchases into fiat currency, bringing in $936M of cash to the company’s balance sheet.
PROFITABILITY
Tesla posted $2.5B GAAP operating income; 14.6% operating margin in Q2 2022, $2.3B GAAP net income; $2.6B non-GAAP net income (ex-SBC1) in the second quarter, and 27.9% GAAP automotive gross margin in Q2. Tesla’s operating income improved YoY to $2.5B in Q2, resulting in a 14.6% operating margin.
OTHER NOTABLE UPDATES
The Fremont factory was able to produce a record number of vehicles in the second quarter. The next generation of 4680 cell machinery has also been installed in Giga Texas. The new 4680 machinery are currently in the process of being commissioned.
Gigafactory Shanghai currently has a capacity of over 750,000 vehicles per year, but the facility will soon be able to produce more after its upgrades this month.
Giga Berlin exhibited strong production rate improvement at the end of the second quarter, with Tesla Germany producing more than 1,000 Model Y in one week. These vehicles are also equipped with 2170 cells, and thus still use more parts.
As for Full Self-Driving and Autopilot, the FSD Beta group has now increased to over 100,000 drivers. Tesla Vision is also now being used for other features such as tightening seatbelts earlier in certain crashes.
Tesla Energy deployments decreased by 11% year-over-year in the second quarter to just 1.1 GWh, mainly due to semiconductor challenges. Solar deployments increased by 25% YoY in Q2 to 106 MW, however.
Below is Tesla’s Q2 2022 Update Letter.
Disclaimer: I am long TSLA.
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Elon Musk
SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch
SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.
The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.
Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.
The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.
As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.
Elon Musk
Tesla AI boss reveals how big Optimus is going to get
Tesla’s Optimus chief corrected himself on X, confirming a staggering 10 million robot production target.
Tesla’s Optimus program has a new number attached to it, after Ashok Elluswamy, the executive who has run the humanoid robot program since June 2025, posted a three word correction on X Thursday, “Correction, 10 million robots.”
The line clarifies the long term annual capacity Tesla is building toward its planned second Optimus production line at Gigafactory Texas, a figure Musk has cited repeatedly since last year’s shareholder meeting.
The scale is worth noting, because ten million robots a year would mean Tesla building more units annually than most countries sell in new cars. Tesla has framed this as a second line, not the first. The buildout is happening in two phases: a roughly one million unit per year line inside Tesla’s Fremont factory, installed on the floor space vacated when Model S and Model X production ended earlier this year, and a much larger dedicated facility under construction at Giga Texas that broke ground on its first steel structure in May. That Texas facility is the one Elluswamy’s correction refers to, and is expected to reach volume production sometime in 2027.
Correction, 10 million robots https://t.co/0z4nyQNTzp
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) July 30, 2026
Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress
Elluswamy took over Optimus from Milan Kovac last summer and has spent the months since talking up the program’s trajectory. Elon Musk has also floated the ten million figure at Tesla’s 2025 shareholder meeting.
Ending Model S and Model X production to make room for the first Optimus line was one of the more consequential manufacturing decisions in the company’s recent history, retiring two flagship vehicles in favor of a robot that has yet to enter mass production. Musk has previously estimated per unit production costs at $20,000 to $25,000 once Tesla reaches a million units a year, though he hasn’t said what that cost looks like at ten times the volume.
Elon Musk
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.
The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.
SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters
Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.
SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.
With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.
Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.
Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.

