Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) is heading into what could be its most important earnings results yet, with the company riding a momentum that has built up since the dip that resulted from the results of its Q3 vehicle production and delivery reports. With Q3 2019’s earnings call just around the corner, here are Wall Street’s current expectations for the Silicon Valley-based electric car maker.
Earnings
Thirty-three analysts polled by FactSet expect Tesla to report an adjusted loss of $0.46 a share for the third quarter of 2019. This contrasts with an adjusted profit of $2.90 per share that Tesla exhibited in Q3 2018, a period that surprised critics with its GAAP and adjusted per-share profits.
On the other hand, Estimize, a crowdsourcing platform that aggregates estimates from Wall Street analysts, buy-side analysts, company executives, academics, fund managers, and the like, expects Tesla to show an adjusted loss of $0.29 per share.
Revenue
FactSet analysts expect the electric car maker to report sales of $6.45 billion, down from $6.82 billion from Q3 2018. This is partly due to the majority of the company’s deliveries now being focused on the much more affordable Model 3 sedan, which is shipping in higher volumes compared to the flagship Model S and X. Compared to the flagship sedan and SUV, the Model 3 is yet to prove that it can be a fully profitable vehicle for Tesla. Q3 2019 could thus be a pivotal point for the all-electric sedan.
Estimize, on the other hand, expects Tesla to show a revenue of $6.60 billion.
The stock so far
Tesla shares have experienced a steep fall in 2019, losing around 22% of its value and down less than 1% in the past 12 months. This compares unfavorably to the S&P 500, which has gains of 20% and 16%, respectively; as well as the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which has shown an advance of 9% and 7% for the 12-month period.
Analysts polled by FactSet have an average price target of $269.67 for TSLA stock. That’s an upside of about 4% from the electric car maker’s current levels.
Analysts’ Take
David Whiston, an analyst with Morningstar, is optimistic about the electric car maker’s chances for Q3 2019. Despite the declining numbers for the lower-volume but profitable Model S and X, Whiston believes that he remains “cautiously optimistic” about the electric car maker.
“With Tesla young and trying to scale up, I’m always interested in their free cash flow or burn for a quarter. That’s the most important thing to me because it’s a measure of health and ultimately of its ability to service its debt. The shift to the Model 3 while Model S and Model X sales are declining, plus increased costs with a raft of planned new vehicles and investments in driverless-car technologies “always create the question of: ‘Is volume sufficient enough to make up for reinvesting in the business?’ Tesla is a long-term story, and one quarter is unlikely to make or break the company,” he said.
Bill Selesky, an analyst with Argus Research, is also convinced that demand for Tesla’s vehicles remain robust despite the stock’s headwinds this year. “Tesla still enjoys strong demand for its vehicles, especially for the Model 3, and from people who did not put down deposits. That’s a good sign for me, telling me that things continue to get better on the demand side. They just need to get production issues corrected and focus on cost controls,” he said.
Tesla will be posting its financial results for Q3 2019 after the market closes on Wednesday, October 23, 2019. The company would be issuing a brief advisory with a link to its Q3 2019 Update Letter, which will be accessible from Tesla’s Investor Relations website. A live Q&A session is set for 3:30 p.m. Pacific Time (6:30 p.m. Eastern Time) to discuss the electric car and energy company’s financial results and outlook.
As of writing, TSLA stock is trading +0.55% at $254.90 per share.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
Elon Musk
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
SpaceX’s Starship flew successfully Friday, landing both stages and deploying its first Starlink V3 satellites.
Starship’s thirteenth test flight delivered exactly what SpaceX needed with a clean liftoff, two successful stage recoveries, and the first real payload the vehicle has ever carried to space. Booster 20 and Ship 40 lifted off at 5:51 p.m. CT from Starbase, and by the time the mission wrapped roughly an hour later, both halves of the rocket had done exactly what they were supposed to do.
Booster 20 separated from Ship 40 a few minutes into the flight and stuck a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about six minutes after liftoff. That is a meaningful turnaround from Flight 12 in May, when the booster lost several engines during its boostback burn before a hard water landing attempt.
Starship as seen from Starlink satellites pic.twitter.com/e2hvfmnewh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2026
Starship 40’s performance was arguably the bigger win. The vehicle deployed the first 20 operational Starlink V3 satellites Starship has ever carried, then flew a suborbital arc to a landing in the Indian Ocean that SpaceX commentator Dan Huot called the company’s softest splashdown yet. “This is a dream scenario for this team that’s trying to get this heat shield data,” Huot said on the live broadcast, according to Space.com’s live coverage. “I’m a little over the moon right now. Wow. Lucky number 13.”
Unlike the mass simulators SpaceX flew on Flight 12, these were production Starlink V3 satellites, meant to extend solar arrays and antennas and attempt to link with the broader constellation before reentering minutes later. Getting real hardware through a full deploy sequence on only the second flight of the V3 generation keeps Starship on schedule for the payload work NASA is counting on for future Artemis lunar landings.
What an awesome launch, really seems like everything went super well and it was all incredibly smooth.
SpaceX is awesome. Very interested to see how the market will respond on Monday pic.twitter.com/KSHmyBfV55
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 25, 2026
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 25, 2026
The flight also arrives at a moment when SpaceX needed a win. SPCX has traded below its $135 IPO price since mid-July, as Teslarati reported when the mission slipped to Friday, and short interest has climbed to roughly a third of the tradable float. A clean flight will not fix a balance sheet, but it does answer the one question SpaceX absolutely needed answered this week: whether the fixes made after the July 16 abort would hold up under real flight conditions. They did, on both stages, on the first try after the redesign.
SpaceX has not set a target date for Flight 14, though the company has said it wants to push toward an orbital attempt on the next mission. After Friday, that goal looks a lot more within reach.
Tesla short sellers won big following the company’s massive fall on Wall Street after it reported subpar Earnings on Wednesday.
Tesla short sellers collected about $4.12 billion in single-day profits on Thursday, according to Bloomberg. Shares fell as much as 15 percent during Thursday’s session. It closed as one of the worst days for Tesla on Wall Street in the past three years.
Investors sold off the stock after Tesla said it would aggressively direct its spending toward AI and its Optimus robot project. The company had record revenues, which were driven by one of the strongest quarters in terms of vehicle deliveries in company history.
However, it missed EPS estimates by reporting just $0.33, a far cry from the $0.53 analysts expected.
S3 Partners reported that about 3 percent of Tesla’s outstanding stock is sold short. Managing Director at S3, Ihor Dusaniwsky, provided the short seller’s potential profit, as well as another figure: shorts have likely had paper gains of $8.92 billion this year, as Tesla shares are down 30 percent in 2026.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla has burned short sellers many times in the past, but the company’s latest Earnings Call was a chance for those skeptics to taste some payback. Although the company gave some very transparent information regarding future projects, the rollout of Robotaxi, Optimus, and Semi, many investors took their profits on Thursday.
Notable short sellers like Michael Burry have been transparent about their skepticism around Tesla shares. Burry just revealed three weeks ago that he had opened up a new short on the stock, stating he shorted Tesla shares at $416.22. “Happy it jumped back to this level,” he said in a blog post.
At the time of publication, Tesla shares were down about 3 percent and the stock was trading at $309.92.
Tesla stock (NASDAQ: TSLA) endured one of its sharpest single-day declines in years on July 23, tumbling approximately 14.5 percent and closing near $320 after opening the session around $374. The drop erased more than $140 billion in market value amid heavy trading volume and left the shares at multi-week lows.
The sell-off followed the company’s second-quarter 2026 results, released the previous evening. Tesla reported record revenue of $28.2 billion, up 26 percent year over year, driven by a Q2-record 480,126 vehicle deliveries. Energy storage deployments also rose strongly.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Yet profitability disappointed sharply. Operating income fell 57 percent to $398 million, compressing the operating margin to just 1.4 percent. Non-GAAP earnings per share came in at $0.33, well below the roughly $0.53 analysts had expected. Free cash flow turned negative by $1.1 billion as capital expenditures surged 142 percent to $5.8 billion, largely tied to accelerated spending on artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous systems.
The losses on capex were expected, as Tesla said it would be spending heavily in 2026.
Investors also reacted to lingering uncertainty surrounding key product timelines. During the Earnings Call, management reiterated ambitions for Robotaxi deployment and the Optimus humanoid robot, but offered limited new concrete milestones, renewing questions about execution pace that have long accompanied Tesla’s ambitious roadmap.
The magnitude of the decline places it among Tesla’s more severe one-day percentage losses since its 2010 initial public offering. Historically, the two largest single-day drops (split-adjusted) remain September 8, 2020, when shares fell 21.1 percent amid broader market volatility and valuation concerns, and January 13, 2012, with a 19.3 percent plunge during the company’s early growth struggles.
Other notable declines include an 18.6 percent drop on March 16, 2020, at the onset of pandemic-related market turmoil. Thursday’s move ranks roughly ninth on the all-time list but stands out as the steepest in more than a year.
Despite the short-term pain, Tesla’s long-term trajectory has repeatedly recovered from such volatility. The latest results underscore both the strength of its core automotive and energy businesses and the near-term costs of heavy investment in next-generation technologies.
Tesla flexes incredible Robotaxi metric that skeptics will hate
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
