Tesla earnings day is upon us — the quarterly check in with one of the world’s largest EV makers and its controversial CEO Elon Musk.
Tesla’s fourth-quarter and full-year earnings are expected to be released Wednesday after market close. A webcast, in which Tesla management will answer questions from analysts and retail investors, is scheduled to begin at 5:30 p.m. ET.
Ever since Tesla’s public debut in June 2010, the quarterly report and accompanying earnings call has delivered surprises, often from Musk’s own mouth. This earnings — the first with Musk embedded in the Trump Administration — is poised to be its most action-packed yet.
Revenue and net income results are on our what-to-look-for checklist along with any guidance for 2025. Earlier this month, Tesla said it delivered 1.77 million vehicles globally in 2024, down 2.2% from 1.81 million in 2023. This was the first year-to-year drop in deliveries, and will likely translate to lower revenue unless other sectors in Tesla’s business can close the sales gap.
Tesla’s fourth-quarter delivery results did hint at some positive momentum heading into 2025. The company delivered 495,570 vehicles in the fourth quarter, 7% higher than Q3 and about 2.28% more than the same period in 2023.
Still, eyes will be on the financials, and ears will be listening for Musk to share their sales and profit expectations for 2025.
There are other nuggets we’ll be watching for, including any Musk comments about President Trump’s executive order to pause disbursement of funds from programs created by the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, including money for EV charging stations.
Of course, we’ll be watching for any updates on the long-delayed Tesla Roadster, progress with the Tesla Semi, and how its Supercharger network is handling non-Tesla vehicles.
Robotaxi dreams
But top on the list is how Musk will talk about his long-promised, never-delivered idea of making Tesla’s cars autonomous. It’s a promise that has kept the company’s stock price sky-high, and one that animated Musk to cut more than 10% of Tesla’s global workforce last year, when he said Tesla was going “balls to the wall for autonomy.”
It seems to be a priority ahead of the call — Tesla posted a video on Musk’s social media platform X Wednesday morning that showed the company is now apparently having finished cars drive themselves about a mile to a delivery prep parking lot.
Musk has claimed that Tesla will start letting people hail self-driving Teslas in Texas and California later this year, and Bloomberg News recently reported that the company has been talking with city officials in Austin and across Texas about launching such a service.
California is a more restrictive place to try to launch a robotaxi service. Companies like Waymo, which operates the only commercial robotaxi fleet in the U.S. at the moment, started with test vehicles and then ramped up to autonomous drives with safety operators, before removing humans from the driver’s seat. Texas, which loves Musk, seems more likely to let Tesla take riskier shortcuts on the path to achieving Musk’s dream.
Looking back
Those big ideas won’t change the company’s bottom line for 2024, though, which was looking iffy prior to the final quarter.
The company reported $25.2 billion in sales during the third quarter of 2024 and a $2.2 billion profit — nearly flat compared to the same quarter in 2023.
How close will the fourth quarter compare to the prior year’s? On a year-over basis, Tesla generated $25.17 billion revenue in the fourth-quarter of 2023 and reported a net income (on a GAAP basis) of $7.9 billion in the fourth quarter. This was an unusually outsized figure that included a one-time non-cash tax benefit of $5.9 billion for the release of valuation allowance on certain deferred tax assets.
The company’s operating income and its earnings on an adjusted basis, which was $2.06 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023, provided a clearer picture of its financial performance.
The company also continued to turn other automakers’ hesitancy to transition to full-electric lineups into free money throughout 2024, though there is some question as to how reliable that income stream will remain.
Tesla booked $739 million worth of sales of regulatory credits (which other companies buy to make up for their vehicle fleet emissions) in the third quarter last year, a huge amount second only to the previous quarter when the company sold credits totaling $890 million.
As is the case with so much of the Musk-Trump relationship, though, Tesla’s ambitions seem to clash with the new administration’s policies. Trump has said he wants to try to revoke California’s waiver that allows it to set its own emissions rules, which could nuke this source of free money Tesla has often relied on to stay profitable. This comes as Trump is already targeting a number of funding programs for EV charging that Tesla benefits from.