Oh man. I just listened to the $TSLA call and it's very cringe-worthy. Tesla was up ~4% on what seemed like a beat before the call and after the call, the stock ended down.
Tomorrow might be even worse as people start to digest all the info. Energy business, which was supposed to be growing rapidly and make up for the car-business shortfall, is down y-o-y.
The Fremont factory conversion getting ready for Optimus, appears to be behind schedule based on Elon's comments.
They set expectations that CapEx growth is going to be massive going forward as Tesla continues to invest in AI and factories.
Slow Robotaxi rollout was initially blamed on regulators, then later Elon gave lots of examples of edge cases that he thought were so funny, but the issues need to be resolved before rollout. This is something that many people have been saying for a long time. Being "scared of crossing railroad tracks" is no joke!
Then the whole HW3 fiasco...Finally another admission that HW3 will never achieve FSD. So many people paid between $6K - $15K for HW3. The lawsuits around this are not going to be good.
Then there's the recurring New Roadster demo, which is perpetually a month away and always continues to be a month away! 🤣
With a PE of 214, you can't even say "but look at the future" because the forward PE is expected to be even worse at 248!
Ouch.
As someone who held $TSLA stock for ~9 years (2015 to 2024), I can't help wonder what people see in it today?
My thoughts on Tesla’s Q1 2026 earnings:
It’s become clear that 2026 will not be the breakthrough year that Tesla investors would’ve hoped - at least from an earnings perspective.
There’s been a softening of language on the biggest levers that Tesla will pull to materially increase its valuation.
Robotaxi scale was softened to “depends on what you mean by scale”. Optimus in any meaningful volume is not happening until 2027 due to the time it takes to revamp the Fremont line (understandable). The showcase of the Bot is being reserved until summer of this year - which could get pushed out again.
On the positive end, demand for Tesla vehicles appears to be increasing, and adoption of FSD is accelerating. This can be seen in the auto margins, which allowed Tesla to have one of their best in a while in a seasonally depressed quarter.
What we should see is as Tesla’s production re-accelerates, the cost per unit of production will come down, while the net price per vehicle will go up as more and more people purchase FSD subscriptions. This means that margins on the auto business should continue to rise.
This should give Tesla the best large-scale auto margins in the world into 2027. This should materially increase again when Tesla releases Unsupervised FSD for the HW4 fleet, which my guess is will come at a premium. I find it hard to see Tesla charging $99 a month for a personal chauffeur where you no longer have to pay attention. The premium on that is far greater. Imagine being able to do whatever you want in your car while it takes you to point A to point B. Big deal!
Another positive (depending how you look at it) is that there’s maximum clarity on HW3 vehicles not achieving Unsupervised, and Tesla will a) offer a discounted trade-in rate on HW3 vehicles that purchased FSD outright and b) will work to upgrade the vehicles to HW4 so that they can be Unsupervised. This is because a car that is a Robotaxi is worth FAR MORE than one that isn’t, and even if the cost to retrofit a HW3 car was $10k+ or more, Tesla would make the money back (and then some) in fares.
Basically a no brainer, if the path for an upgrade actually exists, which now we’ve gotten confirmation that there is.
In the next 12 months, I think Tesla’s biggest catalyst (by far) is the adoption of FSD on a growing fleet of vehicles that will eventually go unsupervised, which will give Tesla recurring revenue at 80%+ margin on a fleet of vehicles that will continue to grow over time, and as regulations allow it.
If you fast forward to the end of 2027, Tesla should be able to have over 5 million cars generating at least $99 per month in recurring monthly revenue, almost all of which drops down to the bottom line, because the cost of the hardware and compute is already baked into the business. That’s roughly $6 billion in net income per year added to the bottom line, and growing. That’s ~166 P/E at a $1T valuation on growing software revenue AND margins. To me, that seems pretty fair. Honestly, might even be undervalued. Just look at Palantir.
This is while the company needs to invest heavily on CAPEX for Optimus, Cybercab, and Terafab, all of which are extremely important for the company’s long-term trajectory.
The question now becomes how fast can Tesla materially increase FSD revenue at 80%+ while it waits to ramp Robotaxi & Optimus.
Overall, IMO, very good quarter for the long term prospects. The acceleration in FSD adoption is a big signal that says Tesla is capable of capitalizing on recurring revenue, and as the software gets to unsupervised, it should increase materially in the coming quarters.
But as far as the next 12 months go, it continues to be a waiting game on the biggest levers for Tesla.
NFA.
$TSLA
Elon on when @Tesla FSD Unsupervised will reach customer owned cars: "I'm just guessing, but probably Q4 of this year. We would release it gradually if a particular geography is confirmed to be safe."
Elon on FSD V14.3: It is the last piece of the puzzle for Unsupervised FSD. But we have a lot of major architectural improvements (coming), so I think it's not going to make sense for us to deploy large scale robtotaxi before deploying those improvements.
Elon Musk on what milestones Tesla is targeting for Unsupervised FSD and Robotaxi expansion beyond Austin this year:
"We certainly hope to have Robtaxi operating in, idk, a dozen or so states by the end of this year. We're taking a very cautious approach. We haven't had any injuries. We want to keep it that way. I think probably Unsupervised revenue will not be super material this year, but probably will be material in a significant way next year."