Sunshine

[Gali @Gfilche]

$TSLA Q2 2026 Earnings Call Notes (Gali Style) 🤓📝

Elon Opening remarks: Great quarter, record Q2 deliveries, Model Y best-selling car of any kind in the world (I think), In locations with FSD approval we’re seeing a very high take rate. People buying cars just for FSD

FSD is a significant demand driver. As approval ramps to other countries, I think we’ll see a similar acceleration in demand

Energy business growing “incredibly fast”, will be crucial for artificial intelligence/data centers

Investing a lot, massive CAPEX year, preparing for the future. Things were investing in will yield incredible return. Best CAPEX returns we’ve ever seen

Cybercab has started production. Optimus starting production very soon. Tesla Semi has started production. Megapack production starting soon. Ramping battery cell production. Also preparing to do a massive solar panel/cell production, all the way from Silicon refinement to deploying the cell

We’re working on the most ambitious advanced technology buildout in history

Robtoaxi goals are very ambitious. But we are being super cautious about causing any accidents or harm to anyone. Although there are 40,000 automotive deaths each year in the US, they generate almost no press. But if Tesla injures one person it’s worldwide headlines news, regulators could clamp down actives. We’re going as fast as possible to scale Robotaxi, while ensuring we don’t harm anyone, or even run over a pet.

We’re providing live updates on X (Robotaxi account) as we scale to new cities. Expanding in Florida and Texas. Will continue to scale very rapidly. More than 10% per week in terms of miles driven

Optimus. Will be biggest product ever. But very complex to solve. One of the hardest things to do is make an autonomous humanoid robot that you simply ask it do to a task. It can watch a video and do it, without any programming. Many challenges with dexterity, and surviving lots of wear and tear. Hardest production ramp we’ve ever done at Tesla. Everything is new, and needs new supply chains. Optimus will follow normal S curve of manufacturing, but initial portion of S curve will be very flat and long. You’ve seen lot of robot demos online, but they are preprogrammed or controlled. Optimus will be the first robot to do these tasks by itself. It will have human hand level dexterity. Human hand is an incredible thing. Optimus will have human, then superhuman level dexterity.

Terafab. Expect to announce a location soon. And will provide more details then. Will leave that info for the launch announcement. It will be big, and deserves its own spotlight, not squeezed into an earnings call. Have to solve memory logic and packaging to scale. Have placed equipment orders for development fab in Austin. Dev fab is pretty cool. Will have a very fast iterative cycle to try out new chip designs. Building will be first of its kind on earth. Will try high risk and high payoff bets on AI chips.

Digital Optimus. Basically driving a computer screen like you drive a car. For the car its pixels in, controls out. Digital Optimus will be the same. Will be a self driving computer essentially. Digital Optimus is important for physical Optimus. Because physical Optimus will need to know how to work computers. This is in partnership with SpaceX’s Grok. Grok will tell Optimus what to do, provides it a series of tasks, then optimus does them.

Megapod. Building out design with AI computers. Digital Optimus in a box. We have 7GW of power at superchargers and growing. We can place Megapods at many of these and have distributed power for AI. Could be quite a big deal.

So much happening, hard to squeeze into an earnings call. It’s going to be one of the best years ever for Tesla. Next year will be even better.

CFO Remarks:

Q2 continued Q1 trends of resurgence in demand. Exited Q2 with largest automotive backlog since 2023. Production growth limited by supply chain, electrical components.

Sales data is showing, FSD is one of the main reasons people are buying cars. 55% of deliveries in NA had FSD subscriptions at the time of vehicle delivery.

Nearly 1.5M paid subscriptions (about 45% subscriptions, 55% lifetime purchases).

Automotive margins (excluding credits) declined. Came from warranty changes and tariff relief. Excluding those, margins would be almost flat.

Energy business is lumpy. Tied to customer timelines. It was the 2nd largest quarter for energy. Energy gross margins declined from 29% to 20%. Because of warranty true up ($240M), also tariffs benefits from Q1 did not repeat. ASPs for industrial storage going down because of competition. Long term the energy business will stay at 20-25% gross margins.

Service margins hit 14.1%, all time high. Operating expenses ramped, because of R&D with Semi, Optimus, Cybercab and other AI initiatives. Also costs related bringing AI compute online. We are in a big investment cycle. R&D will continue to grow in 2026 and beyond.

Net income was positively impacted by $1B in SpaceX equity gains.

Free cash flow was negative for the quarter, as guided. Because of CAPEX doubling sequentially. It will increase further in the 2nd half of 2026. CAPEX for this year will be above $25B. It will grow for the next few years as we keep investing in Robotaxi, Optimus, Terafab, Solar, etc …

SAY Q&A

Ashok answering …

Robotaxi questions were many, so providing a comprehensive view.

Robotaxi going very well. Impeccable safety record. Over 380,000 miles unsupervised. 0 notable incidents. Want to emphasize 0 incidents so far. Everyone said we needed LIDAR, but we are showing that is not true. This record is a huge validation of Tesla’s AI push.

Scaling. We started just one year ago in Austin. Had safety monitors back then. We’ve grown at compounding rate week over week with unsupervised miles.

Robotaxi fleet is already running versions of V15 FSD software. We planned 7 major improvement tracks in FSDv15, we’re making progress on all of them. Car is riduclously safe and capable. All tech improvements are working, and expect the payoff to be huge. And we will sustain the same growth rate through the rest of this year and beyond.

Cybercab. It’s phenomal product. Anyone who rides in it falls in love with the experience. Exponential growth will continue for foreseeable future. Cybercab will be awesome.

Data for Optimus training. (I got distracted, Elon replied to one of my tweets while listening lol)

AI strategy for Optimus is the same thing as FSD. Pixels in, controls out. Optimus will be easy. Can ask it to do anything, and it will just do it. V15 software works on Optimus as well.

ANALYST QUESTIONS (worried they might be boring, uh oh)

Big pause, still on mute … lol classic.

Are suppliers helping to ramp Optimus? Elon answering: Suppliers have been great. Making big investments in support of Optimus and Robotaxi. Samsung and TSMC in particular are building Fabs. Putting in $10Bs to build AI compute for Optimus and Robotaxi. Panasonic investing Billions in increasing battery cell production. Also like to thank Micron for memory allocation. They had to make tough decisions there, and gave Tesla significant allocation at good terms.

Lars coming in… for Robotaxi regulation. Getting support from NHTSA. State to state regulators not ideal, especially New Jersey. Tesla going to let the performance speak for itself (safety data is my guess).

Elon answering … Robotaxi will be vertically integrated, like other business. Won’t have demand challenges because economics will be so good. Demand will be bigger than supply. Really just going through the march of 9s of reliability. It’s the only thing constraining growth in Robotaxi.

Analyst asking about Tesla / SpaceX combining … (uh oh) lol.

Elon answering … Many collabs between Tesla and Space. Especially Terafab. Going to be a gigantic project. Can talk about combining companies on earnings calls, needs an appropriate process.

Other guy chimes in .. .We are benefiting from our partnership with SpaceX. Deepend our partnership with an investment in SpaceX. Grok in the car. Grok helping with digital Optimus. Starlink integrated into Cyebrcab. Soon all of vehicles. For Robotaxis you need cell coverage everywhere. Starlink will allow people to watch 4K live sports in the car.

Robotaxi question … only dozens of cars in each market, why not scale Austin instead of other cities?

Ashok answering … Want to prove the stack works in a lot of different cities without much effort. Growth rate has been exponential … early part of exponential. Vehicles are in continuous operation, so even with a few vehicles you can get a lot of miles out of them. Want to operate a very efficient fleet, optimizing for lots of miles per vehicle in the fleet. Before go high in terms of deployment have to get the infrastructure built out.

Elon chimes in… Cybercab has a new vehicle chassee. This means we need to put lots of testing into it to validate.

Lars chiming in … Regulations different city by city and state by state. Expanding city by city is to meet those requirements one at a time.

Analyst question.. Anything at federal level needed to unlock Cybercab? Lars says no, not really.

Elon .. Very serious shortage of truckers in USA right now. Autonomous Semi is very important to address that. Focusing self driving efforts on high volume vehicles for now. Taking back seat for 6 months for Cybercab. But working next year and the scale up to high production of the Tesla Semi.

You could use starlink terminals in Tesla cars as cell towers / connectivity towers for providing relays on the ground to cells phones or anyone who needs Wifi.

Optimus has lots of specialized electronics , and circuits boards, custom designed for Tesla. For Optimus V4 built in Austin, will be much more vertically integrated. Going for 10M units year, vs 1M units year for Fremont. Will be doing PCB work in house for the V4 Optimus.

AI5 Chip will initially go into Optimus. Tesla chip team is doing great work, making great progress on AI5. Very excited about Tesla AI6 chip. Will be best AI computing chip in the world.

Question.. Pace and path of CAPEX.

Elon … We should be spending CAPEX as fast as we can, without it being “too wasteful”. Not aiming for some extreme high efficiency capital spend because that slows things down. It’s a balance between capital efficiency versus time. Overall pretty happy with how things are going. So much construction going on in so many regions. No company is investing like we are … maybe Henry Ford with the Model T .. but probably fastest industrial scale up since WW2 for America.

CFO .. all of spend on CAPEX is on productive assets. We’re all in on scaling factories.

Analyst … question on Energy storage. Is it peak shaving demand? Is it a quality of power for datacenters??

Elon answers … Not just peak shaving, but grid balancing. Balancing power from wind generation and solar generation, our batteries are awesome for this. Solar + batteries is how most energy will be produced in the future. That’s how Starlink works. Earth is like a giant satellite. Megapack will be useful for getting more energy from the grid for AI. Best way to scale energy in the US is batteries. We have 1.2-3 Terawatt capacity in us, but only using 0.5. We could double the energy of the US with just batteries. We see demand for Megapack being very very high in the future.

Call ends .. techno music resumes

[Dillon Loomis @DillonLoomis]

With Tesla's Q2 earnings call this week, I'm sadly going in with much different expectations. I really don't know how much we can believe of what Tesla and Elon say

I'm only sharing this with the hope that Elon and Tesla will recalibrate and learn to underpromise and overperform rather than the opposite which creates new, unnecessary attack vectors and disillusionment of many Tesla fans and investors. If these goals are so uncertain, please just don't share them. Say whatever you want internally, but to say them publicly and not even get close does nothing but hurt the company and many following it

In just a few of the most recent calls Elon said the following:

Q2 '25: "I believe half of the population of the US will be covered by Tesla's Robotaxi by the end of the year."

Reality: not even close

Q3 '25: "We do expect to be operating robotaxi in, I think, about eight to ten metro areas by the end of the year."

Reality: 1

Q3 '25: "We expect to be operating in Nevada, Florida, and Arizona by the end of the year."

Reality: none

Q4 '25: "In terms of taxi vehicles carrying paid customers, I think we're well over 500 at this point between the Bay Area and Austin. This will probably double every month type of thing."

Reality: number largely stayed flat and Unsupervised is much smaller

I love Tesla and have been a superfan for well over a decade. I'm not here for short term $TSLA performance. But this is far more than just a one-off mistake or single moment of hubris. This is clearly a trend and as someone who holds Tesla to a higher standard, I'd love to see them do better with setting expectations. And further, if you do miss a timeline that was very public, communicating the reasons transparently would go a very long way to maintaining credibility going forward

[jay plemons @jayplemons]

David Sacks just delivered an economics masterclass on Elon becoming the world’s first trillionaire.

@davidsacks: “People see the headline and imagine Elon suddenly has a trillion dollars in the bank. That’s not how it works. His balance sheet didn’t change overnight.”

Why?

The real point is deeper. Wealth isn’t in the “stuff” we consume. Food, shelter, clothes. Things that depreciate and disappear. It’s in the machines that create stuff for decades: tools, workflows, and corporations.
These are the true engines of human progress.

“If you create a machine that makes more stuff, then there’s a discounted present value for all the stuff in the future that machine might create. That’s where the wealth comes from.”

Elon started with nothing. An immigrant who slept on the floor building Zip2. He created these machines from vision and relentless effort. Thousands joined him, including a SpaceX welder who turned his labor into a million dollars in stock.

That’s the magic of tech and free markets: labor can become capital. It’s fluid.

The outrage misses this entirely. The people building machines that deliver medicines, energy, and abundance are creating lasting prosperity for everyone.

What do you think? Does viewing wealth as future productivity change how you see stories like this?

[AleXandra Merz 🇺🇲 @TeslaBoomerMama]

https://t.co/KgFGAZVx7o

[AleXandra Merz 🇺🇲 @TeslaBoomerMama]

I get asked all the time: “At what price would you approve a SpaceX-Tesla merger?”

There is no price.
There is a method.

Here’s exactly how the proposal gets built — from the fairness opinions to the fixed exchange ratio shareholders will vote on, and why July makes sense.

[Melissa Chen @MsMelChen]

Today’s flood of Western media hit pieces and ridiculous commentary on Elon and SpaceX is yet another sign that the West is rotting from the inside.

EVEN the Chinese Communists treat their national champions with more respect than these pathetic hacks.

The CCP and its state mouthpieces aren’t half as deranged with envy. They may leash guys like Jack Ma and slap them down hard when they step out of line, but at least they’re smart enough to understand that they need their best talent and innovators to deliver prosperity for their people, dominate global markets, project raw power across the planet, and forge their nation into a ruthless superpower. The Chinese see them as vital strategic national assets and would never publicly insult or attack the ambitious, high-achieving mindset that creates these winners in the first place.

SpaceX is, without a doubt, America’s national champion.

Elon built the first reusable orbital rockets (Falcon 9), slashed launch costs, launched more missions in a single year than entire nations, revived American space dominance, sent NASA astronauts to the ISS aboard Crew Dragon, built the Starlink constellation that now beams high-speed internet to millions across the globe (including battlefields and disaster zones), and is developing Starship - the most powerful fully reusable rocket ever built, designed to make humanity an inter-planetary species.

Yet the Western press and Democratic officials are almost unanimously attacking the one man going above and beyond to secure prosperity, technological supremacy, and raw national strength for our civilization.

These people are vile soul-sucking wreckers who despise all excellence. The only thing they can produce is endless grievance and failure. All they know to do is tear down the successful, insult greatness, and wallow in their own mediocrity.

[李傻根 MORE MONEY @v3wanu]

黄仁勋昨天在卡内基梅隆毕业典礼的演讲完整版（中文字幕），要点我给你速通一下

1. 老婆是学姐，实验室搭档
2. 我经历了每一个计算平台变革：大型机、个人电脑、互联网、移动设备和云，但AI比他们都更大
3. 我们不能恐惧AI，要拥抱它
4. AI让每个人都是程序员
5. AI基建是人类历史上规模最大的基建
6. 电工、水管工、钢铁工人、技术员、建筑工人，这是属于你们的时代
7. AI要实现电网现代化、扩大发电能力、加速可持续
8. AI不会取代你，但比你更擅长使用AI的人可能会
9. 没有哪一代人像你们一样，携带着强大工具踏入世界，我们都站在同一起跑线上了

[Cern Basher @CernBasher]

https://t.co/XnEBOOuklE

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

I would like to offer to pay the salaries of TSA personnel during this funding impasse that is negatively affecting the lives of so many Americans at airports throughout the country

[amit @amitisinvesting]

PRODUCER PRICE INDEX IS NOT GOOD.

- Headline PPI: 3.4% YoY vs. 3.0% est
- Core PPI: 3.9% YoY vs. 3.7% est

Largest increase in 7 months & these numbers are BEFORE the oil spike.

We know the Fed isn’t going to cut today but this print isn’t helping to get future cuts either.

[Sunshine @Sunshine99888]

@CernBasher Fantastic and enjoyable read! I read it out loud to my family of six during our vacation. Thank you, Cern!

[NicholasGibbs @NickGibbsIAG]

I wasn't going to post this. $TSLA $NVDA

[Dating Dynamics @Dating_Dynamics]

A 102-year-old woman who had been married for 78 years was asked on her deathbed what she wished she had done differently.

Her answer made her 80-year-old daughter weep.

Here is what she said…

[NicholasGibbs @NickGibbsIAG]

I think $TSLA is going to hit All Time Highs soon. But.. There is 1 Big Risk that we CANNOT Ignore.

[Sunshine @Sunshine99888]

@KurtSupeCPA @grok please confirm accuracy.

[Joseph 💎✌️🪑🇺🇸 Tesla Long Term Investor @ShrimpTeslaLong]

Most people: "Investing doesn't work."

Charlie Munger: "No, investing works fine. What doesn't work is your behavior."

I miss Charlie and his words of wisdom.

[Nick shirley @nickshirleyy]

🚨 Here is the full 42 minutes of my crew and I exposing Minnesota fraud, this might be my most important work yet. We uncovered over $110,000,000 in ONE day. Like it and share it around like wildfire! Its time to hold these corrupt politicians and fraudsters accountable

We ALL work way too hard and pay too much in taxes for this to be happening, the fraud must be stopped.

[The Girl with the Mozart Tattoo @phibetakitten]

Pushed a button and my car backed out of my garage and took me from rural Sonoma across the Golden Gate Bridge and through downtown SF to a parking garage without a single touch to the steering wheel or pedals. Brilliant. @Tesla_AI

[david friedberg @friedberg]

why not just raise income tax rates?

because your real intent is not to just “provide healthcare”.

you’re masking that you are proposing the creation of, for the first time in the 250 years of this American republic, an organized government seizure of private property from citizens.

you’re calling it a “wealth tax” or a “billionaires tax” or “millionaires tax” or whatever nom du jour polls well. but at the end of the day, it’s the seizure of private property from citizens by the government. citizens that earned money, paid their fair taxes on those earnings (53% if they live in California) and are now being told they need to hand over after-tax assets because the government has failed to provide promised services with the revenue it’s collected, and are now re-casting their own failure to be a socio-economic inequity that must be justly resolved... a slippery slope that has never gone anywhere good (see economic effects in USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, France and Norway wealth tax etc.)

the American founders fled tyranny in Europe and this amazing nation was populated by immigrants (myself and your parents) from around the world not just looking for a “better life” but for a place where they could have freedom from tyrannical governments that can take what they want from private citizens. a great nation borne of property rights, the rule of law, and endowed freedoms to believe, speak, or act. these principles led to the greatest run of innovations, successes, and widespread increase in prosperity, for all citizens, ever seen.

the citizens, the individuals, not the institutions, delivered this progress. those who invented, who toiled, who bled, who sacrificed, who took risk and persevered, who led, and who changed the world, are not charlatans, kleptocrats, or oligarchs. they’re what made us all better off. prosperity is a measure of america’s success, not its failure.

it is your principle that is so offensive, as evidenced by the broad disdain for your flippant flirtation with the darkest of human fantasy - socialism. you and other neo-socialists have led so many of us to reflect on America’s history and what it is becoming. that now leads so many to consider, so unnecessarily, leaving their homes for a place where everyone stands up to shout down the principle you suggest. because if your ideas are now considered moderate, it’s clear this titanic is sinking.

that a “simple tax” of taking assets that have been earned, through toil and tribulation, rightly taxed, and preserved, should now be unjustly seized, is your solution to a problem of obvious government mismanagement and outright fraud, tells us that your true motivation lies not in giving people healthcare but in cutting down success and deleting the system of prosperity and opportunity for all.

i don’t care, and neither should anyone else, what the sum total market value of a private citizens private assets might be. it is none of my business and should be none of yours. because, again, once you open that pandora’s box, we might as well study Lord of the Flies … there is literally nothing stopping 51% of citizens demanding that their government go out and seize 100% of the private property of the 49%.

want to give healthcare to people in need? do your job and fix healthcare. make it affordable. want to be lazy about it? then do your job lazily and raise income taxes.

want to take private property from private citizens who have paid their fair share of taxes and legally earned their property, then honestly declare that it is envy, not inequity, that you strive to resolve…

[Larry Goldberg @TeslaLarry]

Lot of posts copying the likes of @BernieSanders @SenWarren and @AOC calling for more taxes on Billionaire @elonmusk, forgetting that in 2021 he paid a 53% rate of tax totaling $11b. They all repeat the claim that his company has received benefits of $38b from the US Government.
Let's look at his REAL economic impact to the U.S. It's mind blowing.
Musk’s ventures currently contribute $100–140B in annual GDP impact, or roughly 0.4% of total U.S. GDP. And growing faster – considerably faster – than the US economy, promising even greater contributions in the future.
That’s more annual contribution to US GDP than entire annual GDP of smaller U.S. states, like West Virginia (~$108 billion, 0.37%) or Hawaii (~$116 billion, 0.40%). And growing faster.
On top of that NASA and US Department of War have cumulatively saved over $40 billion as a direct result of SpaceX delivering a reduction in the cost of delivery of launch and communication services over traditional vendors. SO much for Musk Companies having "received" $38b. In other words, had the U.S. not paid Musk companies $38b, then the US would have had to spend $78b with competitors (and possibly then not received a delivery of the goods ordered! Boeing, looking at you.) Not to mention that Starlink practically saved Ukraine from being overrun in the early days of the Russian invasion.
Seems we are all, all Americans - and citizens of the world in fact - benefiting from the growth of Musk’s net worth. Here are the numbers:
Please post this in response to every post you see bleating about Musk being a billionaire or trillionaire and how its so terrible.