Tech billionaire and Tesla founder Elon Musk during a meeting.
Johannes Neudecker | Alliance in pictures | Getty Images
On SpaceX earnings call Tuesday evening, CEO Elon Musk, who also runs Teslatook a break from his financial results speech to tell investors it would be a “good idea” to merge his two companies, and said the boards of directors of both companies had formed special committees to discuss a possible combination.
Musk will be back in public after the market closes on Wednesday, this time to discuss Tesla’s results.
Here’s what Wall Street expects, according to estimates from analysts surveyed by LSEG:
- Earnings per share: 43 cents estimated
- Income: $27.9 billion estimated
If Tesla failed to meet expectations, the company would see a slight decline in revenue from $28.1 billion a year earlier. Tesla posted double-digit growth in each of the previous two quarters, but its revenue fell in three of the four quarters of 2025, as Chinese electric vehicle makers such as BYD and Xiaomi gained popularity in Asia and Europe with affordable and innovative electric vehicles. Tesla was also hit last year by the end of a federal tax credit for electric vehicles.
Earlier this month, Tesla reported third-quarter vehicle deliveries of 486,532, about 2% lower than last year. Deliveries are the closest approximation of Tesla’s reported sales but are not precisely defined in its shareholder communications.
While Tesla still relies on automobile sales for the bulk of its revenue, Musk sees the company’s future in robo-taxis and humanoid robots. That puts a focus on capital spending, which is expected to exceed $25 billion this year, according to previous forecasts, up from about $8.5 billion in 2025.
Tesla unveils its long-delayed Roadster, nearly a decade after first revealing a next-generation version of its original electric sports car, at a launch event in Waco, Texas, on October 15, 2026. In this still image from a distributed video, the Roadster lands using rocket boosters.
Tesla | Via Reuters
One of Tesla’s big investments is in a semiconductor factory it is building with SpaceX and Intel in Grimes County, Texas. This partnership with SpaceX along with other areas of overlap, including work on Tesla’s recently announced Roadster refresh, fueled growing speculation that Elon Musk’s companies were about to unite in what would be a historic transaction.
“I feel like I’m tap dancing through a minefield,” Musk said during SpaceX’s earnings call, in response to a question about a possible merger.
“Do I think that would be a good idea? Yes,” Musk said. “But ultimately, shareholders have to support it.” On Tesla’s side, that means needing a vote of 50% of all shares, which is “a pretty high hurdle,” he said.
Musk highlighted the company’s potential to cooperate in the areas of AI software, chip design, Terafab and robotics. Tesla already uses Grok AI technology, developed by SpaceX, to power AI assistants in customer cars and to help control the company’s Optimus humanoid robots, currently in development.
Tesla’s stock price is down 14% this year, after rebounding on Wednesday, underperforming all of its mega-cap tech peers. SpaceX went public in June and is up from its $150 IPO price following its earnings release.
Tesla Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja told investors during the company’s most recent earnings conference call in July that auto sector margins had been strained this year by rising interest rates and energy costs.
But he also touted the growing revenue from fully autonomous (supervised) driving, sometimes called FSD, the partially automated driving system that Tesla sells for $99 a month. FSD does not make Tesla vehicles safe to use without a human driver, and the company markets the system as Assisted Driving in Europe. Taneja said Tesla reached nearly 1.5 million paying FSD customers worldwide as of the end of June.
Investors submitted questions online ahead of Wednesday’s call, and one of the top-voted requests was for updates on FSD and when it could become “unsupervised,” making customers’ vehicles fully automated and safe to use like a robo-taxi.
Shareholders also want to hear about Tesla’s Cybercab, a bronze two-seater designed for use as a robo-taxi, but not yet sold to individuals.
Tesla is testing the Cybercab and has deployed driverless vehicles in a limited US fleet. But the company is still far behind The alphabet Waymo in the United States, and that of Baidu Apollo Go in China.
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