Tesla Q1 beats estimates
- Tesla posted Q1 revenue of $22.39 billion and adjusted EPS of $0.41, beating expectations. (finance.yahoo.com) - Gross margin improved to 21.7% and free cash flow came in positive at $1.44 billion. ( ) - Management also said it raised 2026 spending plans by about a quarter to fund AI, autonomy, and robotics. (reuters.com)
Tesla beat Wall Street’s first-quarter expectations, but the bigger signal was how much more it plans to spend on artificial intelligence, self-driving software, and robotics. (tesla.com) (finance.yahoo.com) The company reported $22.39 billion in revenue for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, topping Bloomberg consensus of about $22.08 billion. Adjusted earnings were $0.41 a share, ahead of estimates around $0.35. (finance.yahoo.com) (tesla.com) Tesla said gross margin rose to 21.7%, while operating cash flow reached $3.9 billion and free cash flow was positive at about $1.4 billion. The company also reported a $0.9 billion operating profit and $0.5 billion in net income under standard accounting rules. (tesla.com) (finance.yahoo.com) Those numbers landed after Tesla disclosed earlier this month that first-quarter vehicle deliveries fell to about 358,000, even as production topped 408,000. Energy storage deployments reached 8.8 gigawatt-hours, giving Tesla another business line beyond car sales. (tesla.com) Tesla used the quarter to argue that its car business is stabilizing in several regions. In its shareholder update, the company said demand grew in Asia-Pacific and South America and rebounded in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and in North America. (tesla.com) The spending plan is where the story shifted. Yahoo Finance reported that Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja said 2026 capital spending would be “over $25 billion,” roughly a quarter above Tesla’s earlier plan, and that the increase would push free cash flow negative for the rest of the year. (finance.yahoo.com) Tesla said that money is going into more artificial-intelligence computing, battery and materials factories, and production lines for Megapack 3, Cybercab, and the Tesla Semi. The company also said it launched unsupervised Robotaxi rides in Dallas and Houston in April and received approval for supervised Full Self-Driving in the Netherlands in April. (tesla.com) That helps explain why investors are reading Tesla less like a carmaker and more like a company funding several capital-heavy bets at once. Yahoo Finance said the stock rose immediately after the results, then reversed after the spending outlook; Tesla shares were more than 2% lower in premarket trading on Thursday, April 23. (finance.yahoo.com)
