This might be the most hyped Tesla earnings in recent memory. And not for all the right reasons.
Tesla has taken many hits this year as its CEO Elon Musk leans further into right-wing politics and oversees DOGE, the advisory body that President Trump has bestowed the power to slash federal spending.
For Tesla, that has meant watching both its stock price and global sales plummet. And that’s not even taking into account pressure from competitors in China, Europe, and North America.
As Tesla bull and Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote in a note this morning, Tesla is facing the lowest margin expectations this quarter in 12 years. How Tesla’s stock performs will be reliant on the company’s ability to explain why its profit margins are worse than Volkswagen’s amid “likely cash burn,” instill confidence in its autonomy plans, and wrangle Musk’s attention away from the White House.
Analysts surveyed by Yahoo Finance are expecting revenue of around $21.41 billion, which would be flat year-over-year and down from $25.7 billion in Q4 2024.
Tesla’s Q1 2025 earnings call is 2:30 pm PT / 5:30 pm ET. The public can listen along to the call by tuning in here, here, or on X. Here’s what we’ll be listening for.
During Tesla’s last earnings call, the company said it expects its vehicle business to “return to growth in 2025.” Will that still be the case, given Tesla’s unimpressive delivery numbers for Q1 and weak customer demand driven in part by Musk’s politics?
Tesla recorded 336,681 deliveries in the first three months of the year, its worst quarterly performance in more than two years.
The automaker does have some tailwinds. It is better positioned than other OEMs to weather Trump’s tariff storm due to its domestic sourcing and high degree of vertical integration. That said, Musk’s proximity to Trump probably doesn’t help his popularity in China, one of Tesla’s biggest markets. That dynamic could drive more customers into the open arms of rival BYD.
Sources at Tesla have told us that the company has all but abandoned its plans for a cheap EV, though others have reported the automaker has merely delayed the car’s rollout by months. Either way, we’ll be listening out for updates there.
During Tesla’s full-year 2024 earnings call, Musk said the company would launch a paid ride-hailing robotaxi service in Austin starting this June. He has said in the past that Tesla would first use Model Y and Model 3 vehicles with “unsupervised” FSD, rather than its two-seater Cybercab concept that’s built without a steering wheel or pedals.
As research analysts at Cantor said: “Tesla has not yet quantified the commercialization of its Robotaxi segment, or disclosed initial routes/territory.” So investors and analysts will be on the lookout for more concrete details of Tesla’s Austin plans.
The automaker has also said that it plans to launch in California this year, but has been mum on those details.
We’re also hoping to hear some updates on Tesla’s Cybercab. Federal regulations don’t currently allow for operators to mass produce and deploy autonomous vehicles without human controls built in without an exemption. Musk will likely bend that regulation to his will, as he is wont to do, so we might get some insights later into when Tesla plans to start production on those futuristic-looking vehicles.
In Q4, Musk said he expected Tesla to start using Optimus humanoid robots internally this year, particularly for the “boring” tasks. We’ll be listening for a timeline for that, as well as when Tesla says it will begin high volume production of Optimus, and when it expects to begin initial deliveries.
Musk and Tesla have been quiet on Dojo since August 2024, a surprise given how gung ho they were about the supercomputer that would help the company achieve its full self-driving dreams. Then there’s Cortex, which is Tesla’s other new giant AI training supercluster being built at Tesla HQ in Austin to help solve real-world AI. In Tesla’s Q4 shareholder deck, the company shared updates on Cortex, but nothing on Dojo.
The latest update we’ve seen came from the Tesla AI X account show some kind of computing cluster with the words, “Quiet please. The machines are learning.” Though it’s not clear if it’s Dojo or Cortex.
Per Jonas’s note, investors will be searching for “any signs of Tesla’s CEO reprioritizing the efforts of Tesla vs. politically oriented endeavors.”
