AUSTIN, TX — Tesla reported fourth-quarter earnings Thursday afternoon, missing on automotive gross margin, beating on regulatory credits, and disclosing that the robotaxi rollout remains firmly scheduled for the back half of an unspecified calendar year.
The 47-slide investor deck devoted three pages to vehicle deliveries, two to energy storage, and eleven to an animated rendering of a Cybercab pulling up to a curb that does not exist. Slide 19, titled simply ‘Autonomy,’ was a still image of a steering wheel with a red circle and a line through it. Slide 20 was the same image, larger.
‘They beat on the metric they invented this quarter, which is Adjusted Operational Throughput Per Robotaxi Mile, of which there are zero,’ said Priya Anand, an auto-sector analyst at Beacon Strategy who had spent the call eating cold pad thai out of a clamshell. ‘Divide anything by zero and you can put whatever you want in the press release.’
Automotive gross margin ex-credits came in at 13.6 percent, the lowest since 2019, a number CFO Vaibhav Taneja described as ‘a floor we feel very good about being near.’ Asked twice on the call to clarify whether the floor was the current number or a lower number, Taneja said the floor was ‘directional.’
Elon Musk joined the call 22 minutes late and spent the first nine of his remarks describing a robotaxi network that he said would, by late 2026, generate more annual free cash flow than Saudi Aramco. He then paused, said ‘or 2027,’ and moved on. Two analysts on the line wrote down both numbers.
The Q&A produced one new disclosure: the previously announced unsupervised Full Self-Driving rollout in Austin is now described as a ‘geofenced supervised pilot with remote operator oversight,’ which a Wedbush note later clarified was ‘a guy with a joystick in a strip mall off I-35.’ Tesla did not dispute the characterization.
Retail reaction was, as ever, durable. On a Tesla shareholder Discord with 41,000 members, the pinned message at 5:14 p.m. read ‘this is the dip we’ve been waiting for’ for the eleventh consecutive quarter. A user named LongVol_4Eva posted that he had taken out a third HELOC and would be averaging down ‘into the autonomy print.’ Eighty-three people reacted with the rocket emoji.
The stock fell 6 percent in after-hours trading before recovering 4 percent on a Musk tweet consisting of the word ‘soon’ and a single fire emoji. By the time the earnings call ended, two sell-side desks had raised their price targets, citing ‘narrative reacceleration.’
Tesla closed the call with a slide promising the next robotaxi update would arrive ‘at an event,’ on ‘a date,’ in ‘a city to be determined.’ Three analysts asked for guidance on which quarter. Musk said all four.