Tesla's Q2 Earnings Test Whether Robots and Robotaxis Can Offset a Slumping Stock

Tesla reports second-quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday, and the numbers Wall Street cares most about this time may not be the ones in the press release.

Analysts polled by LSEG expect earnings per share of 51 cents on revenue of $25.71 billion. Those figures matter, but they arrive against a backdrop that's harder to quantify: a stock that's down about 10% this month and 16% for the year, even after Tesla posted a 25% year-over-year jump in vehicle deliveries just three weeks ago.

That disconnect is the story. Tesla's core business is showing real signs of life, deliveries topped 480,000 in the most recent quarter, beating analyst expectations, yet investors have kept selling. Some of that pressure is spilling over from SpaceX, Elon Musk's other trillion-dollar venture, which made a record-setting market debut in June and has since shed nearly 40% of its value from that peak. The two companies aren't the same business, but Musk is the connective tissue, and right now that tissue is under strain.

A delivery rebound, but the old headwinds haven't gone away

Tesla spent the last couple of years watching its delivery numbers slide, largely because Chinese automakers, BYD, Nio and Xiaomi among them, flooded overseas markets with EVs that are cheap and loaded with tech. Add to that a slice of car buyers in the U.S. and Europe who've soured on Tesla specifically because of Musk's political activity and his work with the Trump administration, and the company has had real demand problems that go beyond product.

The second-quarter bounce came from a mix of factors. Tesla rolled out cheaper versions of the Model 3 and Model Y, and it extended its premium Full Self-Driving (Supervised) driver-assistance system into new European markets. There was also a less predictable tailwind: gas prices spiked after the U.S. war in Iran, and that pushed European buyers toward EVs, Tesla included. Whether that kind of external boost repeats itself is anyone's guess, which is part of why the stock hasn't followed the delivery numbers upward.

Musk's pivot: it's not about cars anymore

If you listen to Musk, Tesla's future isn't really about selling sedans and SUVs. It's about robots and robotaxis. The company has been ramping production of its driverless Cybercab and converting parts of its Fremont, California factory to build Optimus, the humanoid robot Musk has talked about in increasingly grand terms.

"I think Optimus will be our biggest product, not just Tesla's biggest product ever, but probably the biggest product ever," Musk told investors on the company's April earnings call.

That's a big claim, and it's not the first one. Musk told investors back in 2019 that a million Tesla robotaxis would be on the road by 2020. Last year he said the company's autonomous ride-hailing network would cover "probably half the population of the U.S." by the end of 2025. Earlier this year at Davos, he said Robotaxis would be "very, very widespread" in the U.S. by the end of 2026. None of those timelines have held up so far.

Paul Miller, an analyst at Forrester, put it plainly in comments to CNBC, noting Tesla leadership has made "plenty of big claims about autonomous mobility and physical AI over the years" but has missed on some of the "bolder bets." That track record is why Wednesday's call will likely draw as much scrutiny for what Musk promises as for what the balance sheet shows.

Behind, not ahead, in the race that matters most to Musk

The competitive picture doesn't do Tesla any favors, either. In robotaxis, the company is trailing Alphabet's Waymo in the U.S. and Baidu's Apollo Go in China, both of which have been running driverless ride-hailing services for longer and at greater scale. In humanoid robotics, where Tesla's Optimus is still in development, it's up against China's Unitree, Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, Apptronik and the London-based startup Humanoid. In other words, the two businesses Musk is betting Tesla's future on are both crowded fields where Tesla is currently playing catch-up rather than setting the pace.

Investors on Wednesday's call will be pushing for specifics: concrete updates on where Optimus and the driverless program actually stand, not just projections. There's also likely to be interest in how Tesla and SpaceX plan to collaborate going forward, particularly on Terafab, the large-scale chip factory the two companies are planning to build and operate jointly with Intel in Texas. That project sits at the intersection of Musk's ambitions across both companies, and any detail on timing or scale would be new information for a market that's currently pricing in a lot of uncertainty.

Tesla's fundamentals, for now, look better than its stock chart suggests. The gap between the two is what Wednesday's report needs to close, and that will depend less on the quarter's numbers than on whether Musk can offer something more concrete than another ambitious timeline.