New York (AFP) – Tesla reported higher first-quarter profits Wednesday, topping expectations as it confirmed plans for massive additional investments in autonomous transport, humanoid robotics, and artificial intelligence. Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company reported profits of $477 million, up 17 percent from the year-ago period, while revenues jumped 16 percent to $22.4 billion.
Tesla said it was on track to commence “volume production” of both its Cybercab and Tesla Semi this year, while also notching “record” new subscriptions of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) driver-assistance program. Shares initially ticked higher on the results in after-hours trading, but moved into negative territory during a conference call in which Musk and other Tesla executives said they would press on with massive investments that have drawn skepticism from some Wall Street analysts. Musk has described the spending as essential to Tesla’s future, promising massive profit growth that has fueled the company’s roughly $1.5 trillion market value.
“There remains significant effort and hard work to realize our mission of Amazing Abundance,” Tesla said in its earnings press release. “The future is incredibly bright.” During a conference call, Tesla Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja said the company was embarking on “a very big capital investment phase, which is going to start now and would last a couple of years.” The plan is to spend more than $25 billion in 2026, up from the January estimate of $20 billion. That will translate into negative free cash flow for 2026.
A rise in profit had been expected compared to a particularly weak performance in the 2025 period when Tesla faced boycotts over Musk’s leadership of a Trump administration initiative targeting government spending. The world’s richest person, Musk left the White House later in spring 2025 but has continued to speak out on political issues. Tesla had previously disclosed an uptick in car sales during the period, but its earnings press release gave more color on where the sales came from. The company is experiencing “continued growth” in Asia and South America, “while also seeing a rebound of demand in both Europe-Middle East-Africa (EMEA) and North America,” it said.
Another bright spot in the results was the increase in FSD subscribers to 1.28 million, up 51 percent from the year-ago level. The driver-assistance service is available for $99 a month. But Tesla, which for many years released production volume guidance during quarterly earnings, gave few clues on what kind of overall output to expect. Volumes “will be impacted by aggregate demand for our products, supply chain readiness, and allocation decisions between sales to customers or use for our owned and operated fleet,” Tesla said in its “outlook” section, which also avoided specifics on profit and other benchmarks.
– ‘Cautious’ on unsupervised vehicles –
Heading into earnings season, several analysts wanted Musk to provide more detail about the expected payoff from the investment boom. Given the huge spending ramp-up, “investors will need clearer evidence that unsupervised autonomy is around the corner to support the stock’s valuation,” said a note from Morgan Stanley that pressed Musk to “demonstrate tangible progress in scaling unsupervised autonomous driving capabilities will be critical in supporting valuation.” During the conference call, Musk said he hopes to have unsupervised FSD operating “in a dozen or so states by the end of this year.”
“We’re taking a very cautious approach to the rollout here,” said Musk, adding that it expects the venture to be “material probably in a significant way next year.” Musk also avoided specific promises on Optimus. Tesla plans to prepare its first factory to produce the humanoid robots in the second quarter. “When you have a new product in an entirely new production line, and you have 10,000 unique items…it will move as fast as the least lucky, slowest, dumbest part in the entire 10,000,” Musk said. “It’s just literally impossible to predict, except that I think it will be quite slow at first,” he said of output. Shares of Tesla fell 0.8 percent in after-hours trading.
© 2024 AFP
