On SpaceX's earnings call late Tuesday, CEO Elon Musk, who also runs Tesla, took a break from talking about financial results to tell investors that it would be a "good idea" to merge his two companies, and said the boards at both have formed special committees to discuss a possible tie-up.
Musk will be back in public after market close on Wednesday, this time to discuss Tesla earnings.
Here's what Wall Street is expecting, according to estimates from analysts polled by LSEG:
- Earnings per share: 43 cents estimated
- Revenue: $27.9 billion estimated
Should Tesla fail to top expectations, the company would see a slight decrease in revenue from $28.1 billion a year earlier. Tesla has recorded double-digit growth in each of the two prior quarters, but revenue dropped in three of four quarters in 2025, as Chinese EV makers such as BYD and Xiaomi gained popularity in Asia and Europe with affordable and innovative EVs. Tesla was also hit last year by the end of a federal EV tax credit.
Earlier this month, Tesla reported vehicle deliveries for the third quarter of 486,532, about 2% below the year-ago number. Deliveries are the closest approximation of sales reported by Tesla but are not precisely defined in its shareholder communications.
While Tesla still counts on auto sales for the bulk of its revenue, Musk sees the company's future in robotaxis and humanoid robots. That's putting the focus on capital expenditures, which are expected to top $25 billion this year, based on a prior forecast, up from about $8.5 billion in 2025.
One of Tesla's big investments is in a semiconductor factory that it's building with SpaceX and Intel in Grimes County, Texas. That partnership with SpaceX along with other areas of overlap, including work on Tesla's recently announced Roadster refresh, fueled intensifying speculation that Musk's companies were on the verge of combining in what would be a historic transaction.
"I feel like I'm tap dancing through a minefield," Musk said on the SpaceX earnings call, responding to a question about a potential merger.
"Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes," Musk said. "But at the end of the day, the shareholders have to be supportive of this." On the Tesla side, that means needing a 50% vote of all shares, which is "quite a high hurdle," he said.
Musk pointed to the company's potential to cooperate on AI software, chip design, Terafab and robotics. Tesla is already using Grok AI technology, developed by SpaceX, to power AI assistants in customer cars, and to help control the company's Optimus humanoid robots now in development.
Tesla's stock price is down 14% this year, after rallying on Wednesday, underperforming all of its megacap tech peers. SpaceX went public in June, and is up from its $150 IPO price after its post-earnings pop.
Tesla CFO Vaibhav Taneja told investors on the company's last earnings call in July that automotive margins had been challenged this year by rising interest rates and energy costs.
But he also touted growing revenue from Full Self-Driving (Supervised), sometimes referred to as FSD, the partially automated driving system Tesla sells for $99 per month. FSD doesn't make Tesla vehicles safe to use without a human driver, and the company markets the system as Assisted Driving in Europe. Taneja said Tesla reached close to 1.5 million paid FSD customers globally as of the end of June.
Investors submitted questions online ahead of Wednesday's call, and one of the top-voted requests was for updates on FSD and when it could become "unsupervised," making customers' vehicles fully automated and safe to use like a robotaxi.
Shareholders also want to hear an update on Tesla's Cybercab, a bronze two-seater designed for use as a robotaxi, but not yet sold to individuals.
Tesla is testing the Cybercab, and has deployed driverless vehicles in a limited U.S. fleet. But the company still lags far behind Alphabet's Waymo in the U.S., and Baidu's Apollo Go in China.
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