*solar system

Growth is back at Tesla. Huge congrats to the entire team on an incredible quarter! 👏 This what stands out to me from $TSLA Q3: THE FINANCIALS • Revenue: $28.0B, roughly flat year over year. • EPS: $0.48 vs. $0.45 expected. • Gross margin: 19.6%, up from 18.0% a year ago and comfortably above the 17.9% Wall Street expected. • Automotive gross margin excluding credits: 18.1%, up from 15.4%. Regulatory credit revenue fell from $417M to $113M. The underlying car business is getting more profitable. • Free cash flow: POSITIVE $1.5B. Wall Street expected NEGATIVE $4.5B! • Cash pile: $45.4B, up 9%. CARS • Production rose +4% to 464,391 vehicles. • Largest vehicle backlog in four years, with battery supply now the main constraint on more deliveries. • Record deliveries in Canada, Australia, Japan and Taiwan. • Record production at Giga Berlin. • Tesla built its 10 millionth vehicle. FSD • 1.74M active subscriptions, up 67% in a year. • More than 75% of new cars in North America now come with FSD, up nearly 20 percentage points in a single quarter. • Live in nine EU countries, with 100K+ customers and 160M+ kilometers driven. ROBOTAXI • Cybercab has been giving rides in Austin since September 3. • Nearly 2M unsupervised miles, up 8x in one quarter. • Austin service now runs from 6 a.m. to midnight. • Grok is inside Cybercab, letting you handle email, your calendar and tasks by voice while you ride. OPTIMUS • Production has started on the high-volume lines in Fremont, building Tesla’s first production-quality robots. SEMI • Now in volume production. • 500 miles of range at 82,000 lbs total weight, using roughly one-third the energy of a diesel truck. ENERGY • 13.7 GWh deployed, up 10%. • Record order rate and backlog. • Megafactory Texas is up and running, producing Megapacks. • First Megapacks built using only Tesla’s own LFP cells. AI COMPUTE • Targeting 400 MW of training compute by year-end. • Equipment installation at the Austin chip fab is planned to begin in 2027. The tradeoff of all this is that operating income fell to $718M as Tesla increased spending on AI R&D. That’s a real cost today, but I’m comfortable with Tesla investing in the future. Underneath the flat revenue headline we may see from news outlets, FSD subscriptions are growing, Robotaxi is expanding, energy orders are at a record, and Optimus and Semi are entering production. Meanwhile, the vehicle backlog is the largest it’s been in four years. It looks like to me the next leg of Tesla’s growth is taking shape right in front of us!