Tesla reports its first-quarter results on Wednesday, and Wall Street already knows the financials are going to be ugly. The interesting question is whether the company's AI and robotaxi story is holding together.
Consensus estimates put revenue at around $22.4 billion, with earnings per share of $0.37, numbers that reflect a bruising few months of soft demand in Europe and the United States, and tariff costs that topped $500 million in the final quarter of 2025 alone. None of that is the point.
What investors, analysts, and Elon-watchers actually want to hear is whether Tesla's pivot from electric vehicle maker to AI infrastructure company is on track, and how quickly the economics of that transformation start showing up in the numbers.
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, who carries a $600 price target on the stock against a current price of around $394, says the earnings call will be dominated by two things: the robotaxi rollout and the $20 billion AI capital expenditure programme Tesla has committed to this year.
The robotaxi programme is already moving. Tesla has launched in Dallas and Houston as part of a planned seven-city US deployment, with the Cybercab, the dedicated autonomous vehicle it has been teasing for years, finally making its commercial debut. The question the market wants answered is not whether the technology works in controlled conditions, but how fast it scales, and what the unit economics look like when it does.
Alongside that, investors will be pushing for detail on the Terafab facility, Tesla's next-generation manufacturing complex, and specifically who is on the hook for the billions in capital required to build it out. That question matters more than it might seem: Tesla is simultaneously trying to fund a robotaxi fleet, a humanoid robot programme, a semi-truck ramp, and an AI infrastructure buildout, all at once.
The Optimus robot is worth watching too. Tesla is converting its Model S/X factory into a dedicated Optimus production hub, with ambitions to hit one million units annually over the coming years. That is an extraordinarily ambitious target, and the market will want to understand what milestones sit between here and there.
Then there is the xAI dimension. Tesla invested $2 billion in xAI, Musk's AI venture, which was subsequently acquired by SpaceX in February. Investors want to understand precisely what that means for Tesla's balance sheet and whether it translates into a meaningful SpaceX equity stake.
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There is also, for once, some genuinely good regulatory news to discuss. Dutch authorities this week approved Tesla's Full Self-Driving supervised system, the first FSD approval anywhere in Europe. Germany, France, and Italy are expected to follow. Europe has been a persistent drag on Tesla's autonomous ambitions, and this is the first crack in that wall.
Wedbush's $600 target implies around 53% upside from here. Whether Wednesday's call closes that gap depends almost entirely on how convincing the AI story sounds.
