Tesla (TSLA) releases Q1 2026 financial results: slight beat on earnings

Tesla (TSLA) released its financial results and shareholders’ letter for the first quarter (Q1) 2026 after market close today.

We are updating this post with all the details from the financial results, shareholders’ letter, and the conference call later tonight. Refresh for the latest information.

Tesla Q1 2026 earnings expectations

As we reported in our Tesla Q1 2026 earnings preview yesterday, the Wall Street consensus for this quarter was $22.3 billion in revenue and earnings of $0.37 per share.

The expectations represent a return to year-over-year growth for Tesla after several quarters of decline, with Wall Street expecting roughly 14% revenue growth and 33% EPS growth compared to Q1 2025’s dismal results of $19.335 billion in revenue and $0.27 per share.

However, several data points already suggest the quarter won’t be as rosy as Wall Street expects. Tesla delivered 358,023 vehicles in Q1 2026, missing expectations by roughly 7,600 units. The company also built over 50,000 more vehicles than it sold, signaling significant inventory buildup. Energy storage deployment dropped 38% sequentially to 8.8 GWh, well below the 12-14 GWh analyst consensus.

How did Tesla do compared to expectations?

Tesla Q1 2026 financial results

After the market closed today, Tesla released its financial results for the first quarter and confirmed that it beat expectations with earnings of $0.41 per share (non-GAAP), and it delivered revenue expectations with $22.38 billion during the last quarter.

Gross margin jumped to 21.1% — that’s up 478 basis points YoY from 16.3%, and even above Q4 2025’s 20.1%. This is the strongest gross margin in a while.

Tesla claims “FSD subscribers at 1.28 million”, but that includes everyone who purchased the package, not only people who have subscribed, which muddies the water, especially since Tesla pushed owners to buy last quarter by going subscription-only.

Interestingly, the first thing Tesla mentioned when dicussing aspects of the business that helped increase profits in Q1 was “increase in automotive one-time benefits related to warranty and tariffs.”

Sounds like Tesla got an early tariff refund.

We will be posting our follow-up posts here about the earnings and conference call to expand on the most important points (refresh the page to see the most recent posts):

• Tesla seems to say Robotaxi launch will be pushed back in 5 US cities
• Tesla (TSLA) pulled questionable levers to make Q1 2026 financials look good
• Elon Musk pushes unsupervised FSD for consumer Teslas — again
• Tesla will build factories just to retrofit millions of HW3 cars it said could do FSD

Here’s Tesla’s Q1 2026 shareholder presentation in full:

Here’s Tesla’s conference call for the Q1 2026 results:

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