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Tesla reported its Q3 2026 results on Wednesday, which is also why I waited a bit with this newsletter here.

If you want to dig in yourself, here’s the full shareholder deck,
the full earnings call and our full transcript. Some of my takeaways, also with some of the SpaceX Q3 earnings call mixed in that took place on Tuesday:

Elon Musk said on Tesla’s Q3 2026 earnings call that the company is aiming for 5 million vehicles a year by 2030.

Tesla delivered 1,636,129 vehicles in 2025, so the target is a bit more than triple last year. It is also about 2.8 times Tesla’s best year so far, 2023, when it delivered 1,808,581.

Getting there from 2025 means growing deliveries by roughly 25% a year, five years running. The last time Tesla grew faster than that was in 2023.

The target comes in a quarter where Tesla says orders aren’t what’s holding it back. Its Q3 2026 Update says it ended September with its largest passenger vehicle backlog in four years, and that battery supply capped how many cars it could build:

Tesla currently has more than 2,525,000 vehicles’ worth of manufacturing capacity installed across its factories, so Musk’s target means doubling that by 2030.

The Q3 deck also lists record quarterly deliveries in Canada, Australia, Japan and Taiwan, record production at Giga Berlin, and the 10 millionth Tesla produced and delivered.

This one is for all of us out there thinking whether or when these two merge.

Both Tesla and SpaceX have formed special committees to look at a possible merger, Elon said on SpaceX’s Q3 earnings call on Tuesday.

Because he is a conflicted party, he isn’t part of their talks, and he was clear that no deal has been agreed. Here is how he put it (on video here):

“Both Tesla and SpaceX have formed special committees at the request of shareholders. Because I'm a conflicted party, I can't be in on these discussions. I don't think we should assume that a merger is a certainty. Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes. But at the end of the day, shareholders have to be supportive of this. The special committees have not reached an agreement on any transaction, and it doesn't mean they will, but there is a lot [to] be gained from cooperating on SI, chip design, robots, mass [to] orbit, connectivity. I think it would be a good idea.”
— Elon Musk

On the call, he also noted that a Tesla deal would need the backing of a majority of all outstanding Tesla shares, not just of those voting. At Tuesday’s closing prices, the two companies were worth about $3.5 trillion combined.

On Tesla’s own call a day later, Elon left it at that: “I think I said everything that should be said yesterday. Tap dancing through a minefield there.”

Tesla has started what Elon calls “early production” of Optimus on a high-volume line in Fremont, and he said on the Q3 call that most of a production line built for a million robots a year has already landed there.

Getting to that rate, about 20,000 a week, will take “probably at least a year, maybe a little longer,” because parts of the design are still changing.

Elon: “The growth of Optimus is an S-curve, but the initial part of the S-curve has a shallow slope and is somewhat bumpy because it is such a radically new product.”

Most of the design work left is on the hand, and Tesla plans to put its AI5 chip, with an order of magnitude more compute than AI4, into Optimus around April next year.

Elon expects the design, the AI and the robot’s reliability to be sorted out around the end of 2027. That is when Tesla would start delivering Optimus to other companies, first for dangerous, repetitive industrial work.

Before that, Elon wants to release a video of Optimus doing tasks that aren’t pre-programmed, “maybe a month or two” from now.

CFO Vaibhav Taneja added that Optimus costs are trending closer to where Tesla expects the Cybercab’s cost to end up, and that Tesla has started building an Optimus factory in Austin that should make a lot more robots than Fremont.

Tesla will start commissioning machinery at its Terafab research fab in Austin in the first half of 2027, and Elon said on the Q3 call that it hopes to make a first test chip “around May or June,” “just to see if we can make any chip at all.” The aim is useful chips at volume around Q3 2028.

It won’t come cheap. Elon put the bill at “tens of billions” in equipment through early 2028, and said it will “probably be north of $100 billion long term,” with the split between Tesla and SpaceX still to be worked out.

Elon: “And as I've said publicly on X, the Terafab, I think, will be the most valuable building in the world and will probably have an economic value that will place it in the top 20 of countries. So it's an epic project. And this will be an incredibly important asset, if not a necessary asset, in order to scale, especially Optimus, as we can address bottlenecks in semiconductors, whether it's memory, packaging, logic, or whatever the case may be.”

Tesla sold more electric vehicles in the United States than all other EV brands combined (again) in the third quarter of 2026, with the company capturing an estimated 54.0% of the U.S. EV market.

Tesla sold an estimated 144,094 EVs during the quarter, while the rest of the market combined accounted for 118,555 of the 262,649 EVs sold in the country. Year to date, Tesla has sold 386,194 EVs in the U.S., giving it a 52.9% share of the market.

The Model Y alone (99,037) outsold every other EV brand in the US, and the Model 3 (40,346) came second, per Cox Automotive’s estimates.

🇩🇪 The Tesla Model Y was also Germany’s best-selling car of any fuel type in September 2026 (biggest car market in Europe!), knocking the Volkswagen Golf off the top spot on VW’s home turf.

KBA data shows the Model Y logged 8,038 new registrations in September, against the Golf’s 6,580. The Model 3 added another 4,512 and finished sixth overall, which made Tesla the only non-German brand with two cars in Germany’s top 10. Year to date, the Model Y has 29,464 registrations in Germany, second only to the Skoda Elroq’s 30,845 among EVs.

🇨🇳 In China, the Model Y was similarly the best-selling vehicle of any fuel type in September with 50,359 retail sales, well ahead of the Geely Xingyuan (44,275) and the BYD Yuan UP (22,767).

By the way, I was the one to break the news on Tesla officially heading to Oman 🇴🇲. The company will enter the Sultanate in 2027, and it’s already hiring its first team in the capital, Muscat: a Store Manager, a Sales Advisor and a Customer Experience Specialist.

On Tesla’s Q3 call, VP of AI Software Ashok Elluswamy put a date on what’s next: “next month we'll be launching in Dallas.” Elon added that the Cybercab fleet in Austin “has grown by a factor of 10 since launch about a month ago.”

The registrations back it up. On October 9, Tesla registered a record 150 Cybercabs in Texas in a single batch, and 30 more followed last week, taking the total to 349. Cybercabs now make up about 45% of the 769 Tesla Robotaxi vehicles registered in the state, while the Model Y side has held at 420 since late September.

Robotaxi hours are still growing step by step. Elluswamy said on the Q3 call that the service started out running from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. and will soon run until 2 a.m.
By the end of the year, Tesla aims to run it 24/7 and add highways, higher speeds, more weather conditions and night driving.

After that, customers’ own cars join in. Elluswamy expects the first customer vehicles to become part of the Robotaxi fleet around Q2 2027, running the same V15 software as the Cybercab, once they fit into Tesla’s geofences and fleet management.

Tesla is also trying to get the first Cybercabs to customers by the end of 2026, VP of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy said, though Elon added that “the vast majority” will be Tesla-owned and run as transport as a service. As for the money, Elon expects Robotaxi to become “noticeable probably in Q2, and then probably a big deal by Q3 or Q4 of next year.”

Tesla has officially rebranded FSD (Supervised) in Europe, with the system now called Tesla Assisted Driving (TAD) across the company’s European websites.

The new name is already live on Tesla’s support and order pages in markets where FSD Supervised has been rolled out.

🇸🇰 Nine and counting now. Slovakia has approved FSD Supervised/TAD, the ninth EU country to do so, by recognizing the provisional approval the Dutch RDW issued in April. The EU-wide decision still looks unlikely before the committee's December meeting.

“I am glad that when it comes to modern technologies in transport, Slovakia is not lagging behind.” — Jozef Ráž, Slovak Minister of Transport

Elon, for his part, said on the Q3 call that he is hoping for EU-wide approval “maybe within a few months, but I would be surprised if it takes longer than Q1.”

More than 75% of Tesla’s North American deliveries in Q3 came with a sign-up for a paid FSD subscription, CFO Vaibhav Taneja said on the Q3 call, about 20% higher than in Q2. Every car Tesla delivers there already comes with a free month of FSD, and buyers still sign up.

Globally, Tesla now has more than 1.7 million paying FSD customers, and for the first time more than half of them are on a subscription. FSD has become the key driver of demand, Taneja said, to the point where US showroom visitors ask for it by name:

“They're not asking for a 3, Y, or Cybertruck. They're saying, ‘Can we get an FSD drive?’”

Tesla will start sharing more FSD numbers as the business scales, he added, including revenue and churn.

Tesla is also dropping third-party maps. Elluswamy said Tesla is building its own AI-based mapping and navigation that you can talk to, that learns your preferences and draws on the whole fleet. It starts with the beginning and end of trips in the V15 release, then takes over parking and destination handling over the next several months.

Energy demand is “very strong,” Elon said on the Q3 call: “We're actually almost sold out of all Megapacks for 2027, and we're ramping production as quickly as possible to meet demand.” He also expects Megapack gross margins to increase meaningfully.

Tesla deployed 13.7 GWh of storage in Q3, its second-best quarter, and energy gross margin jumped to 33.1% from 20.4% in Q2. Taneja put that jump mostly down to tariff refunds and a vendor agreeing to reimburse some cell costs, and with data centers driving “extreme demand,” he expects higher prices and further margin gains as production grows.

Quick related note: Mike Snyder, Tesla’s VP of energy and charging who built up the Megapack business, has stepped down, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the move. Per the report, AJ Booth, senior director of energy products engineering, takes over.

As I mentioned, SpaceX held its Q3 call a day before Tesla (they happen to share a CEO). It posted its Q3 2026 results after the close on Tuesday, and revenue jumped 161% year-over-year to $14.6 billion.

See the full earnings call video here, and you’ll also see why Tesla investors sent out an outcry for Musk to replicate the quality of the call for Tesla, too. It didn’t happen this time, but Elon promised he’ll figure it out for next.

Most of that came from Super Intelligence (SI), the renamed AI segment. Its revenue nearly tripled from Q2 to $7.56 billion, which makes it bigger than Connectivity (mostly Starlink), at $5.25 billion and up 69%. Space added $1.77 billion.

The company swung to an operating profit of $2.79 billion, after a $143 million loss in Q2, and net income came in at $4.40 billion, or $0.35 a share.

Elon says he will give one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America next year, adding: “This will be the first of many.” That’s roughly 72 million children, and about $10.5 billion at last Friday’s close. For this, Elon will be using the Trump Accounts, the government-backed investment accounts for US kids under 18 that opened for contributions on July 4. Gwynne Shotwell pledged one share to each of about 2 million children’s accounts in July.

The Boring Company modified its latest Prufrock Liner Truck, which runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units, to carry a standard 20-foot shipping container, with an eye on moving freight through its tunnels.

Walter Isaacson, who wrote Elon’s 2023 biography, opened his new podcast The Builders with a 40-minute Elon interview, recorded on August 6. Most of it is about AI and money. The bits worth knowing: