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WELCOME TO BETA FINCH: TESLA Q2 2026 EARNINGS BREAKDOWN

ALEX: Welcome to Beta Finch, your AI-powered earnings breakdown. I'm Alex, joined as always by Jordan, and today we're diving into Tesla's Q2 2026 results. Big call, lots of Elon energy, so let's get into it. But first, the standard reminder: this podcast is AI-generated content for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing we discuss should be considered investment advice. Always do your own research and consult a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decisions.

JORDAN: Good, glad that's out of the way, because there's a lot to unpack here. Tesla posted record Q2 deliveries, and CFO Vaibhav Taneja said they exited the quarter with their largest order backlog since 2023.

ALEX: Right, and the growth wasn't even — Americas deliveries up 60% sequentially, APAC up 27%, EMEA up 12%. Model Y is setting records in markets like the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand.

JORDAN: But here's the thing investors need to sit with — margins told a different story. Automotive gross margin, excluding regulatory credits, fell from 19.2% to 16.3% quarter over quarter.

ALEX: And a chunk of that is a comp issue, not a fresh problem, right? Q1 had a one-time $230 million benefit from warranty true-downs and tariff relief that just didn't repeat.

JORDAN: Exactly, strip that out and margins were roughly flat. Still, rising interest rates are pinching them too — subvention costs get booked upfront as a revenue offset, so as rates climbed this year, that ate into margin as well.

ALEX: Energy storage is the other margin story. They deployed 13.5 gigawatt-hours, up 53% sequentially, second-best quarter ever for that business. But gross margin there dropped hard, from 39.5% down to 20.4%.

JORDAN: A $240 million warranty true-up on legacy battery cells, tariff benefits rolling off, and ASPs coming down as competition heats up in industrial storage. Vaibhav said long-term they expect that business to normalize in the mid-to-low 20% margin range, so this quarter isn't really the new normal, it's a rough patch.

ALEX: One bright spot — service and other margins hit an all-time high, 14.1%, up from 9.2%. Better fleet cost management, plus some early Robotaxi infrastructure spend baked in there.

JORDAN: Now the number that's going to dominate headlines — CapEx more than doubled sequentially, and free cash flow went negative for the quarter, as they'd guided. Full-year CapEx guide is now more than $25 billion, and it's expected to keep climbing for two to three more years.

ALEX: They're even lining up debt facilities, up to $30 billion in borrowing capacity, to help fund it. This is genuinely one of the biggest industrial buildouts in company history — Elon literally compared the scale to Henry Ford's Model T ramp or wartime production mobilization.

JORDAN: Which brings us to the strategy side, because the story here isn't really about car margins this quarter — it's about what all that CapEx is buying. Optimus, Robotaxi, the new chip fab they're calling Terafab, solar manufacturing, battery and lithium refining. It's an enormous number of S-curves being started at once.

ALEX: Let's talk Robotaxi, because Ashok, their VP of AI, gave a genuinely striking safety stat — over 380,000 unsupervised miles across six cities, zero notable incidents.

JORDAN: That's the headline number, and it's meant to counter the argument that you need lidar and HD maps to do this safely. Tesla's whole pitch is cameras-only can work. What I'd flag for listeners is the scale is still small — Colin from Wells Fargo pushed on this, noting the actual vehicle counts look like dozens, not hundreds, despite the city expansion.

ALEX: And the answer was basically: these cars run near-continuously, so miles accumulate fast even with a small fleet, plus they want to prove the software generalizes

This episode includes AI-generated content.