Tesla’s energy business deployed more batteries in Q3 2026 but brought in less money. Energy generation and storage revenue fell 16% year-over-year to $2.88 billion, even though storage deployments rose 10% to 13.7 GWh.

Tesla’s shareholder letter blames the drop “partially” on “tariff-related customer refunds.” It doesn’t say how much it refunded, to which customers, or why it was accounted for as reduced revenue.

Tesla says it now has 1.74 million active “Full Self-Driving” subscriptions, up 67% from a year ago. A footnote in its Q3 2026 shareholder letter explains how it gets there: the metric follows “our 2025 CEO Performance Award” and “includes both upfront payment and monthly subscriptions.”

So owners who bought FSD outright, some of them years ago, count as subscribers. That matters because 10 million active FSD subscriptions is one of the milestones Elon Musk has to hit to earn his 2025 pay package. It also matters because hundred of thousands of those FSD “subscribers” were sold unsupervised self-driving, which Tesla has yet to deliver.

Tesla says battery supply, not demand, is what’s holding back its car sales. In its Q3 2026 shareholder letter, the automaker wrote that “battery availability continued to be the limiting factor in increasing auto volumes in the quarter.”

It also claims it ended Q3 with “the largest backlog for our passenger vehicles in four years.” But the numbers in the same letter don’t line up with a company that has more buyers than cars.

Tesla (TSLA) released its financial results and shareholders’ letter for the third quarter (Q3) 2026 after market close today. We’re updating this post with all the details from the financial results, shareholders’ letter, and the conference call later tonight.

The earnings call with management is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. ET.

Tesla reports its third-quarter 2026 financial results tomorrow, October 21, after the market closes. The earnings call follows at 5:30 p.m. ET.

Wall Street expects revenue to come in flat and earnings per share to drop 10% from a year ago, even though Tesla just beat its own delivery consensus by more than 24,000 vehicles.

Tesla’s proxy for its 2026 annual meeting, filed today, confirms that one of its supposedly independent directors now sits on SpaceX’s board. Ira Ehrenpreis, who chairs both Tesla’s compensation committee and its governance committee, joined SpaceX’s board in February.

That’s one of several details in the filing that line up with a Tesla-SpaceX merger. There’s a three-item ballot, an auto-voting program that kicks in for the next vote, and Musk pay terms that pay out on a deal price alone.

Tesla (TSLA) delivered 486,532 vehicles in the third quarter of 2026, down 2.1% from the record 497,099 it delivered in the same quarter last year.

That’s still about 25,000 more than Wall Street expected, with the consensus at 461,974 deliveries. Tesla also delivered about 22,000 more vehicles than it built.

Wall Street can’t agree on how many cars Tesla (TSLA) sold in Q3 2026. Estimates from major banks range from 421,758 to 482,000 deliveries ahead of Friday’s report.

That’s a 60,000-unit spread. And after the Street missed Tesla’s Q2 deliveries by 74,000 units, nobody has much credibility on this one.