Tesla Profits: What Investors Want to Hear from Elon Musk

Tesla is scheduled to report earnings tomorrow (Jan. 28). But the electric car maker’s shareholders are less interested in quarterly margins than hearing Elon Musk talk about everything else. On Say.com, the third-party platform Tesla uses to gather questions for its earnings calls, the most up-voted submissions from both retail and institutional investors aren’t about car sales; they are about robots, humanoid robots and SpaceX.

Here are the top questions for investors, and why they matter.

“He once said: Integrity deserves honesty. Will Tesla’s long-term shareholders still be put first if SpaceX does an IPO?”

Musk owns six companies, but Tesla is the only one that is publicly traded. As a result, its earnings calls have become the one place where investors and Wall Street analysts can directly ask Musk about his other private businesses. SpaceX has been at the forefront of many Musk’s eyes because of its much-anticipated blockbuster IPO. The rocket and satellite company is reportedly taking steps to go public as soon as this year, targeting $1.5 trillion—nearly double its current $800 billion.

That would quickly make SpaceX Musk’s company more valuable. Tesla, meanwhile, remains the largest company led by Musk with a market capitalization of $1.36 trillion, but its momentum is waning as EV sales slow and new products struggle to scale. Meanwhile, SpaceX is thriving out of the limelight, pulling in 11-figure annual revenues from government contracts and consumer Starlink subscriptions. Musk’s stake there now represents more than half of his net worth.

If SpaceX goes public, Musk may have a second set of public shareholders to answer to—as well as earnings calls, regulatory scrutiny and additional media obligations. Tesla investors were already on edge last year when Musk took another high-profile position as head of DOGE, a political side project that derailed the automaker.

“When will FSD be 100% unsupervised?” again “What is the current obstacle to expanding the use of Robotaxi and personal use of unsupervised FSD? Safety/functionality of the latest models or people to monitor the robotaxi in the car or remotely? Or something else?”

When it comes to Tesla itself, investors are looking forward to the revival of FSD and Robotaxi. FSD, short for “Full Self-Driving,” is Tesla’s driver assistance software, although the name is misleading: it still requires a human driver to be alert and ready to intervene at all times. Musk has been promising true autonomy for over a decade, but it’s not there yet. Regulators classify FSD as Level 2 autonomy, which means the person is still in charge. Fully unsupervised driving will be level 5.

So far, Tesla’s biggest step toward that idea is Robotaxi, its autonomous ride-hailing service now operating in Austin. The company launched in June 2025, using modified Model Y vehicles equipped with FSD. At first, human security guards sat in the passenger seat. Since January, a small number of driverless vehicles have joined the fleet, marking a major milestone. Expansion to additional cities is subject to regulatory approval.

With global EV demand on the rise, the success or failure of Robotaxi plays a big role in Tesla’s future.

“Regarding Optimus, can you share the current number of units deployed in Tesla factories and actively performing production tasks? What are the specific roles or tasks they perform, and how has their integration affected the efficiency of the factory or product?”

Another key product that will determine Tesla’s fate is Optimus, a humanoid robot designed to take on tedious or unsafe jobs—from housework to factory work. Naturally, Tesla’s EV factories would be the perfect place to prove these robots. The company plans to begin training Optimus at the Austin Gigafactory in early 2026, teaching robots to perform human factory tasks.

Tesla announced the Optimus project in 2021 and unveiled a prototype in 2022. Powered by Tesla’s in-house machine learning and AI technology. Musk described the project as one of Tesla’s most important long-term efforts, even saying it could end up being more important than the company’s car business.

According to Musk, the first production of Optimus is expected later this year, but at a “painful pace” due to the complexity of the humanoid robots. Musk aims to sell Optimus to the public as soon as next year. But given Musk’s track record of sticking to an ambitious timeline, investors might want to take that with a grain of salt.