Flying Roadsters can’t lift Tesla’s flat Q3 revenues

As the smoke clears from its outrageous Roadster demo, Tesla reported Q3 earnings on Wednesday — and the cold reality is that revenue has flatlined.

Tesla said it earned $1.7 billion in net income on $28.0 billion in revenue in the quarter that ended in September 2026. Revenues were flat, while profits dropped 4 percent compared to the third quarter of 2025, when the company earned $1.4 billion in net income on $28.1 billion in revenue. Tesla’s revenue came in above Wall Street expectations of $27.9 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG. Tesla’s own company-compiled expectations predicted Q3 revenues of $28.3 billion.

The earnings come on the heels of a disappointing Q3 sales report, in which Tesla reported a 2.1 percent drop in customer deliveries compared to the blockbuster third quarter of 2025. (For a direct-to-consumer company like Tesla, deliveries are a proxy for sales.) The drop in sales was widely expected thanks to the expiration of the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicles on September 30, 2025. Elon Musk himself said that the company was in for “a few rough quarters” thanks to the expiring incentive and other macroeconomic factors.

But the possibility of a Tesla-SpaceX merger gained new momentum after Musk’s revelation this week that the two companies had formed special committees to discuss the possibility. Musk said a merger would be a “good idea,” even though he claimed he wouldn’t be involved in the process.

Beyond merger talks, this past quarter also saw the highly anticipated re-reveal of the next-generation Tesla Roadster, nine years after it was initially announced. The demo in Waco, Texas, featured a redesigned two-seat prototype flying and flipping through the air using cold-gas thrusters provided by SpaceX. While the event generated its own cottage industry of online reactions, it did little to asauge skeptics that the vehicle would actually go into production in 2028, as promised.

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