The company soon to be known as SpaceX was free-cash-flow positive last quarter, according to results released after the bell on Wall Street Wednesday.
That was one takeaway from Tesla’s results. Another: Capex more than doubled from the same period a year ago, but at $4.73 billion, it fell from Q2. Consensus expected a meaningful QoQ increase.
Note that the $1.531 billion in FCF made for a very stark contrast with Street expectations for a near $5 billion cash burn.
As the figure reminds you, FCF was negative in Q2 for the first time in nine quarters.
On the top-line, total sales were $28.046 billion, slightly below the Bloomberg consensus. That was down YoY, which is to say Tesla’s now returned to non-growth after consecutive quarters during which revenue rose sharply versus the comparable 2025 period.
I won’t even begin to speculate on whether investors care about actual sales at a company that trades almost purely on narratives, but I will note that the top-line might not have missed were it not for “tariff-related customer refunds” in the battery business, where revenue slumped 16% YoY. Disappearing regulatory credits were a drag too.
Apparently, more and more Tesla drivers are paying Musk for his oxymoronic “Supervised Full Self-Driving” system. (He may as well call it CFA, “Chaperoned Full Autonomy.”) The number of active FSD subscriptions was 1.74 million at quarter-end. I don’t know if there was a consensus for that. It was up 17.5% from Q2, whatever that means to you.
Speaking of metrics for which I doubt consensus is especially useful to the extent it even exists, Tesla said “cumulative unsupervised Robotaxi miles” rose 700% from Q2. The company’s backlog both for cars and the storage business hit records.
All of those numbers are a sideshow in the context of the bigger discussion around a possible merger with SpaceX, which on Tuesday reported results that topped estimates as SI revenue outstripped Starlink sales.
Summing up the quarter in an especially gaudy deck (about of a third of the presentation was devoted to pictures, including one of that silly flying roadster which Musk’s calling “the best of the last human-driven cars”), Tesla said the company has “strong momentum” on all sorts of “projects” running the gamut from SI to robotics to renewables. Management’s hard at work “building a future of Amazing Abundance.”
Meanwhile, over at Casa de Zuck, revenue rose a quicker-than-expected 26% to $64.6 billion in Q3, Meta said. At the midpoint, the current-quarter sales guide is $74.5 billion, also higher than analysts saw.
As the figure shows, revenue growth’s slowing, but the release suggested the underlying business is doing pretty well, something Zuckerberg was keen to emphasize. “We hit major milestones this quarter [and] we’re seeing velocity across the board,” he said.
Once you strip out the massive payout to settle claims that its businesses are deleterious to teen mental health (Meta appears to have recognized around half of that charge in Q3), operating income rose 11.4% YoY to $22.88 billion and EPS was $7.40 (versus the reported $3.83).
The company lifted the lower-end of the capex guide to $135 billion from $130 billion. So, it’s now $135 billion to $145 billion for the full year. Meta didn’t provide a 2027 capex guide, saying instead it’s “still developing” the budget.
“We expect to continue investing aggressively to support both our core business and emerging AI initiatives,” the release went on, adding that AI investments are “delivering benefits to the core business.” Sales growth next year should be “strong throughout.”
Finally, Meta introduced a new class of non-voting shares and announced a related one-off dividend in an effort to, among other things, keep Zuck in California amid the Prop 40 debate. Here’s my attempt at a “long story short” version: The one-off share dividend’s basically a way for Mark to pay the prospective billionaire tax without giving up any of his voting clout in the company — i.e., he can just sell his pile of new, non-voting shares if he needs liquidity. In return, he committed to stay in California for at least eight years.
