Tesla starts Optimus production at Fremont as Q3 revenue stays flat and profit reports diverge

Tesla announced the Optimus milestone in its third-quarter shareholder letter. The company said the machines coming off the line in Fremont, a manufacturing space once used for electric vehicles, were "the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured." It added that while Tesla will keep iterating on hardware and manufacturing, it had proven the current process "is suitable for a commercial product."

The robot announcement came with financial results that showed pressure on Tesla's core business. TechCrunch reported total third-quarter revenue of $28.04 billion, slightly below the $28.09 billion generated in the same period of 2025 and about $200 million below the prior quarter's $28.23 billion. The Verge reported revenue of $28.0 billion and said it was above Wall Street expectations of $27.9 billion but below Tesla's company-compiled forecast of $28.3 billion.

The two reports differed on profitability. The Verge said Tesla earned $1.7 billion in net income and that profit dropped 4 percent from the third quarter of 2025, when it earned $1.4 billion. TechCrunch said net income was $787 million, a 43 percent drop from $1.37 billion a year earlier. Neither report explained the discrepancy.

Vehicle sales remained the main revenue source. TechCrunch reported that automotive revenue was flat year over year at $20 billion. Tesla delivered 486,532 vehicles in the third quarter, about 6,000 more than the previous quarter but lower than the same period last year, according to TechCrunch; The Verge reported that deliveries fell 2.1 percent from the third quarter of 2025. The Verge said the decline was widely expected after the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicles expired on September 30, 2025, and that Elon Musk had said Tesla faced "a few rough quarters" because of the expiring incentive and other macroeconomic factors.

TechCrunch reported that expenses rose as Tesla increased spending on Optimus, artificial intelligence and autonomous driving. The company's solar and energy storage business fell 16 percent year over year to $2.8 billion, which Tesla blamed on tariff-related customer refunds, according to TechCrunch. Services revenue grew 33 percent to $4.6 billion, and the "services and other" segment contributed a record $734 million in gross profit. Lower regulatory credit sales also pressured profitability, TechCrunch reported, and the company stayed in the black largely because of the services segment.

The quarter also included a fresh look at two long-running Musk projects. The Verge reported that talks about a possible Tesla-SpaceX merger gained momentum after Musk revealed this week that the two companies had formed special committees to discuss the possibility; Musk called a merger a "good idea" while saying he would not be involved in the process. Tesla also re-revealed its next-generation Roadster, nine years after it was first announced, with a demo in Waco, Texas, showing a redesigned two-seat prototype flying and flipping through the air using cold-gas thrusters provided by SpaceX. The Verge reported that the event did little to assuage skeptics that the vehicle would go into production in 2028 as promised.