🚘 Tesla delivers

Tesla reported quarterly earnings that beat analysts’ expectations, which they’d been lowering over the past year as the company’s core automotive business has struggled and its upcoming innovations have been pushed further into the future.

• The company reported revenue of $22.4 billion (versus a $22.1 billion FactSet analyst consensus estimate) and adjusted earnings per share of $0.41 (compared with Wall Street’s $0.35).

• Meanwhile, its free cash flow was $1.4 billion, much better than the $1.5 billion loss the Street expected, as the company contends with lower regulatory credit revenue, ongoing pricing pressure, and burgeoning capital expenditure.

• Analysts have been hoping that growth in the company’s energy generation and storage business would continue to offset its weakening automotive business. Energy segment revenue rose to $2.4 billion (lower than FactSet’s $3.2 billion) while the automotive segment grew to $16.2 billion (compared with the consensus expectation of $14.9 billion).

Shares were up 4.4% in after-hours trading following the report. In the earnings release, Tesla said that “over time, we expect our hardware-related profits to be accompanied by an acceleration of AI, software and fleet-based profits,” but didn’t give an actual timeline.

The Takeaway

Investors will be looking beyond near-term financials and toward the moon shot AI and autonomous projects on which Tesla is staking its future. That includes expanding into new markets and removing safety monitors from existing ones. So far, Robotaxi is running in San Francisco, Austin, and on a much smaller scale in Dallas and Houston, and safety monitors still attend a vast majority of its rides. Investors will be also looking for any incremental news on Optimus robot and AI chip progress.

Of course, Tesla’s automotive business remains its main source of revenue and the major mechanism with which it finances those forward-looking ambitions.

Read more

There’s no shortage of CEOs willing to declare — with dead certainty — what the future holds, but those tech visionaries can be tough to pin down on the details. 

But then there’s what we got yesterday morning: two earnings reports from the picks-and-shovel AI companies that actually support the massive build-outs. First, we got numbers from an honest-to-god metal-bending industrial company at the heart of the AI data center boom. Electrical equipment and gas turbine maker GE Vernova’s results provided a sturdy block of evidence that the AI boom has room to run.

• Order backlogs at GE Vernova jumped 32% to a new high of $163.28 billion during the three months that ended March 31, as we charted.

• The surge in orders is why RBC Capital Markets analyst Chris Dendrinos thinks GE Vernova will be completely sold out of its production capacity for heavy-duty turbines through 2029 — and possibly into 2030 — by the end of this year.

• To be sure, orders are not the same thing as actual sales. But “GEV’s got more demand than they have slots. They can be choosy as to who they want to work with,” Dendrinos said. And the company can mitigate the risk that when push comes to shove, buyers can’t or won’t meet their commitments.

But on the other side, Vertiv Holdings, another stock at the white-hot center of the data center boom, had a different experience.

• It too reported better-than-expected results early Wednesday.

• But it also stopped reporting quarterly backlog numbers — the firm will give those annually now.

• Without that data, the market focused on Vertiv’s guidance for the coming quarter, which was… uninspiring. So the stock sold off.

The Takeaway

So, what’s the lesson? Well, one may be that after the ride investors have had on some of these AI stocks, they’ll need almost constant reassurance that the boom still has legs.

GE Vernova’s report provided it; the stock went up. Vertiv didn’t. Shares fell. As we head into a big week of tech earnings next week, similar dynamics will be at play for traders when results roll in.

Read more

What month is it again? Price action across US stocks now looks similar to the month when speculative appetite was arguably at its highest since 2021, when the SPAC boom and GameStop’s short squeeze had retail traders ebullient.

October 2025 vs. April 2026, charted

• 🏈 NFL: The NFL draft is tonight! Markets* are pricing in a 73% chance of at least two quarterbacks going in the first round, with one of them, Indiana’s Fernando Mendoza, overwhelmingly likely to go to Las Vegas as the No. 1 pick. Markets are also pricing in a 57% chance of six or more wide receivers going in the first round, and a 20% chance of two or more running backs. Will a kicker or punter be drafted at all? That’s the real mystery this year. 

• 🏈 Draft: Who is going in the top 3? Besides Mendoza — who is essentially a lock to go in the top 3, at 98% — Ohio State linebacker Arvell Reese (76%) and Texas Tech defensive end David Bailey (73%) are seen as the likeliest contenders to round out the top 3, with each player having an even shot at the No. 2 pick and being condemned to work for the New York Jets. 

*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.

• Premarket earnings: Lockheed Martin, Freeport-McMoRan, NextEra Energy, American Airlines, Dow, Blackstone, and American Express

• Postmarket earnings: Intel and Baker Hughes