Tesla's Unsold EVs Pile Up, Fastest-Growing Business Shrinks 40% — Elon Musk Must Explain Tonight

Erica KollmannFri, April 24, 2026 at 8:01 PM UTC

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Tonight, after the U.S. markets close, Elon Musk has a conference call to make.

Tesla‘s first-quarter financial results are due, and the number of lingering questions ahead of that call is starting to look like the number of cars piling up on Tesla’s lots.

Let’s Start With The Cars

Tesla built 408,386 vehicles in the first three months of 2026. It delivered 358,023.

Both numbers are straight from Tesla’s own first-quarter production and delivery release, filed with the SEC in early April.

The gap between them — 50,363 cars built and not sold — is, according to InsideEVs, more unsold inventory than Tesla has ever had in its roughly two decades in business.

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For a company that spent the last decade famous for waiting lists and delivery crunches, sitting on a record pile of finished EVs is not a small shift. It’s the kind of thing that usually ends with discounts, and discounts end with thinner profit margins.

Now The Batteries

Alongside Tesla’s car business, the EV maker has spent the past two years telling investors that its energy-storage unit — the giant Megapack batteries it sells to utilities and data centers — is its fastest-growing business.

Tesla’s Q4 2025 release called it a record: 14.2 gigawatt-hours deployed in a single quarter, with energy revenue up 25% year over year.

The Q1 2026 release, posted to the same investor relations page three weeks ago, shows the first-quarter number: 8.8 gigawatt-hours.

That’s a drop of nearly 40% in three months, from the part of Tesla that was supposed to be accelerating.

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The CapEx

Then there’s the spending. On Tesla’s January earnings call, the company told investors its 2026 capital spending would top $20 billion. That’s more than double what Tesla spent in 2025.

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Two months later, in March, Musk walked onto a stage at the Seaholm Power Plant in Austin and announced a new chip-manufacturing project called Terafab, a joint venture with SpaceX and xAI.

On the same stage, Tesla’s CFO said the pilot facility’s estimated $20 to $25 billion cost is not yet included in that $20 billion 2026 plan.

The Big Picture

Put it together and tonight’s call has an unusual shape.

Tesla has a car business that produced far more than it sold, a battery business whose deployments fell off a cliff in a single quarter, a spending plan already at record size and a separate multibillion-dollar project the company has openly said isn’t in the spending plan yet.

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None of those problems is, on its own, the end of the Tesla story.

The company has absorbed worse quarters. But Musk has rarely walked into an earnings call with all four of them waiting for him at once.

The most interesting part of tonight’s call probably won’t be which one he addresses first. It’ll be which one he chooses not to address at all.

Photo: Shutterstock

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Source: “AOL Money”