Last Updated on: 24th July 2025, 04:43 am
Okay, yes, my first notes on Tesla’s Q2 2025 shareholder update were about three potential positives from the company. However, we can’t avoid the obvious. My first thoughts were about the historically bad financials from the company — it’s just that these were completely expected after seeing Tesla’s shockingly low Q2 sales numbers. But, looking more closely at Tesla’s quarterly financials, it’s impossible to not note some of the extreme, negative trends.
Just glancing at the summary from Google Finance to start, here are 5 key Tesla numbers (year over year) that really burn:
Revenue: down 9.23% ($19.34 billion)
Net income: down 70.58% ($409 million, only positive thanks to regulatory credits)
Net profit margin: down 67.53% (2.12%)
Earnings per share: down 40.00% ($0.27)
EBITDA: down 19.74% ($1.94 billion)
Yikes, that burns.
What is especially concerning is that this follows a super poor 1st quarter and a surprising downturn in 2024. It’s not just one quarter — it builds on a long-term decline in Tesla’s numbers. Recall that the following were some of the company’s key metrics year over year in 2024:
Net income: down 52.72%
Net profit margin: down 53.16%
Earnings per share: down 22.44%
EBITDA: down 3.92%
Tesla’s argument is that it’s all about AI and robots now, and Tesla is just gearing up for a massive surge in breakthroughs and income in that regard. The challenging thing there is that this has basically been said on repeat for the past 5–10 years. Believers see Tesla’s progress as promising enough that they still have faith in this argument, even if key milestones are several years behind schedule. Critics see it as a distraction and more hype than reality, expecting that these aspects of the business will not jack up revenue, income, and earnings per share again. With that as one’s core assumption, the vehicle sales trends get especially concerning and the stock price certainly does not make rational sense.
Frankly, unless new models make a big splash and/or Tesla’s AI and robotics work starts to pay off rather than suck away cash (as they have been doing), recent trends imply that Tesla will start losing money again rather than making a quarterly profit. The growing competitiveness of the EV markets in China and Europe add to those concerns, as do the major political ramifications of CEO Elon Musk’s actions in Europe and the USA (with Tesla losing market share in all of those markets in recent quarters).
Can Tesla turn trends around financially in the second half of 2025 and, especially, in 2026? That’s the big fundamental question for the company. If that doesn’t happen and recent trends continue, it’s hard to imagine that many investors — in particular the “big boys” — won’t lose patience with Tesla’s promises, get spooked by Tesla’s finances, and start really dumping Tesla’s stock. But who knows — as long as investors believe miracles and unfathomable profits are just around the corner, they can definitely ignore poor quarterly finances. It just seems that a lot could change fast if Tesla did cross that critical barrier and go from net profits to net losses again. And such a possibility is clearly looming.
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