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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has spent months — years? — trying to position his company as something more than just a maker of electric vehicles. When Tesla acquired Solar City in 2016, he (and his comms team) pitched it as a sustainable energy company. Over the past year, he has pushed the idea of Tesla as an AI and robotics company.
Musk’s aspirational branding has slammed right up against financial reality: The bulk of its revenue comes from selling EVs. Its latest earnings support this.
The company generated $94.8 billion in revenue in 2025. Of that, $69.5 billion came from selling and leasing EVs as well as related regulatory credits. The remaining $25 billion is split nearly down the middle between its energy generation (solar) and storage business and “services and other,” which include revenue from its Superchargers, parts sales, and Full Self-Driving subscriptions. That reliance on deliveries means that as EV sales have dipped, so has Tesla’s entire balance sheet. Its profits in 2025 were 46% lower year-over-year.
Tesla has tried to grow its non-EV businesses to compensate for the decline in sales, and its Q4 and full-year earnings report (and its accompanying call) signaled a shift beyond the persistent AI-robotics talk and toward action. For now, that action involves spending money, not making it. Musk repeatedly stressed that 2026 would be a huge CapEx year, more than doubling spending to $20 billion, which would put them in negative-cash-flow territory.
For instance, Musk announced that Tesla is ending production of the Model S and Model X, which is more symbolic than material. Those two models represent about 2% of Tesla’s sales volume, a point that Barclays analyst Dan Levy also ma …