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Tesla (TSLA) stock drops 3% after hours — here’s what Wall Street is watching before earnings
26 January 2026
2 mins read

Tesla (TSLA) stock drops 3% after hours — here’s what Wall Street is watching before earnings

NEW YORK, January 26, 2026, 17:03 EST — After-hours.

  • Tesla shares closed down about 3% on Monday, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq ended higher.
  • Investors are heading into Tesla’s earnings focused on robotaxi rollout and Full Self-Driving software revenue.
  • New moves around subscriptions and insurance discounts have put Tesla’s driver-assist business back in focus.

Tesla shares fell 3.1% to $435.20 on Monday, after trading between $446.38 and $434.31, and were little changed after hours. The S&P 500 rose 0.5% to 6,950.13 and the Nasdaq added 0.44% to 23,603.78 as investors braced for a heavy earnings week and a Federal Reserve decision. “Investors are cautiously optimistic,” said Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer at Northlight Asset Management. Reuters

Tesla said it produced 434,358 vehicles and delivered 418,227 in the fourth quarter, and deployed 14.2 gigawatt hours (GWh) of energy storage. For 2025, it reported deliveries of 1,636,129 vehicles and energy storage deployments of 46.7 GWh. Tesla will post fourth-quarter results after market close on Wednesday, Jan. 28, and host a Q&A webcast at 5:30 p.m. Eastern.

That report arrives with Tesla’s self-driving promises back in the spotlight and with much of its $1.49 trillion market value tied to them, even as competition and brand controversy pressure the EV business. Analysts expect fourth-quarter revenue to slip about 4% and adjusted profit to fall about 40%, LSEG data show, after Tesla’s deliveries shrank in 2025, while Visible Alpha puts automotive gross margin excluding regulatory credits — payments other automakers make to meet emissions rules — at 14.3%. Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said “market sentiment is being driven by Tesla’s broader autonomy ambitions,” including its robotaxi platform and the Cybercab, a purpose-built robotaxi due to launch this year, with investors also watching cheaper “Standard” trims and energy-storage revenue expected to jump 44%. Reuters

In recent days, Elon Musk has pointed to Tesla’s robotaxi pilot in Austin, saying customers are now riding in cars without a human safety monitor in the vehicle.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Musk said: “We hope to get Supervised Full Self-Driving approval in Europe, hopefully next month,” and suggested China could follow on a similar timetable. Full Self-Driving, or FSD, is driver-supervised software that can steer on highways and city streets. Reuters

Lemonade said it will cut insurance rates by 50% for Tesla drivers on miles driven while FSD is steering, using telemetry data from the car to separate assisted miles from human driving on its pay-per-mile policies. Lemonade co-founder Shai Wininger said the firm can “see every minute, every second” and uses “millions of signals” to price a policy; the insurer said the offering rolls out in Arizona on Jan. 26 and Oregon in February. Traditional insurers and automakers are still wrestling with how to price and regulate Level 2 systems — features that assist steering and speed but keep the human driver responsible — and U.S. safety regulators have investigated crashes involving Tesla’s software. Reuters

Tesla has also tightened the paywall around its driver-assistance package in North America, dropping Autosteer and ending sales of Autopilot and Enhanced Autopilot on new U.S. and Canada vehicles and pushing buyers toward a $99-a-month FSD subscription. The company said it will stop offering FSD as a one-time $8,000 purchase from Feb. 14. California’s Department of Motor Vehicles has also given Tesla a 60-day deadline to overhaul its marketing or face a temporary suspension of its retail sales license.

But the autonomy trade cuts both ways. Any delay in approvals, a tougher stance from regulators or a miss on margins could bite, especially with investors treating Tesla less like a carmaker and more like a software story.

Wednesday’s results and the call that follows will set the near-term tone, with investors listening for guidance on demand, pricing, and the pace of the Cybercab rollout, plus any timetable for supervised FSD in Europe and China.

Stock Market Today

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