Earnings Season Surprises

In this episode of Motley Fool Money, Motley Fool contributors Tyler Crowe, Matt Frankel, and Jon Quast discuss:

• The biggest surprises from Tesla's earnings report and call.
• Earnings from IBM, Texas Instruments, and GE Vernova.
• Why Progressive is down by more than 20% from its highs.

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A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on April 23, 2026.

Tyler Crowe: Earning season is ramping up, and we're here for Tesla. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Tyler Crowe, and today I'm joined by longtime contributors Matt Frankel and Jon Quast. It's inadvertently become Elon Musk week on Motley Fool Money. This week, I think, this is actually the fourth day in a row that we've discussed an Elon Musk company, either Tesla or SpaceX, in some form or another. But today, yesterday's earnings release from Tesla is going to be the big starting point. In addition to that, we're going to do a lightning round of several other companies that are reporting earnings, and as well, we're going to jump into a mailbag question related to the insurance industry.

But as I said, at the top, we're going to talk about Tesla here. Tesla reported an adjusted $0.41 per share and beat analyst expectations for vehicle deliveries, revenue, and earnings. But it did fall short ever so slightly on energy storage deliveries. Now, there's a lot of ways we could go here because it is Tesla. It is Elon Musk. I'm sure, if we wanted to, we could do podcasts for the next five days on the earnings release alone. But before we get too deep into it, I want to ask you guys, maybe one or two things that stood out to you either in the earnings release or the conference call.

Jon Quast: Apologies to our listeners. We don't mean to hit you over the head with Tesla every single day, but I think we all had that friend in high school who somehow finds his way into every conversation. That's certainly Elon Musk. Entertaining is the most probable outcome. Musk normally says something pretty headline-grabbing in his opening monologue of the earnings call. He didn't really do that this time. It was ho-hum, everything that we've already heard. Nothing really to talk about there, from my view.

But as we got down into the question-and-answer portion of the earnings call, Elon Musk started talking about something called Terafab. Terafab really intrigues me. This is Tesla's internal semiconductor operation that it's working on here. It's thinking very big things with this. But what fascinates me and intrigues me about the Terafab concept, even though it's probably still years and years into the future, is this thing called a feedback loop. I love feedback loops. I love coming up with something, testing it out, seeing how it actually goes, and then iterating on that and improving it as we go. Feedback loops that are short work better. It's one of the things that frustrates me about being a long-term investor. There is a lot of time in between me researching a company, coming up with an investment thesis, and seeing if my investment thesis was right; seeing if my right thesis even mattered in the end, and then adjusting my investment process as I go.

A feedback loop that takes a long time isn't as attractive as a short feedback loop. That's really what Tesla is envisioning with Terafab. Essentially, it wants to have everything in the semiconductor process all under one roof, and that way it can go through the entire iteration cycle, all the way to the finish, test it out, and then go back to the beginning and go again. I think it's so interesting. As Musk put it, there is some new physics we would like to test out. That might be overstating things a little bit, but I think directionally what he's getting at here is, hey, we want to try things, we want to try it fast and see if it works, and we want to adjust and try again. It's looking to put about $3 billion to work to make a few thousand wafers a month. But at scale, it wants to be 50 times bigger than the entire industry combined. I think this is something that is very interesting to watch in the coming years.

Tyler Crowe: I want to step in here a second and talk about the scale that we're talking about here. To give one example, one of the things that they were talking about was using Intel's new 14A process for some of this Terafab work. Intel is building a facility in Ohio, and they believe that the manufacturing costs for the facility itself is somewhere like $160 billion range, and this is for one facility. The idea, we're going to a 50X something like this. The numbers that are going around with this Tesla Terafab thing are jaw-dropping, doesn't quite encapsulate at all. It's more like I live on the 18th floor of an apartment building; my jaw somehow hit the street.

Jon Quast: Exactly right, Tyler. Why is it called Terafab? Because it wants to output a terawatt of compute power annually. A terawatt, it's one word. That's a lot of watts.

Matt Frankel: There are a lot of big numbers that Elon Musk throws out there. What was the latest one? One million data centers in space was one that I've heard. This one isn't really a big surprise on that note, but one thing that really stood out to me in the call is how all-in on robotics Tesla is becoming. Along with the earnings release, Tesla said that preparations for the first large-scale Optimus factory, which is at the Fremont plant, will begin in Q2; the quarter we're in right now. The first generation will be designed for 1 million robots per year. They're prepping Gigafactory Texas to be their second-generation robot manufacturing facility, and they're designing that for a capacity of 10 million per year. That's not surprising.

But the one thing that did surprise me, and this is on the part of the business that no one talks about, but it is what makes Tesla money these days, is the ramp-up in Model 3 and Model Y production. It was up 14% year-over-year in the first quarter despite that tax credit having been in place a year ago, and it's not there now. I would have thought that demand was dropping for those, but it doesn't seem to be the case. That's what surprised me. These two models, the Model 3 and the Model Y, account for about 97% of Tesla's vehicle sales, and management said that lower-cost versions of both models are in the works. Tesla is not a robotics, autonomous driving, chip-making, whatever you want to call its story. The car business could still have significant potential from here.

Tyler Crowe: Here's the thing I found. I guess you could say, peculiar is the right word to figure out, because we talked about these grand, ambitious numbers, like the amount of money that it would take to do the things that we're talking about here, and the 10 million robots a year. There's obviously the plans for robotaxis and Cybercab, and things like that. This is where it became peculiar for me: They said they were going to spend $20 billion this year, and then this quarter, they bumped that spending plan up to $25 billion for the year. Obviously, they're seeing the direction of this. But Q1 capital spending came in at $2.5 billion. It was actually quite small. It was more or less on pace with what they've been doing for the past 6-8 quarters. It's also why it posted free cash flow this quarter, when analysts were mostly expecting cash outflows because it was way less spending than I think a lot of the analysts were expecting.

I acknowledge that spending can ramp throughout the year, but considering how ambitious the plans were, how much they said they're going to be more they're going to be spending, it's going to be a massive ramp-up in the second half of the year. It'll be interesting to see how that happens because we're talking about AI data centers, and supply chains in the United States are really strained for manufacturing construction capacity right now. The further that stuff gets pushed down the line, I think it's going to be a little bit harder to secure a lot of things to do a lot of what Tesla wants to do in terms of procurement, in terms of construction, and stuff like that. It's an interesting thread I want to follow. Again, in all of that, somewhere, there has to be a massive ramp-up in production for its Cybercab or the robotaxis as well.

Matt Frankel: I mentioned the robotics plans. They're ramping up the Fremont factory conversion in Q2, so I have to think that has to do somewhat with the delayed fuss and spending that we're seeing. But you're right, that doesn't have anything to do with the robotaxis. That doesn't have anything to do with Terafab, as Jon was talking. But there is some ramp-up in progress here.

Jon Quast: To that point, Matt, Musk pointing out on the call that when you're talking about building robots, a production line of robots, there are many things that you have to get out on that production line before you actually start ramping, and there's many components, many processes, even robotic assembly line things that you need to have in place, and all of that takes time to disassemble what's already there and source and then reassemble a new production line. It is logical to assume that your higher spending is going to come later than sooner.

Tyler Crowe: That was pretty good coverage of Tesla. Probably a little bit longer than we normally go, but hey, it's Tesla. There's always plenty to talk about. Coming up after the break, we're going to do a lightning round of several other companies that have been reporting earnings this week. We don't have as much time to spend on the rest of the companies we had here, versus Tesla. What we're going to do is we're going to do a quick lightning round of earnings wrap-ups. Each of us picked one stock. We're going to do a quick coverage of what we saw, what was interesting, perhaps some challenges along the way. Matt, you drew the best number, I guess, for the three of us. You're going to start. What was the company you saw and what was most interesting?

Matt Frankel: IBM earnings is one that I was really anticipating, and I like the stock even better, honestly, after its earnings call. They beat expectations on both the top and bottom line, but the stock is down by 10%. There are a few reasons. First, it beat expectations and simply maintained its full-year guidance, and that's usually a sign that the next couple of quarters might become weaker than expected. If you have full-year guidance, you already beat your expectations for the first quarter; the law of averages says you're not going to do that well in the rest of the year.

Second, their consulting revenue grew by 4% year-over-year and missed expectations. This is the part of the business that investors worry the most when it comes to AI disruption, like Claude Code could do COBOL software updating. That's why IBM stock plunged earlier this year, when Claude announced that new update. Generally, their numbers were strong. Revenue was up 9% year-over-year. Software and infrastructure revenue both grew by double digits. Gross margin expanded by 100 basis points. That made their operating cash flow grow by 18% year-over-year. Management really had positive things to say about the AI tailwinds they're seeing throughout the business. I'm not that worried about the software updating consulting long term. It's really the AI part of the business that seems to be moving in the right direction.

Tyler Crowe: I think all three of us picked something that was either directly or tangentially related to AI here because I went with GE Vernova, ticker is GEV. Funny thing is, not too long ago, this was considered the problem child of the conglomerate that was General Electric. They had the great aerospace business, you had this really steady healthcare business, and then you had this electricity business that nobody really liked that much. But it's spun off, and over the past year, GE Vernova is up 253%. Boy, there is a reason. First quarter, free cash flow was more than all of its free cash flow in 2025, and a lot of that had to do with bringing in a lot of revenue for its backlog. It posted an incredible jump of $12 billion in basically unearned revenue. That's basically stuff that people have ordered, and they want built sometime down the road, and it's going to sit as unearned revenue cash sitting on the books.

It's this nice injection of cash because there's going to be a big ramp-up to do a lot of things they want to do. Because total backlog for all of its segments. This is gas turbines; it's nuclear reactors that it has a joint venture with Hitachi in Japan for. Its wind turbines are actually growing. It's grid and transmission equipment, stuff like that, it's all growing, and right now, its backlog is somewhere around $200 billion of work that it needs to do, and this is a $300 billion company. It's basically busy for the rest of the decade. On top of that, it acquired a 50% JV stake, or bought back, would be a better way of saying it, of a company called Prolec. Which again is like transformers and a lot of other electrification and grid equipment. Really leaning into that, hey, AI, electrification of transportation, we need this stuff. It seems like a very opportune time because it's pretty flush with cash right now.

There was two really surprising things for me in the conference call, was from CEO Scott Strazik. Previous quarter, he said that basically they had about 10 gigawatts of available production in 2029. That was last quarter. Basically, they're booked all the way out to 2029, minus 10 gigawatts of power. This quarter, what he said is, so what's changed is we still have about 10 gigawatts remaining, but that's cumulatively through 29 and 30. Basically, he's saying, they're booked all of 2029, 2030 is booking up really fast. This is all the way through the rest of the decade. If there's a company that has really strong revenue growth and a lot of visibility and what it's going to do, I think GE Vernova is really looking interesting. Jon, what do you have?

Jon Quast: Tyler, you're talking about how we're all picking companies that are somehow related to AI. It's honestly hard to find things that aren't related to AI at this point. I actually shudder to think what would the state of the economy be if there wasn't so much AI infrastructure spending right now? I think that the results from GE Vernova are good. A data point there to prove that point, I'm also going AI here with Texas Instruments. This is ticker symbol TXN, often forgotten in the conversation. It's a huge company. It's disrespectful. But let's talk about it a second. It reported its financial results for the first quarter of 2026. Revenue up 19%, and that's actually the highest growth rate it's had in over four years. I think that's worth pointing out. Good guidance for the next quarter, too. What's driving it is data center revenue, up 90% year-over-year; in the most recent quarter, up 25% sequentially, and that's an acceleration from the data center growth rate in the previous quarter.

When it comes to the data centers, Texas Instruments has chips that it makes for power management; it has some things for temperature detection and control, those things. Not necessarily completely core to what's happening in the AI trends in the compute and all that, but still, they're products that are necessary, and the sales cycle does benefit from all the spending going on. When you look at some of the demand trends here, here's a signal. Texas Instruments management was expecting the prices of its products to take a small step back in the first quarter. Not huge, but a small one. But in reality, the prices were flat. What that means is Texas Instruments management knows this business inside and out, and demand was stronger than what it anticipated. The pricing held up better for its products than it thought it would. That led to the small beat that it did report.

I think that is one of those things. If you're one of these investors who says, Are we in a bubble? Remember, there's so many data points that say demand continues to be stronger than even the industry insiders have expected. One other thing to note is the company is acquiring a company called Silicon Labs. That's ticker symbol SLAB. What's interesting here is that this is an unprofitable company, and Texas Instruments management says it's going to be accretive to earnings. Here's the thing: Texas Instruments always reports generally accepted accounting principles, GAAP numbers, not these adjusted numbers. It'll be interesting to see how this unprofitable company is somehow accretive to Texas Instruments earnings. It obviously won't be right away, but it says eventually. I think that's worth pointing out.

Tyler Crowe: The magic of synergies, you can make anything look profitable. Coming up after the break, we're going to go into the mailbag. Hey, a quick reminder, if you like asking questions, we want to be answering your questions. Go ahead, send an email over to podcast@fool.com. We'd love to answer any questions you have on air. Our two requests are: 1, keep it Foolish; and 2, after reading lots of these, try to keep them short so we can read them on air. Again, that email is podcast@fool.com. Today's question comes from Matt Kosiak. I apologize if I misspelled your name. But he wants to know a little bit more about the insurance industry. The question is, Progressive, company ticker is PGR, has fallen quite a bit from its highs, and it's currently yielding 7%. What are your guys' thoughts? We're going to go around the room. Jon, what did you see first?

Jon Quast: Matt is going to give more substantial analysis for the insurance company itself and the industry. But a note there on that 7% dividend yield, not all dividend payers are created equal. There are some that you can count on a quarterly dividend that steadily rises, and that's what that dividend yield is that you're looking at. It's calculated off of that, but there are companies that also pay one-time dividends or annual dividends, and those tend to be a little bit more up and down. They fluctuate. For Progressive, it paid a really big annual dividend recently, and so it's not necessarily going to pay that much again next year in the annual dividend. The 7% yield that has an asterisk on it. It's not necessarily the same as a Dividend King that you can pretty much count on what it's going to be paying next year.

The other thing to mention here. Why is Progressive stock not performing as well? It's related to why it was able to pay that huge annual dividend. Its profit margin is close to an all-time high. That's good, but it's been a favorable underwriting environment, and that's for the entire industry. That's not a Progressive thing. That happens. There are cycles where it ebbs and flows. There are better times, harder times, and Progressive's own profit margin history shows that there are times when it gets up close to the margin that it's at right now because of favorable conditions, but those conditions eventually turn and lead to lower margins down the road. In other words, what we're saying here is the numbers are pointing to the fact that Progressive is maybe close to a cyclical peak in earnings, and therefore, the dividend will be lower, and earnings will be lower maybe a couple of years from now, and so that's what the market is reacting to.

Tyler Crowe: What a nice response there. I don't know much about industry, but I'm going to go through 10 years of its cyclical earnings to give you an idea of what you're talking about here. Jon, speaking modestly here, but I want to actually interject with a point about the cyclicality here, too. Because I was looking at some analysts' projections, industry analysts basically. Thinking what the earnings and stuff like that for Progressive and several other companies in the industry are looking like over the next couple of years.

For example, for fiscal year 2026, analysts are projecting 10% reduction in earnings per share. Basically, all the analyst projections I've seen for earnings and revenue across the insurance industry, not Progressive; we're talking about Travelers and Allstate Company, very similar companies in the property and casualty lines. All of them are more or less projecting either slightly down or flat earnings all the way out until 2028. It does look like we're in a very cyclical moment. Now, of course, analysts' projections can change. These are all looking into the crystal ball of what has happened in the industry before. It could change. Take those numbers with a grain of salt, but it does appear that the industry is in one of its downward cycles that would help to explain why people are probably not chomping at the bit to be wanting to buy shares of Progressive right now.

Matt, you are probably the more optimistic of all of us, so go through the business a little bit more and tell us why? Even despite this like tepid, I guess you could say projection, this is probably worth buying.

Matt Frankel: To be fair, I'm not the most optimistic when it comes to over the next two or three years, like the numbers you quoted on the screen. I agree with those. I think that's pretty spot on. We can go on and on about the insurance business, but generally, premiums they rise in reaction. It's like a delayed fuss. Insurance companies have to get state approval for rate increases, things like. You'll see inflation, you'll see the replacement cost of vehicles going up, then they'll have to raise rates in response. Which is why you're seeing insurance rates go up a lot now, whereas the actual cost of vehicles went up two or three years ago.

But there's a few things to unpack with Progressive. First, growth has slowed considerably. It's worth mentioning that. This is an insurance company that was rapidly gaining share, and in the first quarter, their net written premiums grew by 6% year-over-year. When you adjust for inflation, that's really like 3% actual growth. We've also had a pretty excellent year when it comes to natural disaster losses. We didn't have any catastrophic hurricanes in the U.S. last year, for example. That helped the profitability last year, and it's going to be a tough comp in 2026, and we're already seeing that. Progressive is not down for no reason, in addition to the cyclicality that you mentioned.

But having said all that, I'm a big fan of Progressive at these levels, and really, dividends have nothing to do with it. The company has been the tech leader in the insurance industry for about 15 years. That's not going to change, regardless of what point of the cycle we're at. It's allowed it to not only be more profitable than its competitors consistently, even in down cycles, but to take market share. Progressive was the Number 3 auto insurer in the US a few years ago, and now it's a legitimate contender to take the Number 1 spot away from State Farm. The auto insurance industry itself is expected to grow by about 40% by 2030. Simply put, it costs a lot more to replace a vehicle that's been in an accident than it did a few years ago, even if it's got minor damage. If someone hit my car today, there'd be 6, 7 computer systems that need replacing. That wasn't the case 10 years ago. That's not going to change anytime soon when you talk about all the self-driving software and hardware that's going to be put on all these new cars.

To wrap it up, I'm optimistic about Progressive long-term. I think it's really rare to be able to get a chance to buy Progressive 20% off its recent highs, historically. But I do agree that it could be a tough point in the cycle for the next two or three years.

Tyler Crowe: I think we all landed at this base. Great company. I don't think anybody is going to be too excited with what the results is going to post over the next couple of years. That's all the time that we have for today. Matt, Jon, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I'm going to have disclosure, we'll get out of here.

As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy yourself stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards, and it's not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content provided for informational purposes only. To see our Fool advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. Thanks for our producer, Bart Shannon, and the rest of The Motley Fool team. From Matt, Jon, and myself. Thanks for listening, and we'll chat again soon.

Jon Quast has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Matt Frankel, CFP has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Tyler Crowe has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends GE Aerospace, GE Vernova, Intel, International Business Machines, Progressive, Tesla, and Texas Instruments. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.