Tesla has opened its shareholder question portal for the third-quarter 2026 earnings call. If you own TSLA, you have about a week to help decide what Elon Musk and his team get asked. Questions are being collected on Say Technologies' Q&A platform, where Tesla "invites shareholders to ask and upvote questions that they would like addressed during their Q3 2026 Earnings," Tesla North reported Wednesday, Oct. 14. Teslarati also reported the opening.

The key dates

  • Question deadline: 4:00 p.m. EDT (1:00 p.m. PT) on Tuesday, Oct. 20.
  • Results: after the market closes on Wednesday, Oct. 21.
  • Live webcast: 4:30 p.m. CT on Oct. 21 (5:30 p.m. ET, 2:30 p.m. PT), on Tesla's investor relations site.

How the voting works

Say doesn't count one account as one vote. It ranks questions by the number of shares behind the votes, and you verify your holdings by linking a brokerage account. So big holders carry more weight. Teslarati notes that this gives institutional investors extra pull over the retail crowd. Management usually takes the top few questions near the end of the call, after analysts get their turn.

Early on, Tesla North counted 239 questions from 618 participants, representing about 539,000 TSLA shares. Those numbers will rise sharply by the deadline, and the ranking can change.

What shareholders are asking so far

According to Tesla North, autonomy dominates the early leaderboard:

  • The question with the most shares behind it asks how the Cybercab fleet will scale beyond Austin, and what the regulatory path looks like outside Texas.
  • Others ask when customers can buy a Cybercab outright and when unsupervised FSD will reach customer-owned cars.
  • One asks how much each Optimus robot costs to build.
  • Several highly ranked questions push Tesla for a firm timeline on Hardware 3 upgrades. That's a long-running sore point for HW3 owners, who currently get the cut-down FSD v14 "Lite" builds instead of the full HW4 software.

Teslarati expects the questions to shift from "when" to "how fast." Tesla said on Oct. 10 that more than 300 Cybercabs are serving Austin and named Dallas as the next city. There's also a regulatory question hanging over the call. Tesla's sworn answers to NHTSA's audit of how the pedal-free Cybercab was certified are due Oct. 30, nine days after the call.

What the numbers need to show

Delivery and storage figures for the quarter are already out: 486,532 vehicles and 13.7 GWh. Teslarati cites a Zacks consensus of about 43 to 45 cents a share on roughly $27.8 billion in revenue. For comparison, Q2 brought $28.2 billion in revenue with an operating margin of just 1.4%, according to Tesla North, and EPS missed estimates. Goldman Sachs, which rates the stock Neutral with a $360 target, argues the outlook for robotaxi, FSD and Optimus will matter more to the stock than the quarter itself. Investors will also watch cash flow, since Tesla has said 2026 capital spending is running above $25 billion.

What it means for you

If you own shares and care about the HW3 upgrade path, a Cybercab purchase date or the robotaxi rollout, now's the time to vote, while the leaderboard is still taking shape. Upvoting an existing question usually does more than posting a near-duplicate, because share counts pool behind one question. Remember that Tesla isn't obliged to answer anything, and it often answers the top questions only in general terms. Treat the call as a chance at a clear answer, not a promise of one.

The Roadster reveal comes first. Tesla streams it on X on Thursday, Oct. 15, at 7:55 p.m. CT, and Teslarati expects any production date or SpaceX thruster news to climb the voting list before the deadline.