For what feels like the third or fourth time in a row now, Tesla is gearing up for what may be the most important earnings call in its history.

The electric vehicle maker reports after the bell today, holding its first call with analysts and investors at the dawn of a new era that finds the company squeezed between increased competition and a high-stakes feud involving its enigmatic CEO and the US federal government. At stake are billions in lucrative tax credits. Buckle up, things could get pretty bumpy.

Credit Score

After something of a shareholder mutiny earlier this year sparked by his divided attention while serving as an aide to President Trump, Elon Musk has seemingly quelled the critics. Now, Tesla must confront its myriad headwinds. First and foremost: The regulatory credits Tesla sells to combustion-engine carmakers to offset their tailpipe emissions. Selling the credits has been big business for Tesla, generating more than $10 billion in revenue since 2019 and accounting for a substantial portion of its free cash flow in 2024. Recent legislation, however, eliminates the hefty fines that traditional automakers face for failing to reach emissions standards, thus reducing the demand for Tesla’s carbon credits.

Tesla’s credit sales already dipped in the first quarter, generating revenue of just $595 million compared with $692 million in the final quarter of 2024. Analysts at William Blair and Co. recently projected that revenue in the category might fall by 75% next year, and be virtually eliminated by 2027. Analysts at Piper Sandler, meanwhile, are slightly more bullish, recently projecting that “Tesla will still book around $3B in credits this year, followed by $2.3B in 2026.” Many legacy automakers have long-term contracts for carbon credits from Tesla.

Still, those same legacy automakers are suddenly catching up to Tesla in the EV realm:

• While Tesla remains the EV king in the US, its sales are shrinking just as rivals’ are growing. The Automotive News Data Center estimates that Tesla sold 125,000 EVs in the US in the second quarter, down almost 17% year-over-year (Tesla doesn’t break down its delivery figures by region). GM, meanwhile, reports that it sold 46,280 EVs in the second quarter and 78,167 EVs so far this year, representing a 111% increase from 2024.
• That puts GM’s domestic EV market share at around 13%, while most estimates peg Tesla’s once-dominant US market share at just 43% now. “GM is quietly building trust while Elon burns it,” Paul Waatti, director of industry analysis for AutoPacifi­c, recently told USA Today.

Bleep Bloop: Still, Tesla has a sky-high forward price-to-earnings ratio for a reason. Thus far, at least, Musk has been able to sell investors on a future of self-driving cars and robotics. A robotaxi pilot program launched in Austin, Texas, earlier this summer. “Outside of guidance, the market will likely be focusing on the robotaxi business, which had to navigate a slew of weather problems,” David Wagner, head of equity and portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors, told The Daily Upside. “The company has a ‘hopes and dreams’ multiple, so anything focusing on [autonomous vehicles], robotics and the other innovative products should be the focal point.”

From leveraged funds that invest only in Robinhood to products built to combat anti-semitism, exchange-traded funds are having a banner year.

ETFs — investment vehicles known for their low costs, tax efficiencies and transparency — had collected $540 billion in new money, and issuers had launched 464 new funds, through the first six months of 2025, according to market researcher Morningstar. The industry is on track to launch a record 726 funds by the end of the year.

Issuers are pumping out funds to meet investor demand, but there’s a growing risk that many of the new ETFs will have short shelf lives because they serve very specific purposes or incorporate traditionally niche investing strategies.

“If that purpose falls out of favor and assets dwindle, it may be difficult for the ETF sponsor to keep the lights on,” said Zachary Evens, Morningstar research analyst. “As the space gets saturated, only a relative few will likely see sustained success.”

Fund on the Bun

Low-cost funds with broad market exposure typically have the most assets under management and are the most popular with new investors. However, so few of them have launched this year that they’re almost being seen as novel in the current ETF landscape. “Perhaps Vanguard and [Charles] Schwab’s continued push into very-low-cost bond strategies is unique amongst the sea of leveraged, covered call and buffer ETF launches,” Evens told The Daily Upside.

The Morningstar data showed:

• First Trust, BlackRock’s iShares and Graniteshares were among the top issuers in the first half of 2025, launching 23, 20 and 19 funds, respectively.
• Plenty of the new ETFs have also been fairly costly. The average expense ratio of 2025 ETF launches is 0.74%, much higher than all ETFs’ average expense ratio of 0.6%.

Active-ish: Many ETFs launched this year are being labeled as “active,” meaning a fund manager is at the helm, regularly making investment decisions in the hopes of outperforming a benchmark instead of just mirroring it. That title is a bit of a misnomer, however, as some of those funds are more reliant on algorithms than traditional discretionary strategies, Evens said. They’re only being called active because they don’t track an index.

“Managers essentially have a formula for how to execute a strategy, removing much of the judgement or discretion associated with traditional stock-picking funds,” he said.

Green steel may not be a galvanized pipe dream.

On Tuesday, Hertha Metals — a startup backed by Bill Gates and Vinod Khosla — told Bloomberg that it had successfully developed a method for producing steel at both a lower cost than typical methods and with significantly lower carbon emissions. It marks a significant milestone for the emerging industry.

It’s Not Easy Being Green (and Cheap)

Heavy industrials remain one of the most significant drivers of greenhouse gas emissions, and also one of the toughest to eliminate. After all, it’s pretty difficult to operate 2,912-degree Fahrenheit metal-smelting blast furnaces without letting off some proverbial (carbon-filled) steam. In fact, by most estimates, the roughly 2 billion tons of steel produced each year account for about 7% of the world’s carbon emissions. For reference, that’s more emissions than the shipping and aviation industries combined, as well as more than emitted by the entirety of the European Union in a given year.

Cracking green steel has proven prohibitively expensive, with Hertha’s victory coming just as much of the industry was starting to lose hope that a solution even existed:

• Through an operational breakthrough, Hertha told Bloomberg it can reduce carbon emissions by more than 50% compared with traditional methods, and, at scale, it says it can do so at a lower cost than conventional steelmaking. Next year, the company will break ground on a “larger demonstration plant” that will be able to produce 9,000 tons of cheaper green steel by the time it opens for commercial operations in 2031.
• The breakthrough comes just a month after Cleveland-Cliffs announced it would cancel a $500 million project to build a green steel plant in Ohio, while German conglomerate ThyssenKrupp earlier this year said its own multi-billion-dollar plans for a green steel plant may be unviable.

Light Metals: Worse than just cancelling projects, the high costs have likely prevented many more prospective developers from ever getting past the drawing board. According to a recent report from BloombergNEF, even if all announced green steel plants successfully came online by the end of the decade, they’d still only account for roughly 6% of global steel production. Meanwhile, the report found that global investment in the technology fell by more than half in 2024, to just $17 billion.