Tonight, after the U.S. markets close, Elon Musk has a conference call to make.

Tesla‘s first-quarter financial results are due, and the number of lingering questions ahead of that call is starting to look like the number of cars piling up on Tesla’s lots.

Tesla built 408,386 vehicles in the first three months of 2026. It delivered 358,023.

Both numbers are straight from Tesla’s own first-quarter production and delivery release, filed with the SEC in early April.

The gap between them — 50,363 cars built and not sold — is, according to InsideEVs, more unsold inventory than Tesla has ever had in its roughly two decades in business.

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For a company that spent the last decade famous for waiting lists and delivery crunches, sitting on a record pile of finished EVs is not a small shift. It’s the kind of thing that usually ends with discounts, and discounts end with thinner profit margins.

Alongside Tesla’s car business, the EV maker has spent the past two years telling investors that its energy-storage unit — the giant Megapack batteries it sells to utilities and data centers — is its fastest-growing business.

Tesla’s Q4 2025 release called it a record: 14.2 gigawatt-hours deployed in a single quarter, with energy revenue up 25% year over year.

The Q1 2026 release, posted to the same investor relations page three weeks ago, shows the first-quarter number: 8.8 gigawatt-hours.

That’s a drop of nearly 40% in three months, from the part of Tesla that was supposed to be accelerating.

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Then there’s the spending. On Tesla’s January earnings call, the company told investors its 2026 capital spending would top $20 billion. That’s more than double what Tesla spent in 2025.

Two months later, in March, Musk walked onto a stage at the Seaholm Power Plant in Austin and announced a new chip-manufacturing project called Terafab, a joint venture with SpaceX and xAI.

On the same stage, Tesla’s CFO said the pilot facility’s estimated $20 to $25 billion cost is not yet included in that $20 billion 2026 plan.

Put it together and tonight’s call has an unusual shape.

Tesla has a car business that produced far more than it sold, a battery business whose deployments fell off a cliff in a single quarter, a spending plan already at record size and a separate multibillion-dollar project the company has openly said isn’t in the spending plan yet.