Earnings Eve: Meta and Tesla Report Tonight, and the AI Bill Comes Due

Earnings season has a main event tonight, and it is actually two main events stacked back to back. Meta Platforms reports its third-quarter results after the market closes on Wednesday, October 21, with its earnings call scheduled for 4:30 p.m. Eastern. Tesla follows an hour later, with its third-quarter webcast at 5:30 p.m. Eastern. Meta and Tesla rarely land on the same reporting day, and when they do, the evening stops being about two companies and starts being about the entire technology trade — as the midday action, with the QQQ up 1.3% and Meta itself up 2.5%, made plain in today's midday tape.

Meta: the capex question, again

Consensus expectations for Meta, as compiled by Plus500 and reported via StockTitan, sit at roughly $63.18 billion in revenue and $6.67 in earnings per share; other trackers cluster nearby, with GeeseFinance citing analyst expectations of about $6.58 per share on $63.34 billion of revenue. Either way, the revenue growth story is not really the argument. Zacks framed the tension neatly ahead of the print: Meta is expected to post impressive revenue growth of about 23.7% year over year, built on its extensive AI buildout — while earnings growth is expected to be deeply negative on Zacks' measure, precisely because of how much the company is spending. The stock, Zacks noted, is also looking to bounce back from a second-quarter miss.

That is the whole Meta debate in one paragraph. The advertising engine keeps printing money, and management keeps shoveling that money into data centers, chips and AI talent at a pace that would have been unthinkable three years ago. Investors have tolerated it — more than tolerated it — as long as the core business kept accelerating. Tonight they will grade three things: whether advertising revenue is still growing fast enough to fund the buildout without strain, what management says about the trajectory of capital spending from here, and whether the company's AI products are starting to show up in the numbers rather than just in the keynotes. Guidance on spending will move this stock more than the quarter itself. It usually does.

Tesla: deliveries are known, margins are not

Tesla's evening is structured differently, because Tesla already gave away the top of the story. The company disclosed earlier this month that it built over 464,000 vehicles in the third quarter, delivered over 486,000, and deployed 13.7 GWh of energy storage products. Deliveries beating production is the kind of detail bulls love — inventory moving, demand absorbing supply. What nobody knows yet is what those deliveries did to profitability.

Consensus for Tesla sits near $27.8 billion of revenue and $0.44 of earnings per share, per Plus500. Zacks carries Tesla at a Rank #4 (Sell) into the print, expecting earnings growth of about negative 10% on revenue roughly flat to slightly down year over year on its measure, and the company is likewise looking to bounce back from a second-quarter miss. The watch list tonight is familiar but no less important for it: automotive gross margin after a year of price competition, the pace of spending on AI and manufacturing expansion, and any update on the Cybercab robotaxi program and the Optimus robot, both of which live in the valuation far more than in the current income statement. There is also the matter of the SpaceX conversation that has been swirling around the stock — expect analysts to try to pin management down on it during the question-and-answer session, and expect management to enjoy not answering.

The undercard is genuinely good

On almost any other night, the rest of Wednesday's slate would be the headline. IBM reports after the close, with investors watching whether its AI infrastructure commentary supports the spending narrative Meta is about to lay out — and whether momentum returns after last quarter's warning that AI infrastructure spending was holding up software and mainframe sales, as FXStreet's preview put it, with roughly 3% revenue growth expected. Lam Research offers the semiconductor-equipment read on the same capex boom: if the chip factories are still ordering tools at full tilt, Lam's numbers will say so. Texas Instruments, the industry's favorite analog bellwether, speaks to the parts of the chip world that have nothing to do with AI — autos, industrials, the unglamorous economy. CSX rounds out the evening with a railroad's-eye view of freight demand. AI capex, chips, rails, in one sitting, as MarketOne's Closing Bell preview summarized it.

Together, those prints cross-check each other in a way a single report never could. If Meta promises to keep spending, Lam confirms the orders are real, and IBM says enterprise customers are buying, the AI infrastructure trade leaves tonight stronger than it entered. If any leg of that stool wobbles — a capex trim here, a cautious outlook there — the narrow leadership that carried Wednesday's midday tape gets tested fast on Thursday morning.

Why tonight matters beyond tonight

There is a useful humility check available from just yesterday. General Motors beat its quarter handily on Tuesday — revenue and earnings both ahead of consensus — and the stock fell nearly 7% anyway, because investors decided the story was about next year's costs. Our coverage of the GM fallout, including UBS trimming its target to $109 this morning, is worth reading before tonight's prints for exactly that reason. This market is not grading the quarter that just ended. It is grading the credibility of the spending plans attached to it.

That is why two calls, at 4:30 and 5:30 p.m. Eastern, with barely an hour to digest the first set of numbers before the second begins, will set the tone for the rest of earnings season. Meta's shareholders are up modestly on the year and were buying the stock up 2.5% into the print at midday — a confident posture. Tesla's were doing the same. By about 6 p.m. Eastern, we will know whether that confidence was information or just optimism. Either way, nobody in this market gets to say they weren't warned the evening was loaded.