Tim Higgins, The Wall Street Journal business columnist, joins 'Squawk Box' to preview Tesla's quarterly earnings results.

Tesla is preparing to announce its latest earnings, with significant attention on both its core automotive business and its autonomous vehicle plans. Investors are particularly interested in updates regarding Tesla's limited rollout of robo taxis in Austin, Texas, as these efforts are seen as crucial to the company's future direction. 

The company is currently navigating a transition, with recent executive changes and a reported decline in automotive revenue. Stakeholders are also watching CEO Elon Musk's engagement and focus, as well as the potential for future collaboration between Tesla and Musk's AI startup, XAI, though Musk has indicated no immediate plans for a merger.

Tesla earnings on deck: Here's what to expect

Well, Tesla is set to report earnings after the bell today. In focus, of course, is the normal automotive story, but also Tesla's autonomous vehicle plans. Joining us right now with what he's expecting is Tim Higgins. He's the Wall Street Journal business columnist and a CNBC contributor. And Tim, fill us in. What are you looking for? I think investors are looking for a lot of commentary and color from Elon Musk about the status of those robo taxis that were launched in late June in Austin, Texas, in a very limited fashion. There's just a few out there. He's expanded it a little bit, looking for how's it going, what's his expectations. This is where a lot of people are betting on the future of the company here and these few little robots that are out there in the world. I mean, that's going to be important in part because the company is kind of going through a transition period. Elon Musk is back at work. They've moved out some of their executives. In the last quarter, they actually reported a 20 percent drop in the auto revenue. And that was something that people were kind of focusing. So how much of this is going to be on the present, what they're seeing with their absolute issues in terms of car sales? How much is that future component, Tim? Yeah, clearly, the car business is hugely important for the now. But today's call with analysts after the results drop is really going to be a vibe check, right? How is Elon Musk doing? How's his tone? Is he excited? Investors looking for kind of that growth story, the return to a growth story, which you're not seeing in the delivery results for the cars. They're betting that the future of the company is going to be in robots. And so we're in this really weird period. And hence, they're looking for things like, you know, is he excited again or is he, you know, is he upset? Is he really locked in because he's been so distracted in the last few years? Tesla investors are hoping that now he's back to what some are calling the wartime CEO. And it's not clear yet that he's 100 percent focused or even, you know, he's so busy. If he's 10 percent focused, you know, that's they want to know where his mind is. Yeah. And they're going to want to know about the robo taxi early efforts in Texas, what they're seeing from that. What are the reports that you've been hearing in terms of how that's going so far? Well, he's had folks in it, real, real people. I mean, they are somewhat associated. They seem like they're fans or they're Tesla customers. And they've been somewhat positive. People are on X, his social media platform, talking about how great this service is. But, you know, it hasn't had the huge test yet that Waymo's had, Alphabet's robot taxi service, which is operational in a lot of cities. I'm in San Francisco. You can you can hail one of these. You pay money. It's a it's a business that is growing. And Tesla is still in those really early stages. And the bigger question is going to be kind of going forward is operationally, how do they get to the next cities? How do they grow that beyond just the small area in Austin that they are? That's it gets to the question of how is it a business? Right. The other part of that, though, is XAI. A lot of excitement around that, too. You expect we'll hear a lot on that front or not? Well, you know, they're separate companies. There's this kind of fever dream among some investors that maybe Tesla would acquire this startup that Musk started a while ago. But Musk recently on X is saying he doesn't see that happening. He wants to bring a vote to invest to Tesla investors with the idea of maybe they can invest in XAI like SpaceX, his rocket company is supposedly doing. There's some synergies there potentially. But it's hard to imagine a scenario that Musk would want XAI under Tesla. It exposes that startup to all the challenges of being a publicly traded company under Tesla. And as we all know, there's been some kind of challenges with XAI in these early days. It's chatbot grok having some controversial comments on X. Don't you think long term? I mean, I don't know. I understand right this moment not wanting to do a transaction like this, but long term, given just the way large language models work and what Tesla has and what XAI has and also just the need for cash, the big cash burn, I'm not saying it's gonna happen today. Maybe they need to solve some of the other issues. First, you don't think that long term at three years from now, it'll be one in one institution. It's you know, at this point, Musk has kept his company separate. There's a lot of over overlapping operational things that go on. He shares people, he shares resources at times. But there is some advantages in his world to keeping it a separate company.

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Breakdown