Tesla stock was edging higher early Friday but the electric-vehicle maker's shares were still struggling for direction ahead of the company's earnings later this month.

The shares were up 0.6% at $440.99 in premarket trading, while S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were 0.3% and 0.1% higher, respectively.

Tesla stock has been listless lately. Coming into Friday trading, it was down 1.5% for the week, and 2.5% lower this year. The shares appears to be taking a pause ahead of earnings, due on Jan. 28.

The key items for earnings will be, well, earnings. Profits, profit margins, and free cash flow, needed to finance AI investments, certainly matter. After that, updates on robo-taxi expansion and robots can move the stock.

Tesla launched a self-driving cab service, with a safety monitor, in Austin, Texas, in June. Removing the safety monitor and expanding to more cities are critical for the stock in 2026.

What expectations investors have for robots is harder to say. At a minimum, they want to feel like Tesla is in a leadership position in the nascent AI-trained humanoid robot market.

CEO Elon Musk believes robots will be one of the largest industries in human history, and one of the incentives embedded in his trillion-dollar pay package approved by shareholders in November is selling one million robots, cumulatively, by 2035.