People usually have three questions about Tesla and Elon Musk’s promises: When can I get a $35,000 Model 3? Can Teslas drive themselves? And can Tesla actually make money selling electric cars?

The answer to the first two, when Musk is asked, is usually something along the lines of “in six months or so.” On the third question, he’s been clearer. He pledged that the automaker would be profitable before the end of 2018.

Tesla just released its financial results for the third quarter of the year and reported a net profit of $312 million, finally allowing Musk to keep a promise. “We delivered more cars in this quarter than in all of 2016,” the CEO said on a call to discuss the numbers.

Proving that Tesla can make a profit has been a crusade for Musk, and the figure is higher than most analysts had estimated. He’s said that the criticism of the company—that it has to be profitable to be viable in the long term —is fair, and that he's been eager to prove the doubters wrong. One quarter in the black is a start, but Musk will have to keep this up to accelerate away from doubts about the long-term future.

“Q3 2018 was a truly historic quarter for Tesla,” the company said in today’s investor update letter. A grandiose line? Sure. Hyperbolic? Not that much. Tesla released production numbers for the quarter at the start of this month, which showed it delivered 52,239 Model 3s. Add in the Model S and X, and that's a record more than 80,000 vehicles delivered between July and September.

At the end of the quarter, Tesla actually welcomed existing customers as volunteers to help deliver cars, as that became the new bottleneck. “I’ve never heard of a case where customers volunteered their time to help a company succeed,” said Musk. “That’s amazing. It chokes me up actually.”

This news is all the sweeter given what Tesla has endured in 2018. The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Musk with misleading investors when he tweeted his plan to take the company private, resulting in a $40 million fine (half for him, half for the company), and having him step aside as chairman of the board of directors.

The company laid off 9 percent of the workforce in June, saying that it was a difficult but necessary reorganization. Moreover, Tesla has continued to struggle with quality control. Coincidentally, just released as well are the latest reliability rankings from Consumer Reports, showing the automaker slipping to 29th place out of 29—mostly due to issues with the Model S. The Model 3, which is less complex, has “average” reliability. Oh, and Musk also smoked weed on a podcast.