Investor's Corner
Tesla Motors’ Residential Battery Pack, Lean on Details
Energy storage and Tesla Motors’ residential battery pack has been trending over the last couple of days since it was announced last week during the company’s conference call. In typical Musk fashion, the conference call reference was lean on details and provides the carrot for financial analysts to overlook it’s miss on revenue and earnings.
Tesla battery technology integrated into SolarCity residential solar system. (Image credit: Solar City)
The assumption is this battery pack production will be able to store energy from your solar panels and electric vehicle owners will be able to use that electricity to directly charge their cars.
This is an interesting play from Musk and direction for Tesla Motors due to the fact that residential battery storage doesn’t exist at this point—some pilots have been underway in California via Tesla. Some critics are saying Tesla may be getting sidetracked and would benefit from a more pragmatic CEO (think they said the same thing about Steve Jobs in early 80s).
They have a point. I write for a manufacturing software magazine, called Automation World, and this audience seems to be ideal market for battery storage, if the return on investment is right. However, while researching an upcoming feature article on energy management for manufacturers, plant floor production is just starting to focus on managing energy for bottom-line savings. Battery storage isn’t in the picture, yet—though commercial buildings might be easier to implement than manufacturers at the beginning.
So is Musk’s aim correct? Is residential battery storage ready?
Battery to power your home from @TeslaMotors – very appealing after going 6 days without power after Hurricane Sandy. http://t.co/QyIWRG8pfL
— Freyja Balmer (@bettyrocker) February 12, 2015
Again, Shah is talking about a lithium battery battery pack linked with solar. So what is the vision from Musk and JB Straubel?
From the conference call comments, Tesla said the design is finished. Musk says,
"We’re going to unveil some of the Tesla home battery consumer battery that will be for you using and people’s houses or businesses, fairly soon. We have the design done and it should start going into production probably about six months or so.”
So not much at this point and Musk once had hoped to leverage "used battery packs" as part of a greener energy storage solution for businesses or homes.
However, Tesla’s director of powertrain business development, Mateo Jaramillo, on the same podcast, says,“So will a used EV battery in seven or eight years be cheaper, more cost-effective to integrate into whatever application you’re trying to get into than a brand new battery in that year, says Jarmamillo. “Right now, the answer doesn’t look like to be yes.”
RELATED: [Podcast] Tesla’s Battery Storage Strategy
BMW is also starting a battery storage pilot program in California with Pacific, Gas and Electric, which we announced last month —Tesla and BMW Battery Packs to the Rescue?). Tesla has also said they are in talks with utilities and they are not enemies in this market play.
So there’s something here and it seems like Musk is porting over his Model S plan: create a market, create buzz and hope supporting market mechanisms will sprout up.
Jigar Shah makes a good point that utilities need to have real-time analytics and a communication infrastructure to provide energy pricing signals quickly to customers. Shah sees this support needed to help residential storage to make money and even “pool” their energy with other battery systems and sell it back to the grid.
Just like last year with the gigafactory, Tesla has teased a product with to the clean energy and business crowd. The wait won't be as long as the gigafactory in 2014, Musk said via the conference call last week that "a product unveiling is probably in the next month or two.”
We're ready PT Barnum/Nikola Tesla.
Investor's Corner
Tesla crushes Wall Street expectations, beats delivery estimates by over 15 percent
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) beat Wall Street expectations of 406,000 vehicles delivered in Q2 by reporting 480,126 deliveries for the three months ending in June.
Tesla reported it delivered 467,762 Model 3 and Model Y units, while 12,364 Model S, Model X, and Cybertrucks switched hands during the quarter. The Model S and Model X were officially sunset this past quarter and will no longer be part of the company’s Production & Delivery reports moving forward.
🚨 BREAKING: Tesla delivered 480,126 vehicles in Q2, ANNIHILATING Wall Street expectations of 406,000. Production was reported at 451,758.
Deliveries:
Model 3/Y: 467,762
Other Models: 12,364Production:
Model 3/Y: 442,936
Other Models: 8,822 https://t.co/TTHwQAsKt8 pic.twitter.com/7qI4Zj6FE5— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 2, 2026
The quarter is a pleasant surprise and a good rebound from Q1, when Tesla slightly missed the Wall Street consensus of 365,645 cars by reporting 358,023 deliveries for the first three motnhs of the year.
Energy storage deployments also provided some strength in Tesla’s delivery report, hitting 13.5 GWh for Q2. This is a particular division of Tesla’s business that has been overwhelmingly robust over the past few years, truly being a strong point of the company’s overall model.
For the year, Tesla analysts still predict deliveries to trend in the 1.69 million unit region, a modest 3 to 5 percent increase from the 1.64 million cars the company delivered last year. Tesla will likely return to more sequential and noticeable year-over-year growth as the Cybercab project starts to ramp up considerably in the next few years.
Tesla has some other potential catalysts to spur vehicle deliveries, too. Not only is it expecting Cybercab to truly start making a change in the next few years, but other vehicles could be entering the company’s lineup.
Tesla sends production Cybercab with no steering wheel, pedals to on-road testing
The slightly longer Model Y L has been a highly speculated release candidate in the U.S. It has already done incredibly well in China, and U.S. buyers have been wanting slightly more interior space than the Model Y. Now that the Model X is gone, it is more needed than ever.
Q2 highlights a pretty stable automotive division within Tesla, and no true concerns arise from these figures, especially considering it managed to beat expectations convincingly.
Investor's Corner
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
Tesla short seller Michael Burry, the subject of the film “The Big Short,” where he was portrayed by Steve Carell, has revealed he has opened a new bet against the stock.
In a new update to his Substack newsletter in a post titled “Trading Post June 30, 2026,” Burry revealed a new set of bets against Tesla, Caterpillar, NVIDIA, Applied Materials Inc., and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.
In regard to Tesla, Burry wrote:
“And finally I shorted Tesla at 416.22. Happy it jumped back to this level.”
This means Burry likely opened his new short position after the company’s recent rally on Wall Street, which saw Tesla shares sink in mid-May, only to recover to well over the $400 mark. Currently, shares trade at around $427.
The company saw a big Tuesday as shares climbed considerably, over 10 percent. The size of the Tesla short was not provided, nor did Burry give any information on the position’s structure, the number of shares, dollar value, or whether options were used in the short.
The Tesla and SpaceX merger everyone is talking about is quietly building
Over the years, Burry has been one of the more vocal critics of Tesla, calling its share price “media inflated,” and saying it was “ridiculously overvalued” as recently as December.
The company has largely transitioned away from being known as an automotive company and instead is much more widely regarded as an AI play, mostly due to its Full Self-Driving efforts, Optimus robot development, and data collection related to both.
This has not pulled those skeptics away from being vocal about their distaste for how Tesla is valued, but there’s no denying that the company is a global force in many things, including sustainable energy, automotive, and AI.
Wedbush Securities is initiating stock coverage on SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), marking the first comments on the company since it went public several weeks ago. Wedbush and its analyst handling coverage, Dan Ives, are widely bullish on fellow Musk company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).
Ives wrote his first note initiating coverage of SpaceX shares on Wednesday with a $190 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating. The firm believes the company is well positioned off of its IPO because of its wide array of projects, including AI compute power and infrastructure, connectivity projects, and launches.
“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity,” Ives wrote, “Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel and increasing deal flow for its Colossus clusters.”
Elon Musk called it Epic: The full story of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 12
Wedbush leans heavily on Starlink, which they say is the “profitability driver given the strength of its recurring revenue base of ~12 million subscribers as of June 5th.” Ives believes Starlink is still in the “early innings” of penetrating the global telecommunications and broadband market, as it only holds less than a 1 percent share. However, this number is sure to increase over time.
It also highlights the importance of Starship, which it says is an “essential layer” of SpaceX’s overall success. SpaceX developing and displaying the ability to reuse rockets is a major cost and reliability advantage “as it reduces the necessary hardware launch costs while generating a feedback loop for future flights to improve their launch flight rate without accelerating capex spend.”
Finally, SpaceX’s recent AI/Compute projects are also very elementary, Ives writes. It is worth mentioning Wedbush said its $190 price target is derived from a valuation forecast that sees the company yielding roughly $2.48 trillion of implied enterprise value.
There are also some factors that Wedbush did not take into account with its initial coverage. The firm wrote in the note:
“We note that there is optional value coming from Starship’s accelerating scale towards sub-$200/kg unit economics, orbital data centers, and enterprise AI monetization as these factors could drive meaningful upside but these face major hurdles, so we do not take that into account with our valuation.”
SpaceX shares are down just over 2 percent today, trading at around $167 at the time of publication.
Tesla just told us twice that Model Y L is coming to the U.S.
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