Investor's Corner
Tesla gets restraining order against TSLA critic who tried to disrupt Model 3 test car
The man behind one of the most prominent anti-Tesla accounts on Twitter, @skabooshka, has been issued a temporary restraining order after allegedly trying to cause an accident during a Model 3 test vehicle’s Navigate on Autopilot demonstration. The noted TSLAQ member reportedly drove so recklessly that his vehicle ended up triggering the Model 3’s crash emergency avoidance maneuver.
The temporary restraining order was granted by the Alameda County Superior Court in CA on Friday, though it is still unknown if the restraining order has been served. In its filing, Tesla claimed that California resident Randeep Hothi, the man allegedly behind the TSLAQ @skabooshka account on Twitter, had “stalked, harassed, and endangered” three employees who were driving a Model 3 in the Bay Area. The electric car maker noted that this was not the first time that the noted short committed acts against the company, as he also reportedly injured a member of Tesla’s security personnel when he was caught trespassing on company property.
Tesla explains its request for a restraining order as follows (credit to Twitter user Nafnlaus for providing screenshots of the documents). The following are excerpts from Tesla’s restraining order.
Respondent has a history of trespassing at Tesla’s facilities, unlawfully taking photographs and video to post on his Twitter account, and other misconduct, as explained in the Leslie Declaration. However, in recent months, Respondent’s conduct has escalated and has resulted in violent and intimidating confrontations with Tesla employees.
In an incident in February 2019, Respondent hit Tesla’s security employee Tyler James with his car as Mr. James approached Respondent to ask him to leave Tesla’s private property. Mr. Tyler suffered minor injuries. The Respondent did not stop and fled the scene. The Fremont Police Department were called and arrived on the scene. The Department later attempted to issue Respondent a warning notice of trespass, but was unsuccessful because Respondent has avoided and been uncooperative in meeting with Fremont police officers.
More recently, on April 16, 2019, Respondent stalked, harassed, and endangered (three Tesla employees) who were driving on the highway in a Tesla-owned Model 3 vehicle bearing manufacturer plates and mounted with camera equipment. In particular, Responded pursued these employees on the public highway for about 35 minutes, variously driving ahead of, beside, and behind them, and swerving dangerously close to the vehicle. Respondent swerved so close to the side of the Tesla that the vehicle’s side-collision (crash) avoidance safety feature was triggered to engage an emergency maneuver to avoid the collision.
These employees had no prior knowledge of Respondent’s interactions with Tesla, but it appeared that Respondent was trying to interfere with their drive, and each feared that Respondent’s road conduct would cause a collision and injure them. Fearing for his safety and for the safety of the other passengers in the Model 3 (a Tesla employee) called the San Francisco Police Department at that time. However, because no officers were in the area, (the Tesla employee) ultimately did not request that an officer be sent to their location.
On April 22, 2019, Tesla will host an event at its headquarters at 3500 Deer Creek Road, Palo Alto, during which Tesla employees will be demonstrating vehicle functionality in manufacturer-plated vehicles on nearby roads. Respondent has expressed interest in this event on Twitter, and his Twitter followers have encouraged him to try to follow and interfere with these drives. Respondent is a vocal Tesla detractor, claims to be a Tesla short-seller, and tweets extensively about his desire to see Tesla (and its Autopilot technology) fail. To ensure the safety of Tesla employees and the public, temporary protection is needed, on April 22,2019, for any Tesla employee driving a Tesla vehicle with manufacturer plates within 5 miles of Tesla’s headquarters at 3500 Deer Creek Road, Palo Alto, California.
It should be noted that @skabooshka’s actions mentioned by Tesla in its restraining order disturbingly mirror some of the suggestions proposed by the TSLAQ community when the noted bear posted images of the company’s Model 3 test car on Twitter. Among these suggestions include braking in front of Tesla’s test vehicles, as well as intentionally swerving into the electric cars’ lane to ensure that the company’s demonstrations are authentic. Other Tesla bears also joked that it would be amusing if the Model 3 crashed.
Due to his actions, the noted Tesla bear will now be required to stay at least 100 yards away from the Fremont factory or the employees named in Tesla’s restraining order. He is also required to stay 10 yards away from any Tesla vehicle with manufacturer plates within five miles of the factory. The restraining order is effective until May 7, when a hearing is set.
The Tesla critic’s reckless actions seemed to have stemmed from a particular focus on Tesla’s upcoming Autonomy Investor Day on April 22, where the electric car maker is expected to give investors a deep dive into its full self-driving initiatives, including its custom Hardware 3 computer. Test rides on vehicles equipped with unreleased features of Autopilot and the Full Self-Driving suite are also expected to be held in the event.
Neither Tesla nor Hothi have responded to requests for comment to media publications such as The Verge, though the @skabooshka Twitter account boldly declared on Saturday post that “I will not rest. This is my promise. Tesla is a zero. @elonmusk will go to prison.” Elon Musk, for his part, noted on Twitter that the actions of the noted Tesla bear was something that he has never seen before.
Elon Musk
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
SpaceX’s Starship flew successfully Friday, landing both stages and deploying its first Starlink V3 satellites.
Starship’s thirteenth test flight delivered exactly what SpaceX needed with a clean liftoff, two successful stage recoveries, and the first real payload the vehicle has ever carried to space. Booster 20 and Ship 40 lifted off at 5:51 p.m. CT from Starbase, and by the time the mission wrapped roughly an hour later, both halves of the rocket had done exactly what they were supposed to do.
Booster 20 separated from Ship 40 a few minutes into the flight and stuck a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about six minutes after liftoff. That is a meaningful turnaround from Flight 12 in May, when the booster lost several engines during its boostback burn before a hard water landing attempt.
Starship as seen from Starlink satellites pic.twitter.com/e2hvfmnewh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2026
Starship 40’s performance was arguably the bigger win. The vehicle deployed the first 20 operational Starlink V3 satellites Starship has ever carried, then flew a suborbital arc to a landing in the Indian Ocean that SpaceX commentator Dan Huot called the company’s softest splashdown yet. “This is a dream scenario for this team that’s trying to get this heat shield data,” Huot said on the live broadcast, according to Space.com’s live coverage. “I’m a little over the moon right now. Wow. Lucky number 13.”
Unlike the mass simulators SpaceX flew on Flight 12, these were production Starlink V3 satellites, meant to extend solar arrays and antennas and attempt to link with the broader constellation before reentering minutes later. Getting real hardware through a full deploy sequence on only the second flight of the V3 generation keeps Starship on schedule for the payload work NASA is counting on for future Artemis lunar landings.
What an awesome launch, really seems like everything went super well and it was all incredibly smooth.
SpaceX is awesome. Very interested to see how the market will respond on Monday pic.twitter.com/KSHmyBfV55
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 25, 2026
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 25, 2026
The flight also arrives at a moment when SpaceX needed a win. SPCX has traded below its $135 IPO price since mid-July, as Teslarati reported when the mission slipped to Friday, and short interest has climbed to roughly a third of the tradable float. A clean flight will not fix a balance sheet, but it does answer the one question SpaceX absolutely needed answered this week: whether the fixes made after the July 16 abort would hold up under real flight conditions. They did, on both stages, on the first try after the redesign.
SpaceX has not set a target date for Flight 14, though the company has said it wants to push toward an orbital attempt on the next mission. After Friday, that goal looks a lot more within reach.
Tesla short sellers won big following the company’s massive fall on Wall Street after it reported subpar Earnings on Wednesday.
Tesla short sellers collected about $4.12 billion in single-day profits on Thursday, according to Bloomberg. Shares fell as much as 15 percent during Thursday’s session. It closed as one of the worst days for Tesla on Wall Street in the past three years.
Investors sold off the stock after Tesla said it would aggressively direct its spending toward AI and its Optimus robot project. The company had record revenues, which were driven by one of the strongest quarters in terms of vehicle deliveries in company history.
However, it missed EPS estimates by reporting just $0.33, a far cry from the $0.53 analysts expected.
S3 Partners reported that about 3 percent of Tesla’s outstanding stock is sold short. Managing Director at S3, Ihor Dusaniwsky, provided the short seller’s potential profit, as well as another figure: shorts have likely had paper gains of $8.92 billion this year, as Tesla shares are down 30 percent in 2026.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla has burned short sellers many times in the past, but the company’s latest Earnings Call was a chance for those skeptics to taste some payback. Although the company gave some very transparent information regarding future projects, the rollout of Robotaxi, Optimus, and Semi, many investors took their profits on Thursday.
Notable short sellers like Michael Burry have been transparent about their skepticism around Tesla shares. Burry just revealed three weeks ago that he had opened up a new short on the stock, stating he shorted Tesla shares at $416.22. “Happy it jumped back to this level,” he said in a blog post.
At the time of publication, Tesla shares were down about 3 percent and the stock was trading at $309.92.
Tesla stock (NASDAQ: TSLA) endured one of its sharpest single-day declines in years on July 23, tumbling approximately 14.5 percent and closing near $320 after opening the session around $374. The drop erased more than $140 billion in market value amid heavy trading volume and left the shares at multi-week lows.
The sell-off followed the company’s second-quarter 2026 results, released the previous evening. Tesla reported record revenue of $28.2 billion, up 26 percent year over year, driven by a Q2-record 480,126 vehicle deliveries. Energy storage deployments also rose strongly.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Yet profitability disappointed sharply. Operating income fell 57 percent to $398 million, compressing the operating margin to just 1.4 percent. Non-GAAP earnings per share came in at $0.33, well below the roughly $0.53 analysts had expected. Free cash flow turned negative by $1.1 billion as capital expenditures surged 142 percent to $5.8 billion, largely tied to accelerated spending on artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous systems.
The losses on capex were expected, as Tesla said it would be spending heavily in 2026.
Investors also reacted to lingering uncertainty surrounding key product timelines. During the Earnings Call, management reiterated ambitions for Robotaxi deployment and the Optimus humanoid robot, but offered limited new concrete milestones, renewing questions about execution pace that have long accompanied Tesla’s ambitious roadmap.
The magnitude of the decline places it among Tesla’s more severe one-day percentage losses since its 2010 initial public offering. Historically, the two largest single-day drops (split-adjusted) remain September 8, 2020, when shares fell 21.1 percent amid broader market volatility and valuation concerns, and January 13, 2012, with a 19.3 percent plunge during the company’s early growth struggles.
Other notable declines include an 18.6 percent drop on March 16, 2020, at the onset of pandemic-related market turmoil. Thursday’s move ranks roughly ninth on the all-time list but stands out as the steepest in more than a year.
Despite the short-term pain, Tesla’s long-term trajectory has repeatedly recovered from such volatility. The latest results underscore both the strength of its core automotive and energy businesses and the near-term costs of heavy investment in next-generation technologies.
SpaceX wants to catch Starship for launch 14, Elon Musk says
Tesla to open source Model S and Model X designs and software
