Investor's Corner
Classic Tesla bear thesis gets revived with Goldman Sachs’ latest Sell rating
Just a little over a week after Elon Musk walked away from Tesla’s privatization deal, Goldman Sachs has resumed its coverage of the company. With this renewed coverage comes a strong Sell rating, citing increasing competition from rival carmakers as a reason behind a possible decline in Tesla’s share in the EV market.
A recent note penned by Goldman Sachs analyst David Tamberrino stated that the financial firm believes Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA) would drop 30% in the next 6 months due to the arrival of competing electric vehicles over the next few years. Amidst the release of Goldman Sachs’ note, Tesla shares have taken a 3% drop during Tuesday’s intraday.
“We see the medium-to-longer term industry backdrop as challenging for Tesla’s products; this follows from an increasing number of EV launches from both traditional OEMs and other start-up competitors — at a time when the company’s product cadence hits a gap. We believe the company will see pressure to its lead in EVs as competition catches up,” Tamberrino wrote.
The Goldman Sachs analyst provided a list of some of the electric car makers he believes would be a legitimate threat to Tesla, among them vehicles from BMW, Jaguar, and Porsche, as well as other legacy carmakers that have pledged to release electric cars over the next few years.
“With regional mandates and tightening CO2 standards, both traditional and new entrants are expected to launch several EVs in the coming years — with a large crescendo in the early-to-mid 2020s. Altogether, we remain bearish on the company’s ability to execute, achieve its targeted production ramp/margins, and sustain FCF [free cash flow] generation,” Tamberrino wrote.
It should be noted that the Goldman Sachs analyst has maintained a firm Sell rating on Tesla for a while now. David Tamberrino, for one, has kept his Sell rating on the company since last year, partly causing his rankings in websites such as the TipRanks to suffer. So far, Tamberrino has an average return of -9.0, ranking him as #4,553 out of 4,875 among TipRanks‘ list of Wall St. analysts.
The idea of rival car companies coming up with “Tesla Killers” has been around for a very long time, and over the years, these vehicles have taken many forms. Last year, it was the Chevy Bolt EV being hailed as the Model 3 killer. This year, it’s the Jaguar I-PACE. Next year, it will probably be the Porsche Taycan.
While it is true that these vehicles are legitimate competition for Tesla’s electric cars in terms of quality and performance, their usually limited production numbers prevent them from actually having a shot at toppling the Model S, X, and 3 from their spots at the top of the premium EV market. Chevy, for one, has not really pushed the production of the Bolt this year, Jaguar is reportedly planning to produce up to 30,000 units of the I-PACE annually, and Porsche has revealed that the initial production of the Taycan would be at 20,000 cars per year. Tesla, even at its present state where it is still refining its Model 3 production, is looking to produce around 50,000-55,000 Model 3 this Q3 2018. That’s practically the planned annual production of the Taycan and the I-PACE combined.
Besides, the idea of electric cars “killing” an electric car maker is flawed at its core. Tesla’s electric vehicles, after all, are a step towards sustainability. Thus, if other manufacturers are designing their electric cars in the same way that Tesla is, then they should not be releasing vehicles that are designed to “kill” other electric cars — they should be creating vehicles that are designed to “kill” gas and diesel-powered automobiles.
As of writing, Tesla shares are trading down 3.25% at $291.70 per share.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
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 annihilates Wall Street expectations with strong Q2 delivery showing
Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress
