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Elon Musk’s near-$10M TSLA investment makes his battle with short-sellers personal

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On Monday afternoon, Tesla CEO Elon Musk purchased nearly $10M in Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA). Just a week after an eventful earnings call with analysts and a Youtuber, Musk added 27,097 shares of Tesla to his portfolio. To add some perspective, that’s just .08% of Musk’s total 33,665,421 shares in the company, worth north of $10.2B.

Musk’s stock purchase today wasn’t about increasing his ownership in the company; he has a hefty stock compensation plan for that. Musk was sending a message to the short-sellers of TSLA. The number of short-sellers has surpassed Musk’s holding for the first time in history, now rumored to be near 40M shares.

As of the last reporting date, 4/9/18 (available on 4/24/18), there were 38,258,654 shares held short in the company. That’s the highest in Tesla’s history, making the electric car maker the most shorted company by the amount of equity at stake. There will be an update on the total size of the Tesla short position this Wednesday after markets close, so stay tuned.

While this is nothing new for Tesla, Musk is starting to take it personally. His company is being hit every which way in the media, and that doesn’t feel good. I mean, Bloomberg created a graphic of Musk burning cash with his own flamethrowers, that can’t feel good.

Bloomberg’s Graphic depicting Musk burning Tesla’s cash with his own ‘Boring Company’ flamethrowers.

Graphic: Bloomberg/Getty Image (Animation: Hannah Recht for Bloomberg)

Typically over the past few years, Musk has made several statements acknowledging the high-value the market has placed on his company. Musk’s tone changed last week.

Oh and uh, short burn of the century coming soon. Flamethrowers should arrive just in time,” Musk tweeted after the company announced they had burned upwards of $1B in free cash flow. 

So why should short sellers believe Musk?

Valid question. The very notion of a short position makes it clear they do not believe in Musk. But history is on Musk’s side.

Let’s flashback to April 2013. At the time, I owned shares at Tesla, purchasing the stock just 8 months earlier, shy of $30/share. This was when the Model S production ramp issues and cash burn plagued Tesla’s stock. But on April 1, 2013, Tesla told investors that they should expect a quarterly profit to be reported for the first quarter. The stock shot up 16% that day and continued to rally for several months, gaining 455% over the next 6 months.

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Just before these massive gains, Musk warned in a Fox Business interview that he thinks “it is very unwise to be shorting Tesla, it’s very unwise. There is a tsunami of hurt coming for the shorts.”

Musk is again facing similar challenges with the Model 3 — production ramp issues, a media blitz, and a massive amount of cash being burned. While it is still to be seen if Musk and the Tesla team of 42,022 employees can impress investors, I certainly wouldn’t be sleeping comfortably with a Tesla short position.

When asked on Twitter how this ‘upcoming pain’ for shorts compares to the last round, Musk responded with, “It will be next level. These are really big numbers.”

Disclaimer: This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Teslarati and its owners. Christian Prenzler does not have a position in Tesla Inc. or any of its competitors and does not have plans to do so in the next 30 days.

Christian Prenzler is currently the VP of Business Development at Teslarati, leading strategic partnerships, content development, email newsletters, and subscription programs. Additionally, Christian thoroughly enjoys investigating pivotal moments in the emerging mobility sector and sharing these stories with Teslarati's readers. He has been closely following and writing on Tesla and disruptive technology for over seven years. You can contact Christian here: christian@teslarati.com

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Elon Musk

SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch

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SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.

The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.

Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.

SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites

Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.

The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.

As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.

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Tesla AI boss reveals how big Optimus is going to get

Tesla’s Optimus chief corrected himself on X, confirming a staggering 10 million robot production target.

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Tesla Optimus Gen 3 [Credit: Tesla]

Tesla’s Optimus program has a new number attached to it, after Ashok Elluswamy, the executive who has run the humanoid robot program since June 2025, posted a three word correction on X Thursday, “Correction, 10 million robots.”

The line clarifies the long term annual capacity Tesla is building toward its planned second Optimus production line at Gigafactory Texas, a figure Musk has cited repeatedly since last year’s shareholder meeting.

The scale is worth noting, because ten million robots a year would mean Tesla building more units annually than most countries sell in new cars. Tesla has framed this as a second line, not the first. The buildout is happening in two phases: a roughly one million unit per year line inside Tesla’s Fremont factory, installed on the floor space vacated when Model S and Model X production ended earlier this year, and a much larger dedicated facility under construction at Giga Texas that broke ground on its first steel structure in May. That Texas facility is the one Elluswamy’s correction refers to, and is expected to reach volume production sometime in 2027.

Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress

Elluswamy took over Optimus from Milan Kovac last summer and has spent the months since talking up the program’s trajectory. Elon Musk has also floated the ten million figure at Tesla’s 2025 shareholder meeting.

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Ending Model S and Model X production to make room for the first Optimus line was one of the more consequential manufacturing decisions in the company’s recent history, retiring two flagship vehicles in favor of a robot that has yet to enter mass production. Musk has previously estimated per unit production costs at $20,000 to $25,000 once Tesla reaches a million units a year, though he hasn’t said what that cost looks like at ten times the volume.

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SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites

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SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.

The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.

SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters

Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.

SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.

With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.

Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.

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Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.

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