Investor's Corner
Elon Musk confirms $25 million TSLA purchase, boosts Tesla stake to nearly 20%
In a regulatory filing late Monday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed that he had purchased a total of $25 million worth of TSLA stock in a public offering. Musk’s purchase was teased last week after Tesla announced that it was raising capital, which was followed by reports stating that the CEO was showing “preliminary interest” in increasing his stake on the electric car maker.
Monday’s filings revealed that Musk purchased 102,880 shares on May 2 at an effective price of $243.00, raising his total ownership of Tesla to 33,927,560 shares, or around 19.5% of the company. This is Musk’s first purchase of Tesla stock this year, his previous big purchase being $44.8 million worth of TSLA stock last year, at a time when the company was trading at $330.80 per share.
Tesla’s offering of 3,086,419 shares was priced at $243.00 each last week, though this number could be expanded up to 3,549,381 if underwriters use options to purchase additional shares. Tesla has also announced that it will be using the proceeds from the stock offering and the subsequent $1.60 billion (could be expanded to $1.84 billion) offering of senior notes to “further strengthen our balance sheet, as well as for general corporate purposes.”
Musk’s recent purchase of Tesla stock all but shows the CEO’s firm belief in the electric car maker, which has been facing headwinds in the market since the company released its lower-than-expected first-quarter vehicle delivery and production numbers. Tesla stock has tumbled around 23% year to date, while the S&P 500 has climbed 17%. Nevertheless, Tesla stock has been seeing some recovery since last week, on the heels of its capital raise and news of Elon Musk’s purchase of additional TSLA shares.
Tesla’s additional capital will give the company more runway as it attempts to roll out projects such as the Model Y SUV and the Tesla Semi, both of which are expected to start production in 2020. Other high-profile initiatives, such as the deployment of Full Self-Driving features and the setup of vehicle manufacturing lines at Gigafactory 3 in China, also stand to benefit from the company’s recent capital raise.
Tesla stock continues to be a battleground between the company’s supporters and critics. Just recently, Greenlight Capital founder David Einhorn, whose fund incurred losses of 34% in 2018, renewed his attacks against Elon Musk, calling the CEO’s vision for an autonomous ride-sharing service as “a lot of horse—t.” While speaking at the Sohn Investment Conference on Monday, Einhorn noted that “Napoleon once said, ‘Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake,’ so I won’t. Just watch the screen.”
On the other hand, Tesla has seen a vote of support from venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, an early investor in Facebook. During a segment on CNBC’s Halftime Report, which was filmed before Tesla filed for a capital raise, the venture capitalist defended the electric car maker, stating that “the people who short this company are so short-sighted because the number of companies that would come out of the woodwork. You don’t think that Apple with $200 billion of cash backstops this company and has a chance to enter a trillion dollar market overnight by buying that business if it gets imperiled in any way? Google which already tried to buy it wouldn’t try to buy it again?”
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.
Tesla flexes incredible Robotaxi metric that skeptics will hate
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
