Investor's Corner
The Elon Musk effect: Dogecoin spikes after Tesla CEO Tweets meme
The Elon Musk effect is real, and it’s affecting everything from stocks to Cryptocurrencies. At 2:57 AM EST, the Tesla CEO Tweeted a legendary Lion King meme, with his face dubbed on Rafiki, and the Dogecoin logo photoshopped onto Simba. Before that, Musk shared a picture of Falcon 9 lifting off into the stratosphere. What happened next? The currency spiked by nearly a third.
At 2:29 AM, Musk shared a photo of the Falcon 9 rocket, a SpaceX spacecraft launching and lifting toward outer space. A simple, one-word reply to his own photograph followed six minutes later: Doge.
Doge
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2021
At that time, Dogecoin immediately began a spike in value. Still, Musk wasn’t finished with his effort to help lift the value of the now-widely-known Dogecoin, as the Lion King meme came less than a half-hour later. For around 32 minutes, Dogecoin continued to grow in value, reaching 5.79 cents a share, something that does not sound like it is all that valuable. However, a 779.02% growth in 2021 so far would say otherwise.
ur welcome pic.twitter.com/e2KF57KLxb
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2021
The surge isn’t speculative either, the timing of the spike can be directly attributed to Musk’s Tweets. Graphs from CoinDesk show Musk’s influence and how it lines up with the spike in valuation.
- CoinDesk
- CoinDesk
The Musk Effect
Elon Musk seems to have a small amount of control over some stocks, coming from the influence he has felt as the frontman of his electric car company, Tesla. It all started when investors took a Tweet of his out of context on a stock called Signal, a messaging application. Daily downloads were averaging to about 50,000 per day, CNET reported, but these surged to over 1.3 million by January 11th, four days after Musk’s Tweet.
Use Signal
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 7, 2021
As a result of Musk’s Tweets, Signal exploded from 37 cents per share in early December to $38.70 on January 11th, giving it a 5,675% surge in value. This was the most significant effect Musk had on any stock, but it surely didn’t stop there.
After the Signal situation, Musk said “I kinda love Etsy,” because of a Marvin the Martian wool help he bought for his dog. The stock didn’t experience even close to the same surge in value as Signal, only boosting 2.2% on the day, but still seeing some gains after Musk’s tweet.
Bought a hand knit wool Marvin the Martian helm for my dog
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 26, 2021
Dogecoin seems to be the most recent example, but it certainly may not be the last. Musk, a man vocal about his distaste for short-selling, may hold some influence as retail investors are learning to combat against large hedge funds who have controlled markets for over a century. Now, the little guy is getting some help from a man for the people, Elon Musk, who not only is trying to save the world from environmental collapse, but also by supporting the recent r/WallStreetBets saga, that has made retail investors substantial sums.
Musk even got into touch with Vlad Tenev, Robinhood’s CEO, during a Clubhouse session last week. Musk had the opportunity to speak with Tenev to clear up some confusion about why Robinhood shut down trading on some stocks that had high growth, including Gamestop and AMC, and why Tenev received a demand for $3 billion at 3 AM from the National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC).
Elon Musk gets Robinhood CEO to ‘spill the beans’ on trade restrictions
“So, it was unprecedented activity. I don’t have the full context about what was going on, what’s going on in the NSCC to make these calculations,” Tenev said while adding that restricting certain stocks was not in Robinhood’s control. “We had no choice,” he said.
Musk asked, “If you had no choice, that’s understandable. But then we’ve got to find out why you had no choice and who are these people that are saying you have no choice?”
“To be fair, we were able to open and service our customers. Twenty-four hours later, our team raised over a billion in capital, so that when we do open [Monday] morning, we’ll be able to kind of relax these stringent position limits that we put on these securities on Friday,” Tenev replied. “This was a clearinghouse decision, and it was just based on the capital requirements. So, from our perspective, Citadel and other market makers weren’t involved in that.”
Disclosure: Joey Klender is a TSLA and Dogecoin Shareholder. He does not own GameStop, Etsy, or Signal stock and has no intentions to change any positions within 72 hours.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch
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.
Elon Musk
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.
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.
Correction, 10 million robots https://t.co/0z4nyQNTzp
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) July 30, 2026
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.
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.
Elon Musk
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
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.
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.



