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.
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- CoinDesk
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- 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.
Investor's Corner
Tesla crushes Wall Street expectations, beats delivery estimates by over 15 percent
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.
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