Investor's Corner
Elon Musk’s bet-the-company Tesla Model 3 gamble appears to be paying off
Elon Musk recently described the Model 3 ramp as a “bet-the-company” situation, where the future of Tesla as a whole hinged on the success of the vehicle. Considering recent reports that are emerging about the electric car, it appears that while it might have taken longer than expected, Elon Musk’s Model 3 gamble is starting to pay off.
True to the CEO’s prediction, the 5,000/week milestone that the company achieved at the end of Q2 2018 seemed to have ushered in a new standard for the production of the electric car. Prior to the end of Q2, Tesla was still struggling to build the Model 3 according to its self-imposed targets. Despite doubts from Wall St. that the 5,000/week pace for the Model 3 was unsustainable, signs have emerged since the beginning of July suggesting that the production ramp of the vehicle this Q3 2018 would be better than what critics expect.
Tesla’s journey to reach this point, however, has been painful. In an interview earlier this month with Bloomberg, Elon Musk admitted that his Model 3 gamble came at a high price. Musk noted that while he believes that the Model 3’s production hell is about to end, the whole ordeal has caused him to develop some “permanent mental scar tissue.” In the same interview, Musk also mentioned that he is optimistic about the next few months, and that he would let Tesla’s results speak for themselves.
These results are starting to emerge in a steady stream now. Since the beginning of July, Tesla does not appear to have relaxed its push to deliver as many Model 3 as possible. Test drive programs were started, more than 19,000 new Model 3 VINs were filed in half a month, a new 5-minute Sign & Drive delivery system was adopted, and the Fremont factory appears to be as busy as ever. Tesla enthusiast Anner J. Bonilla, for one, recently shared a recent drive-by video of the Fremont factory (originally uploaded at the Tesla Model 3 Owner’s Club closed Facebook Group), and the facility’s premises were filled with semi trucks waiting to transport Tesla vehicles.
Near Fremont from FB. We are gonna need @boringcompany tunnels to distribute to delivery centers soon. pic.twitter.com/2fhhkADl97
— Anner J. Bonilla 🇵🇷🛩️🔋🔧 (@annerajb) July 18, 2018
Reports have also emerged that Tesla Senior Director of Investor Relations Aaron Chew recently met with investors and analysts, where he reportedly revealed that Tesla is targeting a sustained production rate of 5,000-6,000 Model 3 per week for the third quarter. To support this continued ramp, Tesla seems to be optimizing its workforce once more. Since July started, the electric car maker’s hiring activity has jumped 19%. On July 1, Tesla had 1,662 job openings, and by July 16, the company had 1,974 open positions. Among these, openings for sales and deliveries, such as Customer Experience Specialists and Delivery Experience Specialists were many. Openings for Field Service Associates, which would be assigned to Tesla Energy, have also shown a rise since the beginning of the month.
Perhaps Tesla’s biggest vote of confidence for the Model 3, recently came in the form of Sandy Munro of Munro & Associates, who recently completed his teardown and analysis of the electric car. While initially critical of the Model 3 due to its build quality, Munro ultimately admitted in a recent Autoline Network segment that he had to “eat crow” with regards to the electric car, adding that the vehicle, particularly its battery and electronics, were a “symphony of engineering.” Munro also concluded that based on his company’s teardown and analysis, the Model 3’s Long Range RWD variant could give Tesla a 36% profit. The Detroit veteran further noted that even the base Model 3, which costs $35,000, can give Tesla a profit of 18%.
Amidst signs that Tesla is maintaining its production ramp and Munro’s conclusions that the Model 3 is profitable, the company’s stock started to recover on Tuesday. After a steep dive on Monday after Musk’s incendiary tweets during the weekend, Tesla shares (NASDAQ:TSLA) climbed 4.06% on Tuesday, ending the day at $322.69 per share. With Elon Musk recently returning on Twitter and issuing an apology over his recent statements, there appears to be very little that can get in the way of the company performing better than expected this third quarter.
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Investor's Corner
Tesla Robotaxi gets a massive upgrade in Nevada
Nevada regulators just approved a massive expansion of Tesla’s robotaxi fleet across the entire county.
Tesla’s robotaxi footprint in Nevada just grew by roughly 500 times in a single regulatory vote.
The Nevada Transportation Authority approved Tesla’s full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit on Thursday, clearing the way for the company to deploy up to 5,000 driverless vehicles across Clark County over the next 12 months. The decision came during a four hour general session meeting that Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt watched live and reported on X, noting the vote replaces the interim order that had limited Tesla to just 10 robotaxis on a narrow stretch of the Las Vegas Strip.
EXCLUSIVE: Tesla has just officially received approval for its full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit in Nevada, clearing the way for Tesla to launch a paid public Robotaxi service in Las Vegas.
This officially allows @Tesla to deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis over the next… pic.twitter.com/DPs5UtUlrE
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 20, 2026
That earlier cap, covered here after it surfaced on August 13, came with restrictions that looked stricter than what Tesla runs in Austin: a 45 mph speed ceiling, no airport pickups, and a geofence confined to the Strip corridor. The new approval extends Tesla’s operating authority to all of Clark County, with room to request an even wider geofence across the state.
Tesla representatives at the meeting said they have no intention of putting 5,000 cars on the road right away. Commercial rides are expected to start within 30 days, pending vehicle inspections, insurance filings, and fare approval, the standard steps every robotaxi operator in Nevada has had to clear.
Tesla’s own Robotaxi account replied to the news with a short line, The golden future is upon us.
The timing lines up with Tesla’s broader robotaxi push this month. The company is preparing to open Cybercab rides to the public in Austin as soon as this month, and it opened a sweepstakes for riders to win a seat at the launch event. Tesla filed its original application for a 5,000 vehicle Nevada fleet back in June, a request regulators trimmed to 10 vehicles when they issued the interim order in July. Thursday’s vote effectively grants the number Tesla asked for from the start.
Zoox, the Amazon owned robotaxi operator, has run in Nevada since 2025 and was capped at 100 vehicles before Thursday’s decision. Tesla’s new ceiling puts it well ahead of that comparison on paper, though the company has said its actual fleet size will depend on how quickly FSD v15 rolls out, the software update executives have called the gateway to scaling unsupervised robotaxi operations nationwide.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
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In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.
Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.
The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”
Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”
Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”
Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.
Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.
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