Investor's Corner
Elon Musk hints at Tesla’s profitable Q4, Mid Range Model 3’s int’l release
Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA) is down on early Friday trading amidst news of the company’s new round of layoffs, as well as the impending production ramp of the $35,000 Standard Range Model 3. The rationale behind the 7% job cuts was extensively explained by Elon Musk in an email to Tesla employees, which was shared on the company’s blog.
Musk acknowledged the challenges that Tesla is currently facing, particularly as the company is now setting the stage for the impending release of the Model 3’s most aggressively-priced variant. In his message, Musk noted that in the near future, Tesla’s challenge would lie in developing vehicles and energy products that are attainable for mainstream customers.
“Looking ahead at our mission of accelerating the advent of sustainable transport and energy, which is important for all life on Earth, we face an extremely difficult challenge: making our cars, batteries and solar products cost-competitive with fossil fuels. While we have made great progress, our products are still too expensive for most people,” Musk wrote.
Perhaps most notable in the letter, though, is Musk’s discussion about Tesla’s capability to make a profit. The Tesla CEO noted that he considers Q3 2018’s 4% profit to be the most meaningful in the company’s 15 years of existence. Musk pointed out, though, that the third quarter’s profit was partly the result of a strong push to sell higher-priced variants of the vehicle — the Long Range Model 3 AWD and the Model 3 Performance — to customers in North America. As for Q4 2018, Musk stated that there is a good chance Tesla would be able to make a profit as well, though not in the same level as the third quarter.
“In Q4, preliminary, unaudited results indicate that we again made a GAAP profit, but less than Q3,” Musk wrote.
To help the company maintain profitability, Tesla is adopting Q3 2018’s strategy this quarter, with the electric car maker pushing the Model 3 Performance and the Long Range Model 3 AWD to customers in Europe and China. Musk also stated that Tesla is aiming to deliver “at least the Mid Range Model 3 variant in all markets” starting around May, in order to reach a greater demographic for the electric sedan. Such a system would likely serve Tesla well, at least until the company could start producing the Standard Range Model 3, which starts at the ever-elusive price of $35,000.
In a statement to CNBC, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives notes that Tesla’s international Model 3 push would likely determine the company’s success in the first half of 2019. In the second half, though, Ives stated that Tesla would need to start producing more affordable versions of the electric sedan for the international market.
-
“If you think about the trajectory, the first half of 2019 is really Europe coming onboard. But then, ultimately, in the second half, you need the mid-range Model 3 to really start to kick in,” he said.
Tesla’s Model 3 ramp might have already reached a level where the company is able to distribute the vehicle to other countries, but the electric car maker is only about halfway done. Tesla eventually aims to produce 10,000 Model 3 per week, to meet the expected demand for the vehicle in the international market. To accomplish this, Tesla continues to optimize its production capabilities in Fremont, while accelerating the construction of Gigafactory 3 in China. The latter is expected to complete initial construction by the end of summer, with the facility manufacturing the first China-made, “affordable” Model 3 by the end of the year.
Elon Musk’s recent letter to Tesla employees can be accessed here.
As of writing, Tesla stock is trading down 8.78% at $316.81 per share.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
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 Optimus Gen 3 [Credit: Tesla]](https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/tesla-optimus-gen3-diner.jpg)
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.
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.
SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch
SpaceX’s Starship just got filmed by its own cargo
