Investor's Corner
The epic battle between Elon Musk and the Tesla haters
In a fascinating article in Institutional Investor, Michelle Celarier writes that Tesla [NASDAQ: TSLA] is: “the biggest short in the U.S. market; about 27 percent of Tesla’s free float is short, for a value as high as $10 billion” according to S3 Analytics, a firm that tracks short sales. That said, “the stock has soared more than 1,300 percent since Tesla went public in 2010. It is the first automaker to go public since Ford in 1956, making it one of the darlings of the post-financial-crash bull market.”
Photo credit: Tesla
It turns out that one of the most notorious Tesla shorts is Mark Spiegel. And Spiegel hasn’t even driven a Tesla yet. He says, “I’m more into sports cars.” According to Celarier, “Spiegel has become something of a zealot on Tesla. His small hedge fund, Stanphyl Capital Management, runs a mere $8.5 million, given that it was down 20 percent this year through August. That’s largely due to his short of Tesla, which had gained 74 percent this year, making it the worst-performing short of the year.”
However, there are bigger players out there shorting Tesla. Celarier reports that: “Everyone who’s anyone in Wall Street’s small and clubby world of short sellers has been short Tesla at one point or another… In the past, some of them also shorted Google and Amazon — other high flyers who weren’t making a profit — and somewhat sheepishly [now] admit they were wrong. Clearly, these guys are not dreamers from California’s La La Land, and Musk’s grand plans and his ‘save the world’ ethos can elicit a few eye rolls.”
Another well-known Tesla short, James Chanos of Kynikos Associates, “has been railing against Tesla for at least two years on CNBC and at numerous conferences. He has gone so far as to call Tesla a cult.” Speaking of Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk, Chanos proclaims, “People want to believe he’s some sort of visionary… In a milieu of boring people, they think he is changing the world. He’s not boring. He’s somebody they can attach their hopes and dreams to.”
Photo credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
So why does Tesla attract so many arguments on Wall Street? On the one hand, “Looking at its balance sheet, Tesla is [considered] the perfect short. But its pioneering status in an industry facing wrenching technological upheaval, and its charismatic CEO, has won it legions of admirers and turned it into a battleground stock. Sure, Tesla’s lofty stock price makes it a risky buy — but also a perilous short.”
Anger and hope permeate both camps of investors. “Short sellers berate Tesla investors as momentum chasers, tree-huggers, or simply Elon Musk groupies, but these investors have bought into a vision that has already made great leaps toward building a sustainable energy ecosystem — a costly endeavor that has no shortage of well-heeled enemies.”
And while an army of short sellers persist, plenty of Wall Street’s power players remain steadfast Tesla longs: “The biggest holders, aside from Musk, are mutual funds like Fidelity Investments, which has owned the stock since the IPO. With a current 12.8 percent stake (down from a high of 15 percent), the mutual fund giant is the largest institutional investor in Tesla, and portfolio manager Kyle Weaver says Fidelity has a long-term perspective on the company that is playing out largely as expected.”
Tesla fleet lined up outside of the service center in Amsterdam [Photo credit: Teslarati App]
“It was the worst short I’ve ever had,” says Whitney Tilson, managing partner of Kase Capital Management, who was short when the stock went from $35 to $205. Last month, Tilson told investors he’s shutting down his funds due to poor performance. Tilson explains, “I can do the numbers and see how much money the company is losing, but you’re short an incredibly maniacally driven CEO, with maniacally driven engineers assaulting the world’s largest industry. If they succeed, Tesla could be a $400 billion market cap company.”“The internal combustion engine is toast long term. It’s game over. The costs of making an internal combustion engine do not go down, while the cost of battery technology has gone down every year,” says Fidelity’s Weaver. “The secular trends that will drive Tesla’s fundamentals are a decades-long trend.” He also applauds Tesla’s environmental mission, “I don’t want to bet against that in an emotional sense.”
Musk is also not afraid to openly attack Wall Street’s short sellers. Let’s not forget, “Musk, who has talked about being bullied as a child, seems to delight in taunting his tormentors. In 2013 he gloated on Twitter, ‘Seems to be some stormy weather over in Shortville these days,’” and once cautioned short sellers that a “tsunami of hurt” was coming in a televised interview.
Celarier writes, “To be sure, a mania surrounds Tesla… [and] betting against Musk is a tough proposition. Tesla has already survived near-bankruptcy events, and Musk has plenty of friends in tech companies with much higher valuations, like Larry Page at Google, that could afford to partner with Tesla or take it over. (Google had struck a handshake deal to buy Tesla during a near-death moment in 2013, according to Vance’s biography.)”
There’s also massive opportunity for Tesla in China: “Earlier this year, China’s Tencent Holdings took a 5 percent stake in Tesla. China is proposing to mandate a zero-emissions standard in 12 percent of new cars by 2020 and is considering letting wholly owned foreign electric-car companies operate there. The Chinese market is expected to be huge, and Tesla is charging ahead there. It is already building a new supercharger network in the country and plans to both build and sell cars there.”
Such realities make shorting Tesla, for all its financial shortcomings, a difficult call. As Tilson puts it, “I don’t want to be short open-ended situations. The tail risk is just too high.”
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Note: Article by Matt Pressman, originally published on evannex.com
Source: Institutional Investor
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
Elon Musk confirmed Starmind as SpaceX’s AI satellite constellation name, targeting one million orbital compute nodes.
Elon Musk confirmed that Starmind will be the official name of SpaceX’s planned AI satellite constellation, following a trademark filing by xAI that surfaced earlier this week. Starmind is what’s being described to the FCC as a constellation of up to one million AI satellites
It’s worth noting that SpaceX’s Starlink communication satellite and Starmind are built on the same orbital infrastructure concept but serve entirely different purposes. Starlink is a connectivity network, with satellites receiving and relaying data between points on Earth, and functioning as a high-speed internet backbone in space. The satellites themselves do not process or think, and move information from one place to another, the same function a fiber cable performs underground.
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Starmind, on the other hand, is something completely different, and tather than moving data, its satellites would compute data through artificial intelligence and directly in orbit using onboard processors powered by large solar arrays. Where a Starlink satellite is essentially a very fast pipe, a Starmind satellite is a server. The practical implication is that Starmind would allow AI models to run inference, process queries, and generate outputs from space, then beam results down to users anywhere on Earth within milliseconds, and without the data ever needing to travel to a terrestrial data center.
Starship will be able to carry 30 to 50 AI1 satellites per launch, delivering the equivalent of dozens of server racks per flight, with no land acquisition, no power grid approval, and no cooling infrastructure required on the ground.
SpaceX is pursuing this new technology as terrestrial data centers are running into hard limits such as lack of physical space, community opposition, and power and water consumption at a scale that is increasingly difficult to permit. Space has unlimited solar power, natural vacuum cooling, and no zoning boards. Musk said in a June 8 video presentation that he expects space to become the lowest-cost location to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Two AI1 prototypes are scheduled to launch in early 2027, with volume production targeted for the end of that year at a new facility called Gigasat.
The real world applications Starmind enables extend well beyond powering Grok. A constellation of orbiting AI processors could run inference workloads for any paying customer, anywhere on Earth, with latency measured in milliseconds rather than the seconds associated with ground-based cloud routing across continents. Starmind, if it scales as described, would make SpaceX the landlord of AI compute the same way Starlink made it the landlord of satellite internet.
SpaceX announced today that it commenced its first-ever public bond offering, marking a significant step in the newly public company’s capital markets strategy.
The company announced an offering of senior unsecured notes expected to raise at least $20 billion.
The move comes just a short time after SpaceX completed one of the largest initial public offerings in history. In mid-June, the company priced shares at $135 and raised more than $85 billion, propelling founder Elon Musk’s net worth past the trillion-dollar mark and giving the firm substantial liquidity.
🚨 SpaceX has announced its inaugural offering of senior unsecured notes.
The net proceeds will be used to repay outstanding loans under its bridge loan facility in full.
This inaugural debt offering represents a financing milestone for SpaceX, which previously depended… pic.twitter.com/pcOZuVbTRv
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) June 22, 2026
According to the company’s SEC filing, the net proceeds from the notes will be used primarily to repay in full the outstanding borrowings under its existing bridge loan facility, cover related fees and expenses, and fund general corporate purposes. The offering is being conducted under Rule 144A, as well as Regulation S, targeting qualified institutional buyers and non-U.S. investors. Notes will be unsecured obligations ranking equally with other unsubordinated debt.
The $20 billion bridge loan was used to refinance approximately $17.5 billion in higher-cost “junk” debt tied to X and xAI. SpaceX had merged with xAI in February 2026 in an all-stock deal. The bridge facility, which matures in September 2027, had represented the bulk of SpaceX’s long-term debt.
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In connection with the bond launch, SpaceX disclosed it held approximately $100.8 billion in cash and cash equivalents as of June 19. Investor calls began on the announcement date, with pricing and launch expected shortly thereafter. Rating agencies have assigned investment-grade ratings to the proposed bonds, reflecting confidence in SpaceX’s dominant position in commercial launches and the growth trajectory of its Starlink internet offering.
The debt raise also allows SpaceX to optimize its balance sheet by replacing short-term, higher-cost bridge financing with longer-date, lower-cost fixed-income securities. This provides greater financial flexibility to support capital-intensive initiatives, including the development of Starship, the expansion of the Starlink constellation, and the integration of AI capabilities following the xAI combination.
SpaceX shares (NASDAQ: SPCX) fell sharply on the news, dropping over 16 percent overall on the market on Monday. The stock had surged initially after debuting but pulled back amid profit-taking and broader market dynamics.
Overall, the bond offering underscores SpaceX’s transition to a mature public company with access to diverse funding sources. It positions the firm to pursue its long-term vision of multiplanetary expansion and AI infrastructure, while maintaining a disciplined approach to its capital structure in a high-growth but capital-heavy industry.
Investor's Corner
SpaceX is launching a secret spacecraft that could change how things are made in space
SpaceX’s secret disk-shaped Starfall capsule is targeting a market no reentry vehicle has cracked.
SpaceX is targeting Tuesday, June 23 for the first flight of Starfall, a reentry capsule the company has developed almost entirely in private. The Falcon 9 launch window opens at 6:43 a.m. ET from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, with a backup window available the same time on June 24. SpaceX has made no public announcement about the vehicle, only providing launch details. Everything known about it has come through FAA and FCC regulatory filings.
What makes Starfall different starts with its shape. Rather than the traditional cone used by Dragon and every other cargo return capsule in operation, Starfall is a flat disk that measures roughly 10.2 feet (3.1 meters) wide and just 2.5 feet (0.75 meters) tall, and weighing 4,630 pounds (2,100 kg) and capable of returning up to 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms) of payload from orbit. The disk geometry maximizes structural efficiency and payload volume relative to mass, and the heat shield mechanically jettisons just before splashdown, allowing recovery teams to retrieve both the capsule and the shield separately from the Pacific Ocean.
The difference with Starfall from existing competitors, such as Varda Space Industries, which has largely built the orbital manufacturing market and returns heavy payloads per flight is that Starfall’s specification is roughly 30 times more per mission, and is designed to be mass-produced and launched on either Falcon 9 or Starship. That combination of volume and launch access is something no standalone startup can replicate, and it puts SpaceX in direct competition with the companies that currently pay it to reach orbit.
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The intended market is orbital manufacturing: pharmaceuticals, protein crystals, semiconductors, and advanced optical fiber that physically cannot be produced in the presence of gravity. FAA documents describe Starfall’s long-term purpose as building a “self-sustaining commercial in-space manufacturing market” and as a potential successor to the industrial capabilities of the International Space Station, which is set to retire in the late 2020s. Military rapid global cargo delivery is a parallel application under active discussion with the Pentagon.
The reason some industries seek manufacturing in space comes down to gravity. On Earth, gravity causes materials to settle, separate, and deform during production. In microgravity, those constraints disappear.
SpaceX’s already controls launch access, which means it currently functions as the landlord for every competitor in the orbital manufacturing return space. Starfall converts that landlord position into vertical ownership, and it would no longer just carry other companies’ capsules to orbit, but rather operate the capsule, own the return logistics, and capture the service revenue directly. Viewed alongside Starlink, Colossus, and the xAI merger, Starfall fits a consistent pattern: SpaceX identifying infrastructure layers that others depend on and moving to own them outright. Orbital manufacturing return is the next layer on that list.
If Tuesday’s reentry, parachute sequence, and recovery demonstration goes as planned, the second FAA-approved test flight follows. A successful pair of demos would position SpaceX to begin offering Starfall as a commercial service, likely first to pharmaceutical and materials science customers before scaling toward the military and broader manufacturing segments.
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