Investor's Corner
Investor group urges Tesla to seek board members independent of Elon Musk
Five institutional investors, including the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (Calstrs), the Connecticut Retirement Plans and Trust Funds, and CtW Investment Group, have signed a letter to Tesla director Antonio Gracias urging the company to seek board members that are independent of Elon Musk.
In addition to expanding the size of the Tesla board to include two new members that do not have ties with Musk, the group which manages a combined $721 billion in assets – Caslstrs is the second largest pension fund in America – is also advocating for annual elections for all board members. Presently, only one third of the directors are elected each year. Calstrs is one of the founders of Investor Stewardship Group, which includes several other major investors such as BlackRock Inc., State Street Corp., Vanguard Group, and T. Rowe Price Group. In January, that group formulated a new policy position that supports annual elections for all board members as a way of increasing the accountability of directors to shareholders.
The influential group of investors argue that “Directors should be held to a higher standard of independence given the conflicts of interest that permeate this board.”, according to a report by Bloomberg. “A thoroughly independent board would provide a critical check on possible dysfunctional group dynamics, such as groupthink.”
Less than 11% of S&P 500 companies have staggered board elections today. In 2011, almost a third of them did according to governance data provider Equilar. Last year, 10 proposals seeking declassified boards received approval from 80% support from shareholders according to data compiled by Fundvotes.com.
“As companies grow up and mature, they need to have governance practices that reflect that,” Philip Larrieu, an associate portfolio manager for Calstrs, said in a phone interview via Bloomberg. “When the stock is doing well, the argument is ’we don’t need to make changes, we are doing well.’ But we will push for these changes regardless of the stock price.” The statement by Calstrs comes at a time when Tesla stock continues to reach all-time highs, surging to over 40% gains in this year alone. Tesla has become the largest U.S. automaker, beating General Motors in market capitalization.
Today, Tesla’s board is made up of Musk; his brother, Kimball; Gracias, who is the founder of a private equity firm and a director at SpaceX; Ira Ehrenpreis, a venture capitalist and SpaceX investor; Brad Buss, a former SolarCity chief financial officer; Steve Jurvetson, a venture investor and SpaceX director; and Robyn Denholm, the chief operating officer of Telstra Corp., Australia’s largest telecommunications company.
Musk is the largest Tesla shareholder and holds a stake worth approximately 21% of the company, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Gracias is the sixth largest shareholder with a 3.75% stake.
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A Tesla spokesperson has responded to the letter send to the company, citing “We are actively engaged in a search process for independent board members, which is something we committed to do several months ago, and expect to announce new additions fairly soon”. The Silicon Valley-based electric car maker and energy company added, “We regularly engage with our shareholders and value their feedback.”
“Getting independent people on the board is important in terms of holding management accountable,” Etelvina Martinez, the corporate governance manager at CtW Investment Group, which also signed the letter, said in a phone interview. “Shareholders need to be able to hold management accountable. While the stock price is doing extremely well, there are still concerns about corporate governance.”
Some of the concerns raised in the letter go back to last year’s acquisition of SolarCity by Tesla. Despite Musk’s assurances that the merger was good for both companies, there was concern over the financial health of such an acquisition. “If Tesla truly wants to be forward thinking, then it needs to embrace accountability and it needs to welcome diverse, independent opinions into its boardroom,” New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer told Bloomberg. “Strong performance doesn’t insulate Tesla from accountability.”
Elon Musk
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
SpaceX’s Starship flew successfully Friday, landing both stages and deploying its first Starlink V3 satellites.
Starship’s thirteenth test flight delivered exactly what SpaceX needed with a clean liftoff, two successful stage recoveries, and the first real payload the vehicle has ever carried to space. Booster 20 and Ship 40 lifted off at 5:51 p.m. CT from Starbase, and by the time the mission wrapped roughly an hour later, both halves of the rocket had done exactly what they were supposed to do.
Booster 20 separated from Ship 40 a few minutes into the flight and stuck a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about six minutes after liftoff. That is a meaningful turnaround from Flight 12 in May, when the booster lost several engines during its boostback burn before a hard water landing attempt.
Starship as seen from Starlink satellites pic.twitter.com/e2hvfmnewh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2026
Starship 40’s performance was arguably the bigger win. The vehicle deployed the first 20 operational Starlink V3 satellites Starship has ever carried, then flew a suborbital arc to a landing in the Indian Ocean that SpaceX commentator Dan Huot called the company’s softest splashdown yet. “This is a dream scenario for this team that’s trying to get this heat shield data,” Huot said on the live broadcast, according to Space.com’s live coverage. “I’m a little over the moon right now. Wow. Lucky number 13.”
Unlike the mass simulators SpaceX flew on Flight 12, these were production Starlink V3 satellites, meant to extend solar arrays and antennas and attempt to link with the broader constellation before reentering minutes later. Getting real hardware through a full deploy sequence on only the second flight of the V3 generation keeps Starship on schedule for the payload work NASA is counting on for future Artemis lunar landings.
What an awesome launch, really seems like everything went super well and it was all incredibly smooth.
SpaceX is awesome. Very interested to see how the market will respond on Monday pic.twitter.com/KSHmyBfV55
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 25, 2026
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— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 25, 2026
The flight also arrives at a moment when SpaceX needed a win. SPCX has traded below its $135 IPO price since mid-July, as Teslarati reported when the mission slipped to Friday, and short interest has climbed to roughly a third of the tradable float. A clean flight will not fix a balance sheet, but it does answer the one question SpaceX absolutely needed answered this week: whether the fixes made after the July 16 abort would hold up under real flight conditions. They did, on both stages, on the first try after the redesign.
SpaceX has not set a target date for Flight 14, though the company has said it wants to push toward an orbital attempt on the next mission. After Friday, that goal looks a lot more within reach.
Tesla short sellers won big following the company’s massive fall on Wall Street after it reported subpar Earnings on Wednesday.
Tesla short sellers collected about $4.12 billion in single-day profits on Thursday, according to Bloomberg. Shares fell as much as 15 percent during Thursday’s session. It closed as one of the worst days for Tesla on Wall Street in the past three years.
Investors sold off the stock after Tesla said it would aggressively direct its spending toward AI and its Optimus robot project. The company had record revenues, which were driven by one of the strongest quarters in terms of vehicle deliveries in company history.
However, it missed EPS estimates by reporting just $0.33, a far cry from the $0.53 analysts expected.
S3 Partners reported that about 3 percent of Tesla’s outstanding stock is sold short. Managing Director at S3, Ihor Dusaniwsky, provided the short seller’s potential profit, as well as another figure: shorts have likely had paper gains of $8.92 billion this year, as Tesla shares are down 30 percent in 2026.
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Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla has burned short sellers many times in the past, but the company’s latest Earnings Call was a chance for those skeptics to taste some payback. Although the company gave some very transparent information regarding future projects, the rollout of Robotaxi, Optimus, and Semi, many investors took their profits on Thursday.
Notable short sellers like Michael Burry have been transparent about their skepticism around Tesla shares. Burry just revealed three weeks ago that he had opened up a new short on the stock, stating he shorted Tesla shares at $416.22. “Happy it jumped back to this level,” he said in a blog post.
At the time of publication, Tesla shares were down about 3 percent and the stock was trading at $309.92.
Tesla stock (NASDAQ: TSLA) endured one of its sharpest single-day declines in years on July 23, tumbling approximately 14.5 percent and closing near $320 after opening the session around $374. The drop erased more than $140 billion in market value amid heavy trading volume and left the shares at multi-week lows.
The sell-off followed the company’s second-quarter 2026 results, released the previous evening. Tesla reported record revenue of $28.2 billion, up 26 percent year over year, driven by a Q2-record 480,126 vehicle deliveries. Energy storage deployments also rose strongly.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Yet profitability disappointed sharply. Operating income fell 57 percent to $398 million, compressing the operating margin to just 1.4 percent. Non-GAAP earnings per share came in at $0.33, well below the roughly $0.53 analysts had expected. Free cash flow turned negative by $1.1 billion as capital expenditures surged 142 percent to $5.8 billion, largely tied to accelerated spending on artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous systems.
The losses on capex were expected, as Tesla said it would be spending heavily in 2026.
Investors also reacted to lingering uncertainty surrounding key product timelines. During the Earnings Call, management reiterated ambitions for Robotaxi deployment and the Optimus humanoid robot, but offered limited new concrete milestones, renewing questions about execution pace that have long accompanied Tesla’s ambitious roadmap.
The magnitude of the decline places it among Tesla’s more severe one-day percentage losses since its 2010 initial public offering. Historically, the two largest single-day drops (split-adjusted) remain September 8, 2020, when shares fell 21.1 percent amid broader market volatility and valuation concerns, and January 13, 2012, with a 19.3 percent plunge during the company’s early growth struggles.
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Other notable declines include an 18.6 percent drop on March 16, 2020, at the onset of pandemic-related market turmoil. Thursday’s move ranks roughly ninth on the all-time list but stands out as the steepest in more than a year.
Despite the short-term pain, Tesla’s long-term trajectory has repeatedly recovered from such volatility. The latest results underscore both the strength of its core automotive and energy businesses and the near-term costs of heavy investment in next-generation technologies.
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