Investor's Corner
Lost in Translation, Tesla’s Model 3 Marketing Begins
The irony is that this big, non-detailed marketing message has been the sweet spot for the legacy auto OEMs and gas cars, but now is being employed by a young car maker against their rivals.
During Elon Musk’s recent “end range anxiety” press conference, discussion turned to what he thought was the minimum amount of range for an electric car. “200 miles is the minimum threshold for an electric car. We need 200+ miles in real-world, not 200 miles in ‘AC-off, driving on a flat road,” Musk said on March 19th.
Discussion on the web has some fans and enthusiasts wondering whether Musk’s statement was purely discussion, Model 3 marketing or bragging about the company’s current cars. To me, it’s all about be beginning of the Model 3’s marketing campaign and this “little” reference reinforces to the public and media that Tesla Motors has already produced a 200+ mile car in 2012, not 2017.
In effect, Musk is saying “it’s great that Nissan and Chevy are talking about a 200-mile car in 2017.”
Musk is PT Barnum without the big con (…a little con slips out every now and then). The brilliance of Mr. Musk is that his company produced a game-changing vehicle in the right segment while leveraging a new drivetrain technology. First mover latitude to “speculate” on the technology’s future without a ton of pushback. When he talks the alchemy starts: a new car frontier mixes with Tesla Motors mission, image and whatever you want to call it.
Sure, there’s the battery swap hype of some years ago and the follow-through took sometime, but he has been busy.
Related Story >> A Peak into Tesla’s Battery Swap Station at Harris Ranch
But back to the 200+ mile statement, Musk is right on the mark as I drive a MS 60 in the Chicagoland area. The MS 60 has 208 rated miles and during the winter, it will make you think a bit more about your travels, compared to a MS 85 and its 245+ real miles. When it dips below zero, I top out at 194 miles on a full charge. However, I don’t have any issues with my short commute to my house office and the occasional city trips for business, plus we’re a two-car family.
This 200-mile statement is all about marketing and positioning for the Model 3, while being completely honest and accurate.
Musk said, “Anything below 200 miles isn’t passing grade, most people are looking for 20 percent more than that.” Musk is playing the long game and dropping the seed with early-wave EV buyers that Tesla will be moving toward that number. However, the legacy automakers may hit 200 rated miles..and from recent Nissan reports they won’t even hit 200 miles with their 2017 car.
Musk’s statement did not get much notice, but this story line will pick up momentum. Musk and Tesla will add this to the arsenal for the next two years and say: Who do trust when you buy your first EV car in 2017 or 2018?
The irony is that this big, non-detailed marketing message has been the sweet spot for the legacy auto OEMs, but now is being employed by a young EV carmaker against its rivals.
For the electric drivetrain products, legacy carmakers are adjusting and trying to “educate” car consumers. BMW and Nissan are doing good work in this area, with ride-and-drives and email marketing but GM is out to lunch, marketing-wise…and that’s too bad.
Great cars and excellent marketing is a pretty good combination to have.
*Disclosure: Author is long and owns shares in Tesla Motors.
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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