Investor's Corner
Lucid Motors adds former Waymo Treasurer as CFO as company prepares to go public
Lucid Motors has announced that it has appointed former Waymo Treasurer and Head of Investor Relations Sherry House as its Chief Financial Officer ahead of the automaker’s decision to become a publicly-traded company. Along with the addition of House to the Lucid executive team, the company has added several other new executives who will contribute key insights to the automaker’s financial, technological, and strategic plans as it prepares for the first deliveries of the Lucid Air sedan.
Sherry House: Lucid Motors’ new Chief Financial Officer
Sherry House has officially joined the company on May 5th, leaving her post as Waymo’s Treasurer and Head of Investor Relations after nearly four years. During House’s time at Waymo, the University of Michigan grad built and led a team that handled the company’s financial health and investment plans. Her LinkedIn page says she also led all funding and financing initiatives and managed investor communications to promote growth. House’s expertise with both large Fortune 500 companies and small, emerging startups makes her an ideal candidate for the position of Lucid’s CFO. Lucid CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson is excited about his company’s new addition.
Sherry House leaves her post as Waymo’s Treasurer and Head of Investor Relations to join Lucid Motors as the company’s Chief Financial Officer.
“We are delighted to have Sherry join us. Her rare combination of financial and technical experience bolsters our core leadership team in a pivotal year for Lucid as we prepare to transition to a publicly traded company and launch the Lucid Air,” Rawlinson said. “We stand on the cusp of delivering the world’s most advanced electric vehicles, and now with the arrival of Sherry, augmented by the ongoing, invaluable contribution of our Vice President of Finance, Mike Smuts, we continue to build out what I believe to be the EV industry’s strongest leadership team.”
Other New Additions: Margaret Burgraff, Sanjay Chandra, and Jeff Curry
Lucid is making several other additions to its executive team in preparation for the Air’s launch in a few months. Along with House, the company added Margaret Burgraff as the Vice President of Software Validation, Sanjay Chandra as Vice President of Information Technology, and Jeff Curry as Vice President of Marketing and Communications. The additions are critical in Lucid’s eventual introduction as a public company where investors can openly buy and sell shares. In an emerging market of competitive electric vehicle companies, Lucid is preparing to cater to investors in any way possible. It starts with surrounding an already impressive team of executives with more seasoned veterans who come from the automotive and technology sectors.
Margaret Burgraff is joining Lucid with the title of VP of Software Validation. After 25 years in the industry with companies such as Apple and Intel, where she most recently served as VP of Global Developer Relations, Burgraff was responsible for co-engineering and enabling global independent software vendors to work best with Intel’s product portfolio. Additionally, she has presented to large, global audiences that include topics like Artificial Intelligence, data, and female empowerment.
Sanjay Chara will become Lucid’s first-ever VP of Information Technology. His career has culminated with over 20 years of experience with large companies like Workday, PayPal, and Virgin Mobile. His most recent role was CIO and Head of Cloud Operations at TiVo/Xperi, a position he held for over eight years. He was responsible for cloud operations, infrastructure, and eCommerce, resulting in “explosive business growth and customer expansion.
Finally, Lucid brings on Jeff Curry to take the role of VP of Marketing and Communications. After serving as a successful member of several iconic brands and high-tech startups, such as SiriusXM, Saab, Audi of America, Ferrari North America, and Jaguar, Curry’s most notable work has been in large, well-known events like the Super Bowl. Curry joined Lucid after leaving Jaguar but led the e-mobility campaign strategy for Audi. He joined Lucid’s team as a consultant in December 2019 but now has gained a permanent position as the automaker’s VP of Marketing and Communications.
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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