Investor's Corner
How Rivian’s deal with Mercedes bolsters the EV maker’s long-term outlook
After Rivian Automotive (NASDAQ: RIVN) struck a deal with Mercedes-Benz last week for a strategic partnership and joint production effort of electric delivery vans, analysts are explaining how the move could help bolster the EV maker’s long-term outlook.
Last week, Rivian and Mercedes-Benz announced they would build all-electric delivery vans for the European market, where the EV company has yet to deliver a vehicle. In the United States, Rivian is currently offering customers the R1T pickup, but its EDV, or Electric Delivery Van, is one of the main focal points of the company’s early production.
In 2019, Rivian found itself a worthy investor and supporter in Amazon, which ordered 100,000 EDV units from the company. Deliveries began this year after extensive pilot programs yielded adequate data for a controlled launch in several cities. The EDV is an early signal of success for Rivian as it struggles to ramp production of the R1T and R1S due to parts shortages. Supply chain issues have been cited by Rivian in the past for delayed production and delivery dates.
However, the EDV’s arrival in Europe and Rivian’s partnership with Mercedes-Benz is bolstering the company’s long-term future, which has been not in doubt but definitely questioned by those with extensive knowledge of the industry. While armchair commentators have speculated that Rivian and other EV startups would not survive the early days of production, Tesla CEO Elon Musk advised the automaker to cut costs and ramp production at its first factory before expanding with new manufacturing facilities within the United States.
The EDV partnership with Mercedes gives Rivian a new bit life, according to numerous analysts. The electric van sector, while predominately controlled by Ford, is still widely up for grabs due to relatively low volumes. While the United States may have a higher concentration of these vehicles, Europe is still lacking sustainable commercial logistics solutions, and Rivian’s EDV product is suitable for the market, Dan Ives of Wedbush explained (via MarketWatch):
“We view this as a smart strategic move by Rivian to penetrate Europe while ramping production of the EDV platform to meet its long-term growth and profitability targets. We believe Rivian is primed to capture the massive influx of current and future EV demand, capitalizing on a unique global TAM from a core engineering and design perspective along with the Amazon commercial relationship has the potential to be a major EV stalwart over the next decade. Production is improving to at least hit the 25k deliveries this year and we have confidence that customer reservations continue to increase into FY23 with the stage set for a seminal year ahead.”
Ives has a $45 price target on Rivian and an ‘Outperform’ rating on the stock.
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Credit: Rivian
Additionally, Ben Kallo of Baird Securities has also said the Rivian deal will help the company solve scalability with the production portion of the deal occurring at an existing Mercedes-Benz facility in Europe. Kallo also said that Rivian has a chance to “mount a challenge to Tesla’s current dominance” in the coming years as it continues to address its total scalable market through strategic partnerships like this one:
“With few details disclosed regarding the proposed partnership, the total addressable market for electric vans is still vague. Despite a lack of clarity, RIVN is set to benefit from Mercedes’ scale while lending from its strong technology position. As the world accelerates its shift to EVs, Rivian has a solid opportunity to mount a challenge to Tesla’s current dominance.”
Kallo and Biard hold a $51 price target with an ‘Outperform’ rating on the stock. At the time of writing, shares were down just 1.6 percent on the day, but have surged over 14.5 percent since the partnership was announced last week.
Disclosure: Joey Klender is not a RIVN shareholder.
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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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