Investor's Corner
Tesla just changed the EV game with Battery Day, and Wall Street is disappointed
Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) effectively changed the electric car game with its Battery Day event by outlining a path towards an annual output of 20 million vehicles and a battery cell production output of 3 TWh by 2030. That’s undoubtedly impressive, and it gives a great glimpse at what is to come for Tesla’s electric cars and energy storage devices in the coming years. Yet despite all these game-changing announcements, TSLA traders and Wall Street seem to be disappointed.
A look at reactions from Wall Street analysts, traders, Tesla critics, and battery experts following the highly-anticipated event shows that Battery Day has received a polarizing reception at best. This is best represented by the views of two people who are among the most knowledgable in battery technology, Simon Moores from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and Dr. Ying Shirley Meng, a battery researcher and professor at the University of California.
Following the Battery Day event, Moores noted that the event was “more fantasy and incorrect statements than reality.” Dr. Meng, on the other hand praised Tesla on its new cell format, silicon anode, its diversified cathode materials choices, and recycling initiatives, to name a few. In a later tweet, Dr. Meng noted that it’s always an easier job to critique than to execute and deliver.
Wall Street, for its part, appears to have been generally disappointed with the event, with TSLA stock plunging up to 9% on Wednesday’s intraday. Part of this, as noted in a Bloomberg report, was due to Battery Day’s “letdown.” A notable part of this letdown was the fact that the innovations outlined in the event were due to be implemented within the next few years, as noted by Roth Capital Partners analyst Craig Irwin. “Nothing Musk discussed about batteries is a done deal. There was nothing tangible,” he said.
UBS analyst Patrick Hummel took a more neutral stance, though he also noted the high expectations for the event would likely affect TSLA negatively. “Given the high expectations into the event, we think the market will initially respond negatively to the relatively long timelines of the innovations and the lack of granularity,” Hummel noted.
Longtime Tesla bull Gene Munster, for his part, noted that TSLA investors may be demanding major innovations in a shorter timeframe than those announced in Battery Day. “The challenge with the stock is that everything they are talking about is three years away. I think traditional auto is in an even tighter spot, but Tesla investors want this tomorrow,” Munster said.
This is not the first time that a major technical presentation from Tesla was met with a negative movement in TSLA stock. Last year’s Autonomy Day was followed by a steep dive in TSLA as well, and for much of the same reasons. Tesla’s Autonomy Day received some criticism for discussing technology that is still to come, much like how Battery Day is now being criticized for outlining innovations that are not yet being implemented in the company’s vehicles today.
Inasmuch as the responses to Battery Day are disappointing, however, the fact remains that Tesla’s upcoming projects on the battery design and production front could very well pave the way for the company to achieve its ambitious goal of accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy. The event, after all, did not only showcase the design of Tesla’s next-generation 4680 cells, it also described how the company could transition from producing batteries at the “Giga” level to the “Tera” level. Massive cost reductions on the battery front were also discussed, which could result in Tesla finally releasing a vehicle that’s priced at $25,000, with satisfactory performance and Autopilot.
Disclosure: I am long TSLA.
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
— 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.
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.
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.
SpaceX wants to catch Starship for launch 14, Elon Musk says
Tesla to open source Model S and Model X designs and software
