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Tesla bulls respond to ‘The Big Short’ and his massive bet against the stock

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Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) bulls are responding to “The Big Short” Michael Burry’s massive bet against the electric automaker’s stock, indicating that their beliefs don’t align with the man who correctly predicted the 2008 collapse of the housing crisis.

Yesterday, a 13-F Filing with the SEC revealed that Burry has puts against over 800,000 shares of Tesla. The details of the puts, like value, strike price, or expiry, are unknown, and the filling only details the number of shares that Burry has puts against.

EXCLUSIVE: Tesla Giga Berlin isn’t facing a 6-month delay: German Minister

However, Tesla bulls like Gene Munster of Loup Ventures and Pierre Ferragu of New Street Research aren’t aligning with Burry’s consensus on the stock.

Burry believes that Tesla’s stock is highly reminiscent of the housing market in 2007, just a few months before the crash that led to the first recession in the American economy in twenty years. The previous economic downfall occurred in 1987 when “Black Monday” struck, and stock markets around the world fell apart. Burry has told Tesla investors to “enjoy it while it lasts” and notes that the housing bubble also gained massive value in 2007 before falling apart in September 2008.

Betting against Tesla stock is a risky option, Munster believes. Tesla shares increased in value by over 700% last year, and while 2021 hasn’t yielded the same results, Munster’s analysis reveals that things like tax credits for owners can only lead to bullish outlooks for the automaker’s stock.

Munster believes the reintroduction of a $7,000 EV tax credit could be one of the biggest pieces of the bull story for Tesla in 2021. “In my view, it should be part of the bull thesis,” Munster said to CNBC’s Squawk Box. “I don’t think we’re at anything close to ending these tax credits. They will likely get restarted again for Tesla owners.”

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Tesla lost its ability to offer a $7,000 EV credit after it surpassed the 200,000 vehicle threshold years ago. GM is the only other automaker to achieve this and have the tax credit expunged from its purchases, mostly due to the popularity of the Chevrolet Bolt EV.

Munster also reminds those who are focused on Tesla’s sub-par 2021 run that the stock is up considerably over the past twelve months. “The stock is still up a lot over the past year. It was $160 twelve months ago.”

Meanwhile, other bulls, like Pierre Ferragu, didn’t comment directly on Burry’s opinions of Tesla stock but did state that the “return on operating assets” is Tesla’s “bullet-proof metric.”

“We hear a lot of comments about Tesla’s profitability (or lack thereof),” Ferragu writes. “They usually happily mix considerations about gross margin, segment results, exceptional or financial items, regulatory credits…and rarely make any sense. Tesla builds factories to manufacture cars and sells them. As a result, the only appropriate way to evaluate its operational profitability is to look at cash return on operating assets: out of a dollar of assets immobilized in the group, how much cash can Tesla generate in one year.”

Ferragu says Tesla broke even in Return on Assets in 2018, and in 2020, the company got a 20% cash return. He sees this increasing to 40% in 2023 as new factories in Germany and Texas will increase Tesla’s cash generation as the Return on Assets continues to improve.

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At the time of writing, Tesla shares were trading at $589.44, up 2.16%.

Disclosure: Joey Klender is a TSLA Shareholder.

Joey has been a journalist covering electric mobility at TESLARATI since August 2019. In his spare time, Joey is playing golf, watching MMA, or cheering on any of his favorite sports teams, including the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, Miami Heat, Washington Capitals, and Penn State Nittany Lions. You can get in touch with joey at joey@teslarati.com. He is also on X @KlenderJoey. If you're looking for great Tesla accessories, check out shop.teslarati.com

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Elon Musk

SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch

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SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.

The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.

Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.

SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites

Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.

The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.

As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.

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Elon Musk

Tesla AI boss reveals how big Optimus is going to get

Tesla’s Optimus chief corrected himself on X, confirming a staggering 10 million robot production target.

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Tesla Optimus Gen 3 [Credit: Tesla]

Tesla’s Optimus program has a new number attached to it, after Ashok Elluswamy, the executive who has run the humanoid robot program since June 2025, posted a three word correction on X Thursday, “Correction, 10 million robots.”

The line clarifies the long term annual capacity Tesla is building toward its planned second Optimus production line at Gigafactory Texas, a figure Musk has cited repeatedly since last year’s shareholder meeting.

The scale is worth noting, because ten million robots a year would mean Tesla building more units annually than most countries sell in new cars. Tesla has framed this as a second line, not the first. The buildout is happening in two phases: a roughly one million unit per year line inside Tesla’s Fremont factory, installed on the floor space vacated when Model S and Model X production ended earlier this year, and a much larger dedicated facility under construction at Giga Texas that broke ground on its first steel structure in May. That Texas facility is the one Elluswamy’s correction refers to, and is expected to reach volume production sometime in 2027.

Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress

Elluswamy took over Optimus from Milan Kovac last summer and has spent the months since talking up the program’s trajectory. Elon Musk has also floated the ten million figure at Tesla’s 2025 shareholder meeting.

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Ending Model S and Model X production to make room for the first Optimus line was one of the more consequential manufacturing decisions in the company’s recent history, retiring two flagship vehicles in favor of a robot that has yet to enter mass production. Musk has previously estimated per unit production costs at $20,000 to $25,000 once Tesla reaches a million units a year, though he hasn’t said what that cost looks like at ten times the volume.

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SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites

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SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.

The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.

SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters

Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.

SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.

With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.

Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.

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Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.

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