Investor's Corner
Tesla’s planned layoffs to affect 3% to 3.5% of total workforce: “We grew a little too fast in some areas”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has set the record straight about the electric vehicle maker’s layoffs. Tesla’s efforts to optimize its workforce have been met with some confusion, partly due to Musk’s own updates about the matter. And with the layoffs now being reported across social media platforms such as LinkedIn, some Tesla employees have taken the legal route to complain about their termination.
Earlier this month, a leaked email from Musk revealed that the CEO was looking to cut off about 10% of the company’s workforce. Musk later clarified this statement, stating that the cuts would be implemented on salaried employees. The headcount for hourly employees would actually be increased. Musk also noted that Tesla would not be terminating employees that are working on key tasks such as vehicle and battery production.
During his virtual appearance at the Qatar Economic Forum on Tuesday, Musk was asked to clarify Tesla’s headcount reduction plans. Musk explained that Tesla actually grew too fast in some areas, so some reduction is pertinent for now. However, considering that salaried workers only comprise about 1/3 of the company’s employees, Musk noted that his 10% job cut estimate would result in just about a 3% to 3.5% reduction in Tesla’s total headcount.
“Tesla is reducing the salaried workforce roughly 10% over the next probably three months or so. We expect to grow our hourly workforce, and I should be quite clear that we expect to grow our hourly workforce. But we grew very fast on the salaried side. And we grew a little too fast in some areas, and so it requires a reduction in the salaried workforce.
“We’re about two-thirds hourly and one-third salary. So I guess technically, a 10% reduction in the salaried workforce is only roughly a 3%, 3.5% reduction in total headcount,” Musk said.
This past weekend, two former Tesla employees filed a lawsuit against the company. According to the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Tesla had violated US labor laws when it initiated “mass layoffs’ in its workforce. As per the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, employers are required to provide 60 days of advance notice of a mass layoff or plant closure. This was reportedly not done in Tesla’s case.
Elon Musk, however, seemed to dismiss the lawsuit when asked about the topic at the Qatar Economic Forum. The CEO noted that the lawsuit “has no standing” and is of “minor consequence.” He added that anything Tesla-related typically gets a lot of attention, so even trivial legal efforts against the company are at times blown out of proportion.
“We did make an announcement on that. Let’s not read too much into a pre-emptive lawsuit that has no standing, that is a small lawsuit of minor consequence. Anything related to Tesla gets big headlines, whether it is, you know, a bicycle accident or something much more serious. It seems like anything related to Tesla gets a lot of clicks, whether it is trivial or significant.
“I would put that lawsuit you’re referring to in the trivial category. So a year from now, I think our headcount will be higher in both salary and obviously in hourly, but in the short term of the next few months, we expect to see, like I said, roughly a 10% reduction in salaried workforce, which is actually just really only a 3%, 3.5% reduction in total headcount and not super material,” Musk explained.
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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.
Tesla brings Model Y L ‘Launch Series’ to the U.S. at $61,990
Tesla just told us twice that Model Y L is coming to the U.S.
