Investor's Corner
Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada tops $1.3 billion in construction costs
Tesla filed 112 new building permits for its Nevada Gigafactory during 2017, with the electric car maker and energy company investing another $379.9 million on the now-$1.3 billion facility.
The new permits filed by the Elon Musk-led firm signified the ongoing development of Gigafactory 1, with Tesla filing a number of addendums to its existing structures and in-house facilities. As noted by BuildZoom, a trend evident in Tesla’s 2017 permits was the high occurrence of project addendums, which correspond to improvements done on facilities that are already in operation.
Over the course of 2017, 50 of the 112 permits filed by the electric car maker and energy firm were addendums to previous structures, including its chiller yard and microgrid lab. Improvements were also implemented for Sections F and G, among others. The overall cost of these updates is valued at $165.6 million.
As revealed by the permits filed by the company in 2017, Tesla opted to add a metrology lab in the Nevada factory. This particular addition is quite notable since metrology equipment is primarily used in the auto industry to ensure that components assembled on the line are built according to precise measurements.
According to a report from Automotive Manufacturing Solutions, metrology equipment are used in car manufacturing to conduct off-line, near-line, and in-line inspections of vehicle components coming off production. These inspections, which are conducted through the utilization of devices such as 3D laser trackers, ultimately improve a car maker’s precision and accuracy when manufacturing parts of a vehicle.
During Tesla’s Q3 2017 earnings report, the California-based firm noted that one of the primary constraints on the production of the mass market vehicle was its battery module assembly line. According to Tesla, the battery modules, which were “done by manufacturing systems suppliers” was significantly “redesigned” by the company, ultimately resulting in a delay in the production of the Model 3. With this in mind, the addition of a metrology lab, which ensures that components produced on-site are manufactured according to specifications, seems to be a step in the right direction.
Other permits that were filed by the California-based electric car company include a brazing oven that automates metal joining, a hot oil skid system that stores and transfers heat fluids, an air separation yard that separates atmospheric air into elemental components, and a chiller yard that removes heat from liquids.
-
Here are some of the more interesting Tesla Gigafactory project additions in 2017, as noted by BuildZoom
- A metrology lab (November 8, 2017)
- A brazing oven to automate metal joining (November 8, 2017)
- $179,850 for a hazmat building addendum (November 1, 2017)
- $13.7M for hot oil skid systems to store and transfer heat fluids (March 13, 2017)
- $10.8M for air separation yards to separate atmospheric air into elemental components
- $2.6M for chiller yards to remove heat from liquids
Tesla’s Gigafactory seems to be growing from within during the past six months, with most improvements to the facility happening in-house. While external developments along the north and south ends of the factory have remained relatively unchanged since August 2017, the number of permits filed by the car maker during the year prove that Tesla’s efforts in the factory’s improvement have been nothing but consistent.
Once completed, Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory will be the largest building in the world in terms of physical footprint, with the entire facility set to cover an area of 13 million square feet.
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.
Tesla claims supplier is holding Cybertruck production hostage
Tesla Full Self-Driving v14.3.6 review: a rare regression, but some bright spots
