Investor's Corner
Tesla Grabbing Sales From German Car Makers
A report from Germany says Tesla is taking sales away from German car makers in the luxury car segment of the market. It say plug-in hybrids are a dead end.
[Source: @dennis_p via Teslarati App check-in]
Professor Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer is the director of the Center for Automotive Research in Germany. He has written a report entitled “Tesla Asserts Itself In The Luxury Class,” in which he says the big three German car makers have wasted money on plug-in hybrids — which he calls a blind alley. They are also losing sales in the most profitable end of the luxury market to Tesla, he says.
“In a lot of markets we are seeing Tesla doing better than the BMW 7 series, Mercedes S class, Audi A8 and Porsche Panamera. Tesla can boast real innovation and customers with big money are trying it. I’m not sure if Tesla will be successful in the long term but when they broaden the line we will see if it can bring revolution to the car industry.”
Are plug-in hybrids really a blind alley as Professor Dudenhoeffer suggests? A report in Forbes says IHS Automotive recently looked again at its medium to long range forecasts and raised its prediction for electric vehicles in 2020 to just over 1% of the global market. It says that figure will only increase to 1.5% by 2025.
By contrast, IHS says global market share for hybrids and plug-in hybrids will be 7% in 2020. It expects that figure will rise to 16% by 2025 as upcoming US and European regulations require all cars to have better fuel economy and lower carbon dioxide emissions.
But Dudenheoffer doubts those forecasts are correct. He says plug-in hybrids are not proving popular with buyers and are seen as not environmentally friendly because they often use internal combustion engines to get where they are going. He points out that even in markets like Germany and Switzerland, where there are no subsidies for electric vehicles, the Tesla Model S is stealing sales from the Mercedes S class.
“I think plug-in hybrids are the wrong direction and will not be successful. The costs are too high. The weight of the car is too high,” Dudenhoeffer told Forbes. “I think environmentalists and governments will come to the conclusion that plug-in hybrids are not real progress.” His remarks are targeted specifically at Mercedes, which has 3 plug-in hybrid models on sale already and promises to add 7 more soon.
Tesla is doing an excellent job of disrupting the traditional German luxury car manufacturers. The real battle will come when it adds the Model 3 to the mix. It’s one thing to steer customers away from buying an S Class or 7 Series. It’s something else entirely to take sales away from mid-market models, where shoppers have many more choices and the price competition is fierce.
Tesla’s electric cars versus the other guys’ plug-in hybrids. Who will win that fight? The answer will not be entirely market driven, because government regulations will skew the results. That may give an advantage to plug-ins, at least temporarily. The car business will undergo transformative change in the next five years. Tesla has always shown an amazing ability to recognize and adapt to change and that may be its ultimate weapon in the upcoming battle.
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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.
![Tesla Optimus Gen 3 [Credit: Tesla]](https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/tesla-optimus-gen3-diner.jpg)
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.
Correction, 10 million robots https://t.co/0z4nyQNTzp
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) July 30, 2026
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.
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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