Investor's Corner
Tesla Model 3 becomes August’s 5th best-selling passenger car, 15th in US’ overall auto sales
Tesla took longer than expected to ramp the production of the Model 3, but now the company is finally hitting its manufacturing stride, and the electric sedan is starting to make waves in the US auto industry — some very serious waves.
Auto sales tracking website GoodCarBadCar has posted the estimated sales figures of car manufacturers currently operating in the United States in August. Based on their August 2018 data, the Tesla Model 3 has become America’s 5th best-selling passenger car. The electric car’s rankings for August is up two places from its rank in July, when the Model 3 was listed as the 7th best-selling passenger car in the US.
The auto sales tracking website now lists the Model 3 directly behind the big four of the US passenger car segment — the Toyota Camry, the Honda Civic, the Honda Accord, and the Toyota Corolla Family — all of which are lower-priced than the electric car. The Model 3’s strong August sales figures allowed it to overtake two more affordable vehicles in GCBC‘s rankings as well, the Hyundai Elantra and the Nissan Altima.
The Tesla Model 3 is not just establishing itself as a formidable competitor in the US’ passenger car market, either. The Model 3 also made it to the Top 20 of GoodCarBadCar‘s overall rankings for US auto sales, which include SUVs and trucks such as the best-selling Ford F-150, the Dodge RAM, the Toyota Rav4, and the Honda CR-V. So far, the Model 3 is 15th on the overall list for August, beating out popular SUVs such as the Jeep Wrangler, Jeep Grand Cherokee, and the Subaru Outback.
The Model 3’s estimated August sales are quite impressive, considering that Tesla is still in the process of ramping the production of the electric car. Tesla, after all, plans to eventually build 10,000 Model 3 per week, and so far, the company is only producing around half of that number weekly.
Tesla ended Q2 2018 on a strong note, producing 5,000 Model 3 vehicles in a seven-day period. Despite this milestone, the company’s critics are highly skeptical that Tesla would be able to maintain its optimum production numbers. That said, over the first two months of Q3, Tesla appears to have taken it upon itself to prove its critics wrong.
During the Q2 2018 earnings call, Elon Musk mentioned that Tesla was able to maintain a production rate of 5,000 Model 3 per week during “multiple weeks” in July. In August, the company also showed encouraging signs about the electric car’s production. Tesla’s VIN registrations for the Model 3, for one, rocketed past the 100,000-vehicle mark, and Bloomberg‘s online Model 3 production tracker even showed a week where the company seemed to have produced more than 6,000 units of the electric sedan in a seven-day period.
Perhaps the most notable vote of confidence for the company’s Model 3 production ramp came from veteran auto analyst George Galliers from Evercore ISI, who was given an extensive tour of the Fremont factory, including the newly built GA4 set up on the grounds of the facility. The analyst later published a report about his visit, noting that Tesla is well on its way to sustaining a weekly production rate of 5,000-6,000 Model 3 per week.
“Tesla seems well on the way to achieving a steady weekly production rate of 5,000 to 6,000 units per week. We are incrementally positive on Tesla following our visit. We have confidence in their production. We did not see anything to suggest that Model 3 cannot reach 6k units per week and 7k to 8k with very little incremental capital expenditure. Focusing on the fundamentals and setting aside talk of privatization, we are incrementally positive on Tesla following our visit,” Galliers noted.
Investor's Corner
NASA taps SpaceX to launch the telescope that could unlock new worlds
NASA’s Roman Space Telescope heads to orbit this August aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy with massive scientific ambitions.
SpaceX is set to play a central role in one of NASA’s most anticipated science missions in years. The company’s Falcon Heavy rocket, currently the most powerful operational launch vehicle in the world, will carry the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into orbit on August 30 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Roman is now in final preparations inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, where on June 26 technicians used a crane to lift the observatory into a specialized stand for fueling and pre-launch testing.
Roman is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy, whose career helped shape how the agency approaches space science.
NASA chose SpaceX Falcon Heavy because of Roman’s needs to reach a specific orbit far from Earth, well beyond where a standard Falcon 9 can deliver it. The Falcon Heavy, which first flew in 2018, has since become NASA’s go-to option for missions that need serious muscle without the cost and complexity of older launch systems.
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Roman will carry a field of view at least 100 times wider than the Hubble Space Telescope, meaning it can photograph enormous swaths of the universe in a single shot rather than the narrow slices Hubble captures. That difference in scale is significant. While Hubble reshaped our understanding of the cosmos over 30 years, Roman is built to work faster and wider, surveying hundreds of millions of galaxies at once.
One of Roman’s most compelling capabilities is its potential to discover and photograph planets orbiting stars outside our solar system, and with enough precision to directly image planets that would otherwise be lost. That means scientists could study the atmosphere and surface characteristics of distant worlds rather than simply confirming they exist. Combined with Roman’s sweeping field of view, the telescope could detect thousands of exoplanets, and some of those planets may be in habitable zones where liquid water could exist. No telescope currently in operation has this level of power and capability. That capability alone could change what we know about other worlds, and perhaps finally answer the question: are we the only intelligent lifeforms in existence?
What Roman actually finds once it reaches orbit is an open question, and that is exactly what makes this launch worth watching.
Elon Musk
California snubs Tesla in its newly passed EV incentive that favors Rivian and Lucid
California passed a $135 million EV incentive that rewards Rivian and Lucid while sidelining Tesla
California just drew a line in the EV incentive sand to put Tesla on the wrong side of it. The state recently passed a $135 million program offering first-time electric vehicle buyers a direct incentive with no application required, but the rules were written in a way that leaves Tesla at a structural disadvantage compared to Rivian and Lucid.
The program caps eligible vehicles at $50,000 for new EVs and $25,000 for used ones. That pricing threshold rules out a significant portion of Tesla’s lineup, though some lower-priced Model 3 and Model Y configurations would still qualify. California-based automakers are exempt from the price cap entirely, regardless of what their vehicles cost. Rivian, headquartered in Irvine, and Lucid, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, both benefit from that exemption. Rivian’s R2 starts at roughly $45,000 but has versions above the cap. Lucid’s Air and Gravity start at $70,990 and $79,990 respectively, well above any threshold a non-California company would face.
California hits Tesla Cybercab and Robotaxi driverless cars with new law
Tesla built its reputation and a significant portion of its early market share in California, where EV adoption has consistently led the nation. The company operates its original factory in Fremont, California, and the state was home to Tesla’s headquarters for most of its existence. That changed in 2021 when Tesla moved its corporate headquarters to Austin, Texas. Since then, the relationship between the company and California Governor Gavin Newsom has been openly adversarial, with Musk and Newsom trading public criticism on multiple occasions.
California’s EV incentive landscape has shifted repeatedly in recent years, and Tesla has previously lost eligibility for state-level programs as its vehicles exceeded income-adjusted price thresholds. The federal $7,500 EV tax credit, which Tesla models have qualified for and lost depending on policy cycles, is no longer available after it expired without renewal, making state-level programs more meaningful to buyers than they have been in years.
The practical impact for buyers is more nuanced than the headline suggests. California residents purchasing a Tesla under $50,000 for the first time can still access the incentive. But the exemption written for California-based manufacturers is a structural advantage that rewards where a company plants its headquarters flag rather than where it builds its products, and Tesla moved that flag to Texas.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s newest logo confirms everything about what it’s become
SpaceX officially absorbed xAI under the SpaceXAI brand, completing the largest private merger in history.
SpaceX made its corporate transformation official in May 2026 when Elon Musk posted on X that xAI would cease to exist as a standalone company. “xAI will be dissolved as a separate company, so it will just be SpaceXAI, the AI products from SpaceX,” he wrote.
A new SpaceXAI logo was announced today, visually embedding the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity, which can be seen as a deliberate design choice that signals the merger is not a partnership but a full absorption and XAi a core function of the same company. The same way Starlink is not a separate brand but a SpaceX product. The announcement closed the loop on a process that began February 2, 2026, when SpaceX acquired xAI in the largest private merger in history, valued at $1.25 trillion. SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion.
We are now @SpaceXAI. pic.twitter.com/ema66xDWC9
— SpaceXAI (@SpaceXAI) July 6, 2026
The reason SpaceX bought xAI was stated plainly by Musk at the time of the deal: to build orbital data centers. SpaceX had simultaneously filed with the FCC to launch up to one million satellites designed to function as AI compute nodes in low Earth orbit, escaping what Musk described as the energy constraints limiting AI development on Earth.
xAI provided the AI software stack, with Grok, the X platform, and the Colossus supercomputer infrastructure in Memphis with over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, while SpaceX provided the rockets, Starlink, and the capital base to fund it. The two companies needed each other. xAI was burning $2.5 billion in losses on $250 million in revenue. SpaceX was generating an estimated $8 billion in profit on $15 billion in revenue and needed an AI narrative to command the valuation it was targeting for its IPO.
What SpaceX has done, regardless of how the orbital AI vision ultimately plays out, is walk into a public market as something no company has been before: a rocket manufacturer, satellite internet provider, AI software company, social media platform, and supercomputer operator under one ticker. Whether that combination is worth $2 trillion depends entirely on which of those businesses you believe in most.
NASA taps SpaceX to launch the telescope that could unlock new worlds
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