Investor's Corner
Tesla Model 3 in $35k base trim to start production ‘in the next 8 months’
Elon Musk’s prediction last July that the Model 3’s production hell is coming to an end seems to be ringing true. Tesla is currently in the final month of Q3 2018, and according to Musk in a letter to employees shared last Friday, the company is on the cusp of its “most amazing quarter” yet, as it prepares to build and deliver “more than twice as many cars” as it did in the second quarter.
The catalyst for Tesla’s growth is the Model 3. Dubbed by Elon Musk as a “bet-the-company” vehicle, the Model 3’s success or failure could dictate Tesla’s future. So far, though, the Model 3 has been performing well, being dubbed by auto sales tracking website GoodCarBadCar as the 5th best-selling passenger car in the United States last August. Tesla was able to achieve this despite producing only three variants of the electric car — the Long Range RWD, the Long Range AWD, and the AWD Performance version. The Model 3’s base trim, which is expected to cost $35,000 before any options, is still not being produced.
If Tesla plays its cards right, the $35,000 standard trim Model 3 could very well become a fossil-fuel car killer. At its price point, the base Model 3 becomes comparable in price to some of the United States’ best-selling passenger cars like the Toyota Camry, whose top-of-the-line XSE V6 trim is priced at $34,950. While the potential of the $35,000 Model 3 is vast, Tesla and even CEO Elon Musk have been quite conservative when releasing updates about the upcoming electric sedan.
That is, until now. Just recently, Worm Capital analysts Eric Markowitz and Dan Crowley published a post on the financial firm’s website outlining their insights on Tesla after a tour of Gigafactory 1. Tesla’s head of investor relations Martin Viecha facilitated the tour, while also provided some updates on the company’s upcoming projects. Among these projects was the $35,000 standard trim Model 3.
According to the analysts, they were informed that the Model 3’s base variant, which is equipped with a shorter-range battery, would likely start production “in the next 8 months.” With this statement in mind, it appears safe to infer that by April or Mar 2019, Tesla would be manufacturing the $35,000 base Model 3.
Contrary to an emerging Tesla bear thesis that demand for the Model 3 is declining, the analysts noted that the electric car maker is currently focused on selling higher-margin cars such as the Model 3 Performance and the Long Range AWD Model 3, where “demand continues to exceed what is being produced.” This is in line with Tesla head of sales Robin Ren’s statement in the Q2 2018 earnings call, when he noted that the company is seeing “more orders for the All-Wheel Drive dual-motor car and performance cars combined than the rear wheel drives.”
Back in June, Tesla CEO Elon Musk provided a rough estimate as to when the initial production of the $35,000 Standard trim Model 3 would begin. Musk also noted that Tesla would likely start producing the vehicle’s smaller battery packs at the end of 2018.
“We will definitely offer a $35,000 version of the Model 3. And probably at the end of this year is when we will be able to make a smaller version of the battery pack, and get into volume production of $35,000 version in Q1 next year. We would definitely honor that obligation, and we would do so right now if it were possible,” Musk said.
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The recent timeline related by Martin Viecha covers and exceeds Q1 2019, considering that his estimated timeframe ends at either April or May next year. That being said, Tesla definitely appears to be getting ready for the rollout of the $35,000 base Model 3, as well as succeeding models like the standard-range AWD version. Once Tesla is manufacturing the full range of the Model 3’s variants, it would not be too surprising if the vehicle ends up dethroning best-selling passenger cars like the Toyota Camry in the United States.
The Tesla Model 3’s base variant has a 220-mile range, a 0-60 mph time of 5.6 seconds, and a top speed of 130 mph. The vehicle starts at $35,000 before any options.
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
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— 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.
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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.
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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.
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