Investor's Corner
The Tesla Model 3 is replacing BMW as the US’ ‘Ultimate Driving Machine’
German-made automobiles have established their reputation for their excellence in selected segments. While Mercedes-Benz prides itself on building its vehicles for comfort and class, BMW prides itself on its cars’ driving performance. This is the reason behind BMW and its “Ultimate Driving Machine” moniker. Yet, in the electric age, there seems to be a single car that is steadily hacking into BMW since it was unveiled — the Tesla Model 3.
Bloomberg recently released the fourth part of its Model 3 survey, which aggregated data from 5,000 Tesla owners about their experiences and insights about the all-electric sedan. This time around, the publication focused on the Model 3’s effect on the market. And based on the results of its study, it appears that the Model 3 is now taking away customers from legacy automakers, including those who previously only had more affordable vehicles, as well as those that prioritize performance above all else.
Data gathered by the publication showed that the BMW 3 Series was among the most popular cars that were traded in by owners who bought a Model 3. The BMW 3 Series joins other, more affordable vehicles like the Toyota Prius, the Honda Accord, and the Toyota Camry, as some of the top vehicles that have been traded-in for the all-electric vehicle. This means that customers are making a stretch to acquire the Model 3, and BMW 3 Series owners are likely coming over to Tesla due to driving performance.
This was mentioned by some respondents in Bloomberg‘s study. “I’ve owned three BMW 3 Series and was a diehard BMW fan. The Tesla blows those cars away,” one respondent noted.
It could be said that BMW is the veteran carmaker that is most vulnerable to the assault of the Tesla Model 3. Other carmakers whose vehicles are being traded-in frequently for Tesla’s midsize sedan such as Toyota have an extremely large presence in the United States. Thus, even if the Prius and the Corolla and the Camry take hits due to the Model 3, the company still has a healthy market share in America. This is not the case with BMW.
With this in mind, BMW stands to lose far more than automakers like Toyota due to the Model 3’s advance. Couple this with benchmarking tests against the Model 3 such as those conducted by BBC‘s Top Gear, which concluded that “Electric Beats Petrol! Tesla Model 3 Outguns BMW M3” after the EV beat the petrol-powered car by 2 seconds at the Thunderhill Raceway Park in California, and the German automaker might very well find itself on dire straits soon. This was reflected in Bloomberg‘s study, which listed BMW as the most vulnerable brand against Tesla.
There are many things about the Model 3 that its owners love, but one former BMW X5 owner provided some deeper insight to the publication. According to the former BMW owner, Tesla’s consistent software updates make her vehicle feel brand new all the time, and it is simply something that is not matched by any other carmaker today.
“One of the things I absolutely adore about the Model 3 is that I feel like I get a new car about every 12 weeks. I have so many features now that I didn’t have when I bought the car a year ago. Normally, at about a year, year-and-a-half of ownership I’m already scouting out the freeways for what looks good, and I find that I don’t do that with the Model 3,” the Model 3 owner said.
The fourth part of Bloomberg‘s Model 3 survey could be accessed here.
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.
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
Tesla’s Supercharger Diner probably just secured more locations
