Investor's Corner
Tesla Model 3 delivery event: Key points investors will be looking for
With the Tesla Model 3 delivery event just days away, Tesla fans everywhere are gearing up for the final roll out of Tesla’s high volume, affordable EV.
Amid the excitement, however, Tesla shares have seen a mercurial run on the market in recent weeks. With many investors betting on Tesla’s future — and many more skeptical buyers shorting it — the Model 3 release will be nothing short of a rubber-meets-the-road moment for CEO Elon Musk and his grand automotive ideas.
Barring any major production or logistical mishaps, the production of the Model 3 is aiming to make a substantive impact on the automotive industry.
The Model 3 event is a defining moment for Musk, Tesla and investors alike. As the launch draws nearer, The Motley Fool introduced a few key features from the Model 3 that Tesla investors and fans need to be aware of.
The range of the Model 3 could put it in direct competition with the Chevy Bolt, which has a reported range of around 238 miles per charge from a 60 kWh battery.
In May, Tesla fans spotted a Model 3 with an estimated range of 310 miles. This model was likely equipped with a 75 kWh battery pack while a baseline Model 3 will achieve a minimum of 215 miles per single charge facilitated by a 60 kWh pack, according to inside sources.
Oh so little faith
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2017
In addition to vehicle range, another key point for investors is the Model 3’s access to the Supercharger network. Up until now, charging a Model S or Model X has been free at Supercharger locations. Tesla has announced, however, that all drivers will have to pay a fee cheaper than the cost of gasoline for charging after using over 400 kWh of energy from Superchargers.
Charging costs for the Model 3 remain a question mark ahead of the official roll out date.
Investors will also glean insight from Model 3’s Autopilot pricing model when it’s released. We already know that all Model 3 will be equipped with Autopilot 2.0 hardware as standard equipment, but what’s uncertain is how much customers will need to pay to activate Autopilot. Will Tesla offer “Enhanced Autopilot” as it currently does to Model S and Model X buyers, or will Model 3 only be available with Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving Capability“?
As Daniel Sparks of The Motley Fool points out, Model S and X customers can enable Enhanced Autopilot for $5,000 before delivery and $6,000 afterwards. Buyers have the option to add Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Capability for an additional $3,000 before or after delivery.
The biggest uncertainty that faces Tesla is its projected production ramp-up. Musk will hand over 30 Model 3s at the delivery event on Friday. From there, production will increase exponentially until roughly 10,000 vehicles are produced per week in 2018.
Recent Model 3 sightings have indicated that at least seven Model 3s have already been produced by Tesla.
In the final days leading up to Friday’s Model 3 delivery event, several factors remain important for investors. Production is expected to kick into a higher gear and Musk’s processes and logistics will be tested following the official Model 3 event. For investors, this will be the defining moment on whether Musk’s vision for a high volume, affordable electric car is possible.
The delivery event will also feature presentations from Musk on Tesla’s grand vision for a sustainable future. Teslarati will have live, behind-the-scenes coverage of the launch event. Follow us @Teslarati on Twitter for in-depth coverage of the event.
Investor's Corner
Tesla crushes Wall Street expectations, beats delivery estimates by over 15 percent
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) beat Wall Street expectations of 406,000 vehicles delivered in Q2 by reporting 480,126 deliveries for the three months ending in June.
Tesla reported it delivered 467,762 Model 3 and Model Y units, while 12,364 Model S, Model X, and Cybertrucks switched hands during the quarter. The Model S and Model X were officially sunset this past quarter and will no longer be part of the company’s Production & Delivery reports moving forward.
🚨 BREAKING: Tesla delivered 480,126 vehicles in Q2, ANNIHILATING Wall Street expectations of 406,000. Production was reported at 451,758.
Deliveries:
Model 3/Y: 467,762
Other Models: 12,364Production:
Model 3/Y: 442,936
Other Models: 8,822 https://t.co/TTHwQAsKt8 pic.twitter.com/7qI4Zj6FE5— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 2, 2026
The quarter is a pleasant surprise and a good rebound from Q1, when Tesla slightly missed the Wall Street consensus of 365,645 cars by reporting 358,023 deliveries for the first three motnhs of the year.
Energy storage deployments also provided some strength in Tesla’s delivery report, hitting 13.5 GWh for Q2. This is a particular division of Tesla’s business that has been overwhelmingly robust over the past few years, truly being a strong point of the company’s overall model.
For the year, Tesla analysts still predict deliveries to trend in the 1.69 million unit region, a modest 3 to 5 percent increase from the 1.64 million cars the company delivered last year. Tesla will likely return to more sequential and noticeable year-over-year growth as the Cybercab project starts to ramp up considerably in the next few years.
Tesla has some other potential catalysts to spur vehicle deliveries, too. Not only is it expecting Cybercab to truly start making a change in the next few years, but other vehicles could be entering the company’s lineup.
Tesla sends production Cybercab with no steering wheel, pedals to on-road testing
The slightly longer Model Y L has been a highly speculated release candidate in the U.S. It has already done incredibly well in China, and U.S. buyers have been wanting slightly more interior space than the Model Y. Now that the Model X is gone, it is more needed than ever.
Q2 highlights a pretty stable automotive division within Tesla, and no true concerns arise from these figures, especially considering it managed to beat expectations convincingly.
Investor's Corner
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
Tesla short seller Michael Burry, the subject of the film “The Big Short,” where he was portrayed by Steve Carell, has revealed he has opened a new bet against the stock.
In a new update to his Substack newsletter in a post titled “Trading Post June 30, 2026,” Burry revealed a new set of bets against Tesla, Caterpillar, NVIDIA, Applied Materials Inc., and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.
In regard to Tesla, Burry wrote:
“And finally I shorted Tesla at 416.22. Happy it jumped back to this level.”
This means Burry likely opened his new short position after the company’s recent rally on Wall Street, which saw Tesla shares sink in mid-May, only to recover to well over the $400 mark. Currently, shares trade at around $427.
The company saw a big Tuesday as shares climbed considerably, over 10 percent. The size of the Tesla short was not provided, nor did Burry give any information on the position’s structure, the number of shares, dollar value, or whether options were used in the short.
The Tesla and SpaceX merger everyone is talking about is quietly building
Over the years, Burry has been one of the more vocal critics of Tesla, calling its share price “media inflated,” and saying it was “ridiculously overvalued” as recently as December.
The company has largely transitioned away from being known as an automotive company and instead is much more widely regarded as an AI play, mostly due to its Full Self-Driving efforts, Optimus robot development, and data collection related to both.
This has not pulled those skeptics away from being vocal about their distaste for how Tesla is valued, but there’s no denying that the company is a global force in many things, including sustainable energy, automotive, and AI.
Wedbush Securities is initiating stock coverage on SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), marking the first comments on the company since it went public several weeks ago. Wedbush and its analyst handling coverage, Dan Ives, are widely bullish on fellow Musk company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).
Ives wrote his first note initiating coverage of SpaceX shares on Wednesday with a $190 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating. The firm believes the company is well positioned off of its IPO because of its wide array of projects, including AI compute power and infrastructure, connectivity projects, and launches.
“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity,” Ives wrote, “Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel and increasing deal flow for its Colossus clusters.”
Elon Musk called it Epic: The full story of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 12
Wedbush leans heavily on Starlink, which they say is the “profitability driver given the strength of its recurring revenue base of ~12 million subscribers as of June 5th.” Ives believes Starlink is still in the “early innings” of penetrating the global telecommunications and broadband market, as it only holds less than a 1 percent share. However, this number is sure to increase over time.
It also highlights the importance of Starship, which it says is an “essential layer” of SpaceX’s overall success. SpaceX developing and displaying the ability to reuse rockets is a major cost and reliability advantage “as it reduces the necessary hardware launch costs while generating a feedback loop for future flights to improve their launch flight rate without accelerating capex spend.”
Finally, SpaceX’s recent AI/Compute projects are also very elementary, Ives writes. It is worth mentioning Wedbush said its $190 price target is derived from a valuation forecast that sees the company yielding roughly $2.48 trillion of implied enterprise value.
There are also some factors that Wedbush did not take into account with its initial coverage. The firm wrote in the note:
“We note that there is optional value coming from Starship’s accelerating scale towards sub-$200/kg unit economics, orbital data centers, and enterprise AI monetization as these factors could drive meaningful upside but these face major hurdles, so we do not take that into account with our valuation.”
SpaceX shares are down just over 2 percent today, trading at around $167 at the time of publication.
Texas man charged in fatal Tesla crash where he blamed Autopilot
Tesla’s strong Q2 deliveries: Four key drivers behind the surprise
