Investor's Corner
Tesla to sustain Model 3 “burst” production rate in July, suggests online tracker
Tesla’s capability to sustain its rate of manufacturing 5,000 Model 3 per week this third quarter remains in question, but an online tracker by Bloomberg suggests that the Silicon Valley electric car maker is on pace to hit peak production levels in the next few weeks.
Tesla was finally able to manufacture 5,000 Model 3 per week during the final seven days of the second quarter, thanks to a blitz of activity in the Fremont factory. Tesla had to implement a number of unorthodox strategies to achieve the production milestone, including building an entirely new general assembly line inside a massive sprung structure at the grounds of the Fremont factory and air-freighting six airplanes’ worth of robots from Europe. These, together with Tesla’s “burst” build, were considered by critics to be unsustainable.
Doubts about Tesla’s capability to maintain its 5,000/week Model 3 production rate fueled the thesis of the company’s most vocal critics, such as JP Morgan analyst Ryan Brinkman, who wrote that Tesla’s burst production could not be repeated. CFRA Research analyst Efraim Levy also downgraded TSLA to a Sell, stating that the burst rate for Model 3 production is the not “operationally or financially sustainable.” These reservations affected Tesla’s stock (NASDAQ:TSLA), with the company ending the week at $308.88 per share, a significant drop from the near-record highs it achieved earlier in June.
Bloomberg’s Tesla Model 3 tracker as of 7/9/18. [Credit: Bloomberg]
If the current numbers reflected in Bloomberg‘s Model 3 online tracker are any indication, however, it appears that Tesla might just be on track to produce the Model 3 at a sustained rate of the 5,000 vehicles per week. As of this weekend, the online tracker, which was just 2% off its prediction for Tesla’s final Q2 numbers, shows a trend of more than 5,000 Model 3 per week over the next three weeks. Apart from this, production of the compact electric car is also listed at 5,187 Model 3 per week.
Bloomberg‘s Tesla Model 3 production tracker aggregates data from U.S. government resources, social media reports, as well as direct communication with Tesla owners. VINs that are listed in the tracker are either traced depending on Tesla’s own filings during batch registrations, or sightings of Model 3 in the wild. Vehicle Identification Numbers do not directly correspond to the number of Model 3 that Tesla is producing, but Elon Musk himself admitted in the Q1 2018 earnings call that “any information that (Tesla) provide(s) would be one week or two in advance of what will become public knowledge just due to vehicle registrations and shipments that are tracked very carefully.”
Tesla is now attempting to hit sustained profitability for the first time in its history. During Q2 2018, Elon Musk boldly declared on Twitter that Tesla would start being profitable around Q3 or Q4 2018. During the first quarter earnings call, Musk reiterated this, stating that it was about time Tesla starts showing some earnings. In order to accomplish this goal, Tesla would have to ensure that the Model 3 gets built and delivered at a pace that is sustainable.
Considering the sales numbers of the Model 3, it appears that if Tesla can keep its production rate steady, it would only be a matter of time before the vehicle can help push the company towards profitability. In Tesla’s Q2 2018 Production and Delivery report, the company stated that it had delivered 18,440 Model 3 from April-June 2018. Tesla also had 11,166 Model 3 vehicles in transit to customers by the time the quarter ended, setting up the third quarter for record deliveries and sales. The Chevy Bolt EV, considered as the Model 3’s main rival, had sales of 3,483 vehicles during Q2 2018, 82% less than the Model 3.
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.
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