Investor's Corner
Tesla impresses skeptical Wall St analyst after Model 3 Performance test drive
One of Tesla’s most ardent bulls who adopted a more skeptical stance on the company earlier this year has seemingly been won over after a test drive in the Model 3 Performance. In a recent note, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote that the Model 3 Performance is impressive, being a vehicle that signifies a positive momentum for electric cars as a whole.
In his note, Jonas stated that workers at the Fremont factory continue to be incredibly busy manufacturing the electric car to meet the demand for the vehicle in the United States. The Morgan Stanley analyst also pointed out that the Model 3 Performance seems to be the best bang-for-the-buck electric car in Tesla’s lineup, giving even more value-for-performance than the Model S 75D.
“Frankly, our enjoyment of the high-spec version of the Model 3 took us by surprise. It’s hard to say how much this matters. But it matters,” Jonas stated.
Overall, Jonas outlined several factors driving expectations for electric cars today, including positive regulatory initiatives in large markets such as China and Europe, the rising price of oil, as well as the increasing number of companies looking into electrified vehicles. These factors, particularly the regulatory initiatives from several regions across the globe, are starting to be felt by legacy carmakers, including Volkswagen AG, which recently expressed its reservations about the EU’s proposal to reduce emissions by 35% on or before 2030.
Morgan Stanley has historically adopted a bullish stance on Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA), though last May, Jonas cut the company’s price target from $376 to $291 – a 23% decrease. Jonas also slashed his long-term operating profit margin forecast for the electric car maker from 14.3% to 9.8%. Explaining his more conservative stance in a note, Jonas wrote that the “lingering manufacturing issues with the Model 3 – most recently at Fremont final assembly” could prevent Tesla from achieving its ambitious self-imposed targets.
“The challenges in ramping up Model 3 production reflect fundamental issues of vehicle design, manufacturing process, and automation levels that can weigh against the profitability of the vehicle,” Jonas wrote.
Just last month, Jonas also released a note stating that Tesla would likely initiate an equity raise of $2.5 billion in Q4 2018. While the analyst did acknowledge the bull thesis that Tesla would not need to raise equity if it generates enough cash, Jonas nonetheless stated that “it is far better for a company to raise when it doesn’t need to.” Considering the Morgan Stanley analyst’s recent note, though, it appears that Adam Jonas might adopt a more optimistic outlook on Tesla once more.
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Since ending Q3 2018 with a delivery blitz that resulted in a total of 83,500 vehicles being handed over to customers before September ended, Tesla appears to be going full throttle in its ongoing efforts to ramp the production of the Model 3. Even before Q3’s end, reports already emerged that Gigafactory 1 in Nevada is receiving upgrades in Q4, in the form of new Grohmann machines that can make “module production become three times faster, and three times cheaper.” New battery cell production lines from Panasonic, which were initially scheduled to go online by the “end of 2018,” are set to be completed earlier than expected as well.
Tesla has been mostly quiet about its progress this Q4 so far, but the company has been showing encouraging signs of a strong production ramp. In the first two weeks of October, for example, Tesla registered more than 30,000 new Model 3 VINs, including a record batch of more than 9,000 vehicles in one filing. In a recent announcement, Tesla CEO Elon Musk also revealed that despite the company’s restructuring earlier this year, Tesla now employs a workforce of around 45,000 employees.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.
The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.
Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.
The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.
As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.
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Elon Musk
Tesla AI boss reveals how big Optimus is going to get
Tesla’s Optimus chief corrected himself on X, confirming a staggering 10 million robot production target.
![Tesla Optimus Gen 3 [Credit: Tesla]](https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/tesla-optimus-gen3-diner.jpg)
Tesla’s Optimus program has a new number attached to it, after Ashok Elluswamy, the executive who has run the humanoid robot program since June 2025, posted a three word correction on X Thursday, “Correction, 10 million robots.”
The line clarifies the long term annual capacity Tesla is building toward its planned second Optimus production line at Gigafactory Texas, a figure Musk has cited repeatedly since last year’s shareholder meeting.
The scale is worth noting, because ten million robots a year would mean Tesla building more units annually than most countries sell in new cars. Tesla has framed this as a second line, not the first. The buildout is happening in two phases: a roughly one million unit per year line inside Tesla’s Fremont factory, installed on the floor space vacated when Model S and Model X production ended earlier this year, and a much larger dedicated facility under construction at Giga Texas that broke ground on its first steel structure in May. That Texas facility is the one Elluswamy’s correction refers to, and is expected to reach volume production sometime in 2027.
Correction, 10 million robots https://t.co/0z4nyQNTzp
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) July 30, 2026
Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress
Elluswamy took over Optimus from Milan Kovac last summer and has spent the months since talking up the program’s trajectory. Elon Musk has also floated the ten million figure at Tesla’s 2025 shareholder meeting.
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Ending Model S and Model X production to make room for the first Optimus line was one of the more consequential manufacturing decisions in the company’s recent history, retiring two flagship vehicles in favor of a robot that has yet to enter mass production. Musk has previously estimated per unit production costs at $20,000 to $25,000 once Tesla reaches a million units a year, though he hasn’t said what that cost looks like at ten times the volume.
SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.
The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.
SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters
Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.
SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.
With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.
Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.
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Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.
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