Investor's Corner
Tesla’s last-month Model 3 production blitz for Q3 will likely be its most impressive yet
This Q3 2018 would likely be one for Tesla’s history books, since this could be the time when the company hits a breakthrough point in its journey towards becoming a mainstream carmaker. Amidst the noise last Friday resulting from the departure of two executives and Elon Musk’s actions during a podcast, the company released an update stating that it would likely deliver twice as many cars this third quarter as it did in Q2 2018.
Tesla’s optimistic and bold forecast for the third quarter, which was authored by Elon Musk, was published on the company’s official blog. The post was a letter sent to Tesla employees, and it noted that the company is “about to have the most amazing quarter in (its) history, building and delivering more than twice as many cars as (it) did last quarter.”
Tesla delivered a total of 40,740 vehicles in Q2 2018, of which 18,440 were Model 3, 10,930 were Model S, and 11,370 were Model X. The company was able to manufacture a total of 53,339 vehicles during Q2 as well, comprised of 28,578 Model 3 and 24,761 Model S and X. Considering Musk’s recent letter to Tesla’s employees, it appears that Tesla is attempting to deliver more than 80,000 Model 3, Model S, and Model X this Q3.
It took a lot of pain and effort to get to this point. Tesla’s trials and Elon Musk’s tribulations since the company started manufacturing the Model 3 are well-documented. Since July 2017, Tesla faced bottleneck after bottleneck in its Fremont factory and at Gigafactory 1 in Nevada. The progress of Tesla’s Model 3 push was nothing short of “production hell,” and CEO Elon Musk was not exaggerating when he described the past year as one of the “most painful” 12 months of his career.
The second quarter appears to have been a pivotal point in Tesla’s Model 3 push, as it was the quarter when it was finally able to hit its manufacturing targets for the first time. Tesla was able to produce 5,000 Model 3 during the final week of June, on top of 2,000 Model S and X. This 7,000-vehicle week was considered a milestone by the company, though it was considered unremarkable by Ford Europe CEO Steven Armstrong, who stated that the legacy automaker could produce 7,000 vehicles in 4 hours. Tesla’s critics were also dismissive of the production milestone, stating that the company would probably not be able to maintain its optimum production rate for the Model 3 during the following months of Q3.
Tesla appears to have taken these criticisms as a personal challenge to prove its critics wrong. During the company’s Q2 2018 earnings call, Elon Musk noted that Tesla was able to produce 5,000 Model 3 per week during “multiple weeks” in July. In August, Tesla showed even more signs that the Model 3’s production was still going full throttle. The Model 3’s VIN filings rocketed past the 100,000-mark, and Bloomberg‘s production tracker, which has only gotten more accurate during the past months, estimated that at one point in August, Tesla produced more than 6,000 Model 3 in a week. Evercore ISI analysts who visited the Fremont factory also concluded that Tesla could ramp to 7,000-8,000 Model 3 per week with minimal CapEx.
September is the final month of the third quarter, and Tesla is already showing indications that its Model 3 push would only get more aggressive. Reports have emerged that Model 3 VINs in the 100k range are already being assigned to reservation holders. A Tesla employee who works at Fremont’s paint shop has also teased on Twitter (in a post that has since been deleted) that production is going well, and that the company is “smashing records.”
During the past two quarters, Tesla has shown a tendency to adopt radical and unorthodox strategies to push its manufacturing capabilities during the final month of a quarter. In Q1, the last week of March saw Tesla going all-in to produce more than 2,000 Model 3 in a week. In Q2, June saw the company setting up GA4 inside a sprung structure as a means to hit its production target of building 5,000 Model 3 in one week. It remains to be seen if Tesla would adopt something similarly unique for Q3, but one thing seems certain — the company is about to go on a production blitz at a scale unmatched in the company’s history.
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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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