Investor's Corner
Tesla’s end-of-Q3 Model 3 production and delivery ramp looks like an electric car invasion
It seems that Tesla board member Kimbal Musk was not kidding when he noted in a CNBC Closing Bell segment that the number of Model 3 which would appear in US roads near the end of September would be shocking to some. After Tesla’s volunteer-boosted delivery weekend — which saw members of the community dedicating some of their time to help out new owners with the features and functions of their electric cars — it is starting to become evident that Q3 2018 could be the quarter when the Model 3 starts its invasion of the US passenger car market.
The Model 3 is Tesla’s most ambitious vehicle. Radically designed from the ground up, the Model 3 was the car that would determine Tesla’s future. Elon Musk himself dubbed the vehicle as a “bet-the-company” situation, where its success or failure would equate to Tesla’s own rise or fall. It took a while for Tesla to hit its stride with Model 3 production, with the company only hitting its then-mythical goal of manufacturing 5,000 of the electric sedans in a week by the end of Q2 2018, six months later than initially expected.
The Model 3 has started to show its potential in the US passenger car market over the past months. Back in July, sales estimates from auto tracking website GoodCarBadCar suggested that Tesla sold 14,250 Model 3 in the month, making it 7th place in America’s list of best-selling passenger cars. Considering that mainstream, lower-priced vehicles like the Toyota Camry and the Honda Civic were included in GCBC‘s list, the Model 3’s 7th place was more than respectable.
While the Model 3’s sales in July were undoubtedly impressive, its August estimates were even more noteworthy. With an expected 20,450 units sold during August, the Model 3 became the 5th-best-selling passenger car in the US, beating out the Hyundai Elantra and the Nissan Altima. The Model 3 was even listed as the 15th-best-selling vehicle in GCBC‘s overall Top 20 list, which includes titans like the Ford F-150 and the Toyota Rav4.
plenty of time to cover your puts before they go to zero $TSLAQ $TSLA pic.twitter.com/vOcuGyZtfw
— myname (@cbotnyse) September 23, 2018
https://twitter.com/danahull/status/1043655097819979776
It is no secret that Tesla has a tendency to initiate a blitz of deliveries and production before a quarter ends. The company did this in Q1 when it was struggling to build 2,500 Model 3 in a week, and it adopted the same strategy for Q2 when it was trying to manufacture 5,000 of the electric sedans in a seven-day period. This third quarter, Tesla is aiming to produce 50,000-55,000 Model 3 — a record number of vehicles — while attaining profitability. For the company to get a shot at achieving these targets, cars have to be delivered to reservation holders. These efforts, of course, culminated in the recent volunteer-boosted delivery weekend.
As the Tesla community was mobilized in the United States and Canada, it soon became apparent that the company is moving a vast number of vehicles. In the United States, social media posts from Tesla owners shared images of numerous semitrailers transporting electric cars all across the country. Anecdotes from owners who volunteered in the weekend delivery push indicated that numerous vehicles were being moved to service centers, where reservation holders await them. Even a journalist who covers Tesla on a consistent basis shared a clip of a truck full of Model 3 being transported. In Canada, members of the Tesla community have also spotted large lots filled with Model 3, Model S, and Model X. Images taken of centers in British Columbia, Vancouver, Toronto, and Ontario, also depicted a busy, yet very productive volunteer-boosted weekend.
Lots and lots and lots of #Tesla 's .. three lots full plus a hall full of new S,X and 3's waiting delivery in Toronto.. Good luck shorts pic.twitter.com/Fw1UQMyv6y
— Avron (@Avron_p) September 23, 2018
https://twitter.com/TeslaArmy/status/1043960545014013952
In a letter to employees, Elon Musk wrote that Tesla 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.” Kimbal Musk, for his part, noted that “it’s really gonna blow people’s minds how many Model 3s are gonna appear in America in just the next couple of weeks.” If Tesla’s busy delivery weekend, as well as the apparent invasion of electric cars being sighted in the US and Canada, are any indication, the company might very well exceed expectations this quarter. It will not even be surprising if the Tesla Model 3 moves up a couple more steps in GoodCarBadCar‘s list of best-selling passenger cars in the US for September.
Tesla has only been in the auto industry for 15 years, and over that time, it has transformed itself from a niche manufacturer that offered one small, quick, two-seater all-electric sports car into a company that is taking on veterans with premium electric cars that force legacy carmakers to come up with compelling EVs of their own. Tesla still has a long way to go before it masters the auto business, and Elon Musk himself would be the first to admit that gross miscalculations, such as the Model X’s overcomplicated design and the Model 3 ramp’s over-reliance on robots, have happened in the past. Despite this, Tesla remains a company that commands a strong following — one that is willing to pay it forward when needed.
Investor's Corner
Tesla Robotaxi gets a massive upgrade in Nevada
Nevada regulators just approved a massive expansion of Tesla’s robotaxi fleet across the entire county.
Tesla’s robotaxi footprint in Nevada just grew by roughly 500 times in a single regulatory vote.
The Nevada Transportation Authority approved Tesla’s full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit on Thursday, clearing the way for the company to deploy up to 5,000 driverless vehicles across Clark County over the next 12 months. The decision came during a four hour general session meeting that Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt watched live and reported on X, noting the vote replaces the interim order that had limited Tesla to just 10 robotaxis on a narrow stretch of the Las Vegas Strip.
EXCLUSIVE: Tesla has just officially received approval for its full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit in Nevada, clearing the way for Tesla to launch a paid public Robotaxi service in Las Vegas.
This officially allows @Tesla to deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis over the next… pic.twitter.com/DPs5UtUlrE
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 20, 2026
That earlier cap, covered here after it surfaced on August 13, came with restrictions that looked stricter than what Tesla runs in Austin: a 45 mph speed ceiling, no airport pickups, and a geofence confined to the Strip corridor. The new approval extends Tesla’s operating authority to all of Clark County, with room to request an even wider geofence across the state.
Tesla representatives at the meeting said they have no intention of putting 5,000 cars on the road right away. Commercial rides are expected to start within 30 days, pending vehicle inspections, insurance filings, and fare approval, the standard steps every robotaxi operator in Nevada has had to clear.
Tesla’s own Robotaxi account replied to the news with a short line, The golden future is upon us.
The timing lines up with Tesla’s broader robotaxi push this month. The company is preparing to open Cybercab rides to the public in Austin as soon as this month, and it opened a sweepstakes for riders to win a seat at the launch event. Tesla filed its original application for a 5,000 vehicle Nevada fleet back in June, a request regulators trimmed to 10 vehicles when they issued the interim order in July. Thursday’s vote effectively grants the number Tesla asked for from the start.
Zoox, the Amazon owned robotaxi operator, has run in Nevada since 2025 and was capped at 100 vehicles before Thursday’s decision. Tesla’s new ceiling puts it well ahead of that comparison on paper, though the company has said its actual fleet size will depend on how quickly FSD v15 rolls out, the software update executives have called the gateway to scaling unsupervised robotaxi operations nationwide.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.
Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.
The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”
Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”
Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”
Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.
Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.
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