Investor's Corner
Tesla’s Q2 2018 earnings call showed a more mature Elon Musk leading a more mature company
Tesla’s Q2 2018 financial results and earnings call were not only a pleasant surprise because of the encouraging figures in the company’s Update Letter. Contrary to what critics of the company have predicted in the weeks leading up to the Q2 2018 earnings call, the Elon Musk that showed up on Wednesday was not the same person that attended Q1’s now infamous Q&A session.
To say that Elon Musk has courted controversy over the past few months is an understatement. During the company’s Q1 earnings call, Musk lost patience and cut off analysts from Bernstein and RBC Capital Markets, dubbing their questions as “dry,” “boring” and “boneheaded.” The ensuing fallout from Musk’s dismissal of the analysts’ inquiries was significant, with Tesla’s stock taking a steep nosedive. Musk’s actions online became subject to criticism as well, particularly after he was involved in the rescue attempt of a soccer team stranded in a flooded cave network in Thailand. Facing criticism from internet trolls and a rude comment from a cave explorer, Musk snapped back with a retort that was equally uncalled-for. Just like his actions during Tesla’s Q1 earnings call, his Twitter reaction then was negatively reflected in Tesla’s stock.
Elon Musk is at his best when he is calm and calculating and at his worst when he is combative and emotional. While his actions over the past few months on Twitter suggested that he would attend Wednesday’s Q&A session as the latter, his behavior during the Q2 earnings call itself was clearly the former. Musk was restrained, readily admitting his mistakes and directly apologizing for his behavior.
“Yeah, I’d like to apologize for being impolite on the prior call. Obviously, I think there’s no excuse for bad manners, and I was kind of violating my own rule in that regard. I have some excuse; there are reasons for it. I’ve gotten no sleep, and I’ve been working 100, 120-hour weeks, but nonetheless, there’s still no excuse. My apologies for not being polite on the prior call.”
Tesla seemingly made it a point to address questions asked by Toni Sacconaghi from Bernstein and Joseph Spak of RBC Capital Markets, the two analysts who were on the receiving end of Musk’s frustration in the first-quarter earnings call. Musk was polite, humble even, at one point reiterating a direct apology to the RBC Capital Markets analyst.
“I would like to apologize for being impolite on the last call with you. It was not right. I hope you accept my apology,” Musk said.
Apart from Musk’s apology for his errors, Tesla’s Q2 2018 earnings call also featured the CEO sharing the spotlight with members of Tesla’s executive and Autopilot team. As questions were asked, they were addressed by individuals whose expertise corresponded directly to the inquiries. This was quite a departure from Musk’s behavior in Q1’s Q&A session, when he dominated much of the discussion. Targets and timelines mentioned during the call were also realistic, a departure from Musk’s usual bold promises and claims. When Musk was asked about Tesla’s coast-to-coast Autonomous drive, for example, the CEO admitted that the company is currently focusing its attention on releasing Software V9, which would introduce the company’s first Full Self-Driving features.
A look at Tesla’s Q2 2018 Update Letter shows that the electric car and energy company is growing at a rapid rate — and it’s just getting started. With the Model 3 sustaining a 5,000 per week production rate for several weeks in July, Tesla is now looking to raise the electric car’s manufacturing to even greater heights. Tesla plans to ramp the production of the vehicle to 7,000 per week, and steadily improve it from there until it reaches 10,000 Model 3 per week. Overall, Tesla’s potential is vast, but as the company matures into a full-fledged carmaker, Elon Musk must also mature to become a more well-rounded leader.
In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek last month, Elon Musk promised that he would do better when it comes to responding to the company’s critics and trolls on Twitter. While Musk’s recent tweets — two of which involved a snarky message to Tesla bear Montana Skeptic and hedge fund owner David Einhorn — still showed his tendency to poke fun at his detractors, his actions in the Q2 2018 earnings call shows that he is willing to take a step towards change.
Ultimately, the stock market appears to have appreciated Musk’s change of pace. Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA) popped after hours, at one point rising as high as 10%. As of Thursday’s pre-market, the company’s shares were up 8.06%, trading at $325.10.
Investor's Corner
NASA taps SpaceX to launch the telescope that could unlock new worlds
NASA’s Roman Space Telescope heads to orbit this August aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy with massive scientific ambitions.
SpaceX is set to play a central role in one of NASA’s most anticipated science missions in years. The company’s Falcon Heavy rocket, currently the most powerful operational launch vehicle in the world, will carry the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into orbit on August 30 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Roman is now in final preparations inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, where on June 26 technicians used a crane to lift the observatory into a specialized stand for fueling and pre-launch testing.
Roman is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy, whose career helped shape how the agency approaches space science.
NASA chose SpaceX Falcon Heavy because of Roman’s needs to reach a specific orbit far from Earth, well beyond where a standard Falcon 9 can deliver it. The Falcon Heavy, which first flew in 2018, has since become NASA’s go-to option for missions that need serious muscle without the cost and complexity of older launch systems.
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Roman will carry a field of view at least 100 times wider than the Hubble Space Telescope, meaning it can photograph enormous swaths of the universe in a single shot rather than the narrow slices Hubble captures. That difference in scale is significant. While Hubble reshaped our understanding of the cosmos over 30 years, Roman is built to work faster and wider, surveying hundreds of millions of galaxies at once.
One of Roman’s most compelling capabilities is its potential to discover and photograph planets orbiting stars outside our solar system, and with enough precision to directly image planets that would otherwise be lost. That means scientists could study the atmosphere and surface characteristics of distant worlds rather than simply confirming they exist. Combined with Roman’s sweeping field of view, the telescope could detect thousands of exoplanets, and some of those planets may be in habitable zones where liquid water could exist. No telescope currently in operation has this level of power and capability. That capability alone could change what we know about other worlds, and perhaps finally answer the question: are we the only intelligent lifeforms in existence?
What Roman actually finds once it reaches orbit is an open question, and that is exactly what makes this launch worth watching.
Elon Musk
California snubs Tesla in its newly passed EV incentive that favors Rivian and Lucid
California passed a $135 million EV incentive that rewards Rivian and Lucid while sidelining Tesla
California just drew a line in the EV incentive sand to put Tesla on the wrong side of it. The state recently passed a $135 million program offering first-time electric vehicle buyers a direct incentive with no application required, but the rules were written in a way that leaves Tesla at a structural disadvantage compared to Rivian and Lucid.
The program caps eligible vehicles at $50,000 for new EVs and $25,000 for used ones. That pricing threshold rules out a significant portion of Tesla’s lineup, though some lower-priced Model 3 and Model Y configurations would still qualify. California-based automakers are exempt from the price cap entirely, regardless of what their vehicles cost. Rivian, headquartered in Irvine, and Lucid, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, both benefit from that exemption. Rivian’s R2 starts at roughly $45,000 but has versions above the cap. Lucid’s Air and Gravity start at $70,990 and $79,990 respectively, well above any threshold a non-California company would face.
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Tesla built its reputation and a significant portion of its early market share in California, where EV adoption has consistently led the nation. The company operates its original factory in Fremont, California, and the state was home to Tesla’s headquarters for most of its existence. That changed in 2021 when Tesla moved its corporate headquarters to Austin, Texas. Since then, the relationship between the company and California Governor Gavin Newsom has been openly adversarial, with Musk and Newsom trading public criticism on multiple occasions.
California’s EV incentive landscape has shifted repeatedly in recent years, and Tesla has previously lost eligibility for state-level programs as its vehicles exceeded income-adjusted price thresholds. The federal $7,500 EV tax credit, which Tesla models have qualified for and lost depending on policy cycles, is no longer available after it expired without renewal, making state-level programs more meaningful to buyers than they have been in years.
The practical impact for buyers is more nuanced than the headline suggests. California residents purchasing a Tesla under $50,000 for the first time can still access the incentive. But the exemption written for California-based manufacturers is a structural advantage that rewards where a company plants its headquarters flag rather than where it builds its products, and Tesla moved that flag to Texas.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s newest logo confirms everything about what it’s become
SpaceX officially absorbed xAI under the SpaceXAI brand, completing the largest private merger in history.
SpaceX made its corporate transformation official in May 2026 when Elon Musk posted on X that xAI would cease to exist as a standalone company. “xAI will be dissolved as a separate company, so it will just be SpaceXAI, the AI products from SpaceX,” he wrote.
A new SpaceXAI logo was announced today, visually embedding the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity, which can be seen as a deliberate design choice that signals the merger is not a partnership but a full absorption and XAi a core function of the same company. The same way Starlink is not a separate brand but a SpaceX product. The announcement closed the loop on a process that began February 2, 2026, when SpaceX acquired xAI in the largest private merger in history, valued at $1.25 trillion. SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion.
We are now @SpaceXAI. pic.twitter.com/ema66xDWC9
— SpaceXAI (@SpaceXAI) July 6, 2026
The reason SpaceX bought xAI was stated plainly by Musk at the time of the deal: to build orbital data centers. SpaceX had simultaneously filed with the FCC to launch up to one million satellites designed to function as AI compute nodes in low Earth orbit, escaping what Musk described as the energy constraints limiting AI development on Earth.
xAI provided the AI software stack, with Grok, the X platform, and the Colossus supercomputer infrastructure in Memphis with over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, while SpaceX provided the rockets, Starlink, and the capital base to fund it. The two companies needed each other. xAI was burning $2.5 billion in losses on $250 million in revenue. SpaceX was generating an estimated $8 billion in profit on $15 billion in revenue and needed an AI narrative to command the valuation it was targeting for its IPO.
What SpaceX has done, regardless of how the orbital AI vision ultimately plays out, is walk into a public market as something no company has been before: a rocket manufacturer, satellite internet provider, AI software company, social media platform, and supercomputer operator under one ticker. Whether that combination is worth $2 trillion depends entirely on which of those businesses you believe in most.
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