Investor's Corner
Tesla’s Q2 2019 earnings: A look back at TSLA’s journey from Q2 2018 to the present
Tesla’s (NASDAQ:TSLA) second-quarter earnings report on Wednesday is poised to be a pivotal point for the electric car maker. While the importance of Q2 2019’s earnings cannot be emphasized enough, it is pertinent to note that just a year ago in Q2 2018, things were a lot different for Tesla. Things were, for lack of a batter term, a make or break for the company.
Tesla was at a much different place in the second quarter of 2018. Prior to Q2 2018, Tesla had failed to meet every Model 3 production forecast that it has announced. Q2 2018 already had an adjusted production target of producing 5,000 Model 3 per week, but the task had proven to be more difficult than expected. Even Q1 2018’s conservative goal, producing 2,500 Model 3 per week, was not met by the end of March 2018.
Tesla dug deep in the second quarter, breaking convention and building GA4 in the Fremont factory’s grounds. The rapid buildout only took a few weeks, and it involved CEO Elon Musk doing manual work with other Tesla employees in an attempt to set up the tent-based production line. Apart from this, Tesla also decided to fly in six airplanes’ worth of robots from Europe as part of an initiative to raise Model 3 production numbers. These measures ultimately allowed Tesla to produce 5,000 units of the electric sedan by the end of the second quarter.
The next two quarters following Q2 2018 will see Tesla’s challenges transition from what Elon Musk described as “production hell” to “delivery logistics hell.” Together with the launch of the Model 3 Performance and the Dual Motor AWD variant, Tesla’s efforts ultimately resulted in the company reaching profitability in both the third and fourth quarter. Vehicle delivery numbers also reached record levels, hitting 90,000 in Q4 2019.
Tesla did have its own set of challenges in this period, and a notable part of it was centered on CEO Elon Musk. The CEO ended up in several Twitter controversies over the past 12 months, from his rows with journalists that seemingly held notable anti-Tesla biases, to his short-lived attempt at taking Tesla private at $420 per share, to his troubles with the Security and Exchange Commission, which resulted in his departure from Tesla’s Chairman position.
Amidst all these challenges, Tesla has expanded its presence in the electric vehicle market. The company has revealed the Model Y, and Tesla has also taken the wraps off its custom Hardware 3 computer, which will be a crucial component of its future Full Self-Driving strategy. The company has also started rolling out improvements to the Model S and X, which are expected to herald even more updates to the flagship vehicles.
In the weeks leading up to Tesla’s release of its Q2 2019 vehicle production and delivery figures, TSLA stock was battered as analyst after analyst from Wall Street expressed reservations about the allegedly declining demand for the company’s vehicles. Yet, following the release of the company’s record-setting numbers, sentiments among TSLA investors have shifted for the better. Tesla has so far been on a path towards recovery in July, recovering around 14% to date following another 21% in June.
Tesla set records in Q2 2019 by producing a total of 87,048 vehicles and delivering approximately 95,200, both in the United States and in other territories such as Europe and China. This quarter’s feat was a blow to the pervading bear thesis insisting that demand for the company’s vehicles is declining. With such strong results, Wall Street is currently expecting Tesla to report an adjusted quarterly loss of $0.39 per share.
As of writing, Tesla stock is trading at +0.60% at $257.21 per share.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
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.
Tesla brings Model Y L ‘Launch Series’ to the U.S. at $61,990
Tesla just told us twice that Model Y L is coming to the U.S.
