Investor's Corner
Tesla set for ‘massive trajectory’ for Q3 deliveries fueled by September demand
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- Wedbush analyst Dan Ives says September Tesla deliveries are on pace for “massive trajectory”
- Ives reiterates “Outperform” rating; holds $1,000 price target
- Tesla on pace for 230,000 deliveries, Ives predicts
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) is set for its biggest quarter in company history, according to Wedbush analyst and $TSLA bull Daniel Ives. Ives, who has periodically put his two cents regarding Tesla stock for several years, has spoken highly of the electric automaker, giving the company credit for being the leading force in the up-and-coming “green tidal wave” that will overtake the automotive sector as a whole. Tesla’s Q3 2021 is likely to be fed in part by September demand, which Ives believes is trending toward historic levels thanks to the automaker’s ability to avoid the long and drawn-out shortage of semiconductor chips.
Ives, who currently maintains an “Outperform” rating on $TSLA stock with a price target of $1,000, said that he is confident Tesla would exceed consensus expectations, which have Q3 deliveries set at 123,000 vehicles. Ives is more convinced of Tesla hitting 230,000 deliveries in Q3, mainly fueled by a “massive trajectory” of between 145,000 to 150,000 deliveries in September alone.
“The pace of EV deliveries in the US and China have been robust the last 4-6 weeks with an eye-popping growth trajectory heading into 4Q and 2022 for Musk & Co.,” Ives wrote in a note to investors.
September may be the saving grace for Tesla in Q3, especially as Elon Musk wrote in a leaked email to Tesla employees earlier this month that Q3 has the potential to be the company’s most remarkable. The CEO told workers that this week has the potential to be the “most intense delivery week ever,” as Tesla continues to trend toward record numbers once again. Tesla has not seen a decline in sales or deliveries of its vehicles Quarter-over-Quarter since Q1 2019.
The only reason Ives believes Tesla won’t have an even bigger quarter than he expects is due to the semiconductor chip shortage. While Tesla was able to avert most of the production delays and manufacturing stoppages with the creation of its own in-house microcontrollers, there was still a negative effect on the company’s production and delivery rate in July and August, he said in the note. Ives believes Tesla would have delivered around 80,000 to 90,000 vehicles for the first two months of the quarter. Overall, Ives said that the chip shortage may have decreased the overall production and delivery number by around 40,000 units.
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Tesla’s decision to export vehicles from Shanghai to Europe earlier this month to begin sales of the Model Y crossover on the continent could have also affected the automaker’s overall outlook for Q3. Ives believes the intense and complicated logistical process may have thrown a few wrenches into Tesla’s overall growth.
Even still, as Tesla navigated through the chip shortage and handled a new logistical process with relative ease, Ives is convinced that Tesla will still report its biggest quarter when Q3 wraps up tomorrow.
Analysts at other financial firms have already listed their estimates for Tesla’s third quarter. Many analysts have expectations for around 230,000 vehicles, including Alex Potter of Piper Sandler and Credit Suisse analyst Dan Levy. The analysts estimated 233,000 and between 225,000-230,000 deliveries for Q3, respectively.
Disclosure: Joey Klender is a TSLA Shareholder.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch
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.
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’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.
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.
Elon Musk
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
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.
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.

