Investor's Corner
Tesla will start being profitable by September, says Wall St veteran Gene Munster
Wall Street analyst Gene Munster from Loup Ventures has issued his expectations for Tesla’s (NASDAQ:TSLA) financial performance this coming quarter, stating that the Elon Musk-led company will start being profitable by September 2018.
In a statement to CNBC‘s Fast Money, Munster stated that Tesla would probably not be “wildly profitable” by September, but Elon Musk’s 6,000/week target for the Model 3 would move the company’s finances towards positive territories.
“This 5,000 production number was the first time in about nine months he’s gotten one right. I think it’s safe to always dial back what he’s saying, that’s why we think Tesla’s going to meet the production number by the end of the September quarter. If they hit that number, it’s going to equate to 48,000 model 3s produced in the September quarter. That should get them to profitability, slightly profitable. It’s not going to be wildly profitable in September; I just want to warn everyone, but it moves them in the right direction.”
Tesla’s production blitz at the final week of Q2 2018 resulted in the electric car and energy company reaching its all-elusive goal of producing 5,000 Model 3 in a single week. Despite accomplishing its Model 3 targets and exhibiting a 55% growth in production compared to Q2 2017, however, Tesla stock took a nosedive on Monday, ending the day down 2.30% and trading at $335.07.
Part of the reason behind the dip in the company’s stocks were negative reports from some Wall Street analysts including CFRA’s Efraim Levy, who downgraded his rating of Tesla stock from Hold to Sell. The CFRA analyst stated that the company would likely be unable to sustain its production rate for the Model 3. Levy also criticized Tesla’s long-implemented $2,500 deposit for the compact electric car as an “aggressive attempt to meet otherwise difficult targets of being cash flow positive in Q3.”
Other Wall Street analysts, however, had far different outlooks. Apart from Gene Munster, Guggenheim Securities analyst Rob Cihra released a favorable Q3 forecast for Tesla, reiterating his Buy rating for the company’s stocks. According to Cihra, Tesla’s story as it heads for the second half of 2018 is one of leverage, as the company starts absorbing more of its fixed cost of production and expanding its margins. The Guggenheim Securities analyst also noted stated that Tesla’s in-house development of the vehicles’ components would prove to be a difference-maker.
“Tesla reaffirmed its guide for positive GAAP net income and cash flow in Q3 and Q4, which is in line with our estimates, but we believe much more optimistic than many investors continue to assume. Yet while six months later than initially projected, we continue to estimate that with Tesla now hitting its 5K/week production bogey for Model 3, that sets up prospects for the company’s overall economic model to flip from sizeable cash-burn in 1H18E to profitability in 2H18E.
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“With just small tweaks post Q2 deliveries, our EPS estimates continue to be >$10 in 2019E and >$18 in 2020E, remaining well above consensus. Because Tesla makes so much of its cars in-house, we believe its proportion of FIXED cost/vehicle are particularly high (driving losses and cash-burn today) but with the flip-side then being that as Model 3 volumes now ramp, their fixed-cost absorption should make Tesla’s LEVERAGE that much higher,” Cihra wrote, according to a Barron’s report.
Guggenheim Securities expects Tesla’s total vehicle production to hit 58,000 this coming quarter, followed by 67,000 in Q4 2018.
Tesla is currently attempting to achieve profitability by Q3 or Q4 2018. Responding to a report from The Economist alleging that Tesla would do a capital raise this year, Elon Musk declared that the company would start being profitable by the third or fourth quarter. Musk doubled down on profitability in the company’s Q1 2018 earnings call, when he stated that it was “high time” for Tesla to become profitable. In order to accomplish this, Tesla has adopted a series of strategies, including trimming 9% of its workforce and opening orders for the higher-priced variants of the Model 3.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
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.
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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.
SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) got an absolutely crazy price target rating from Raymond James after the company experienced a tough first few weeks following its Initial Public Offering (IPO).
Despite the tumultuous start, SpaceX has plenty of believers, and the company’s massively successful Starship launch last Friday, its 13th test flight of the massive rocket, went so smoothly that Raymond James analysts pushed its price target on the company to roughly 7 times its current trading level.
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
The firm officially put a “Strong Buy” rating and an $800 price target on the stock. It currently trades at around $113. Its all-time high is $225.64, reaching this trading level shortly after shares first went public.
Raymond James’ price target is tied to the firm’s confidence after Starship’s 13th test flight. Analysts at the firm said it was an incremental step that reduces engineering risks, citing the widely successful heat shield test that CEO Elon Musk recently detailed, the smooth deployment of Starlink V3 satellites, and a successful in-space engine relight.
SpaceX also managed to see Starship splash down safely in the Indian Ocean, while the Super Heavy Booster fell down to the Gulf of America with no incidents.
It is interesting to see these launches have such a tremendous impact on the stock and what investors think of it. After SpaceX initially delayed the Starship launch last week, shares fell tremendously. Most probably did not realize that the stand-down is a standard practice, especially if everything is not perfect.
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The mission was initially aborted due to an issue with Raptor engines. This was resolved, and Starship launched last Friday after another delay on Thursday, which was caused by weather.
Now that analysts have seen what SpaceX launches are capable of and how impressive the feat is, firms are adjusting their price targets accordingly, making it known that they have high expectations for the space exploration company.
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.
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
Elon Musk sheds two new bits of detail on Starship after 13th test launch
