Investor's Corner
Journalist in Twitter scuffle with Tesla’s Elon Musk spills details to CNBC
A journalist who recently caught the ire of CEO Elon Musk on Twitter defended her coverage in a recent interview. During a segment on CNBC‘s Halftime Report, Business Insider senior finance correspondent Linette Lopez told her side of the story, confirming that former Tesla employee and alleged saboteur Martin Tripp did provide her with information, and denying any financial connections with noted Tesla short-seller Jim Chanos.
“It’s up to shareholders to decide whether or the CEO of a $50 million (sic) company should spend his time yelling at reporters on Twitter. What my reporting indicates is that the mission of Tesla is not really quite in line with the manufacturing of Tesla. Elon Musk has, for years, a high-quality car that is environmentally-friendly and what we’re seeing coming out of both Tesla factories is not exactly that,” Lopez said.
Lopez was joined in her segment in CNBC‘s Halftime Report by Bethany McLean of Vanity Fair and Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenberg. McLean, who is noted as one of the reporters who was involved in the Enron investigations, stated that Musk’s actions against Lopez on Twitter are uncharacteristic of a CEO that is confident of his company’s numbers. McLean also commended the Business Insider reporter for following her story.
“I think Musk should be ashamed of himself and shareholders should think about running for the hills. Given the ugliness on Twitter where somebody like Elon Musk starts to lead a pack and the pack takes that as an excuse to behave in an extremely ugly manner, and I think that brings out the worst in human nature. Even if you’re right and you’re on to something, it’s pretty hard to sit on the other side of that and not have it get to you. So, I commend Linette for her courage,” McLean said.
Ultimately, the Business Insider correspondent concluded that she would continue covering the electric car maker in her reports. Lopez also noted that she still has sources, and she still has stories to tell.
“Of course, there’s no question. I will continue to cover Tesla. I will continue to work very hard. I am not out of sourcing, and I am not out of stories,” Lopez said.
Linette Lopez has been covering Tesla for a while now, and a good number of her articles are pointedly negative. Articles such as “Elon Musk doesn’t care about you” and “Internal documents reveal Tesla is blowing through an insane amount of raw material and cash to make Model 3s, and production is still a nightmare,” after all, invoke an air of subjectivity. Her favorable articles featuring Tesla’s most notable short-seller, Jim Chanos, also gives an impression that she already has a clear stance on Tesla.
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Nevertheless, McLean’s statements about Twitter bringing out the ugly side of human beings is pretty much on target as well. Some members of the online community, after all, have resorted to below-the-belt attacks on Lopez, and that is not okay. Musk is no stranger to online hate, either, as proven by the criticism he received after his team built a mini-submarine for the stranded Wild Boar soccer team in Thailand. Musk received a lot of flak for allegedly being a “narcissist” and attempting to take credit away from the divers who rescued the children and their coach. Recent Twitter updates by Musk, however, proved that the team conducting the rescue operations were in active communication with the Tesla CEO. Social media posts from Thailand also confirmed that they appreciated Musk and his team’s efforts to help (the minisub is now part of the country’s rescue equipment), but the vitriol is still there.
Ultimately, if there is one thing that Musk could to silence his critics and prove members of the media like Lopez and McClean wrong, it would be through Tesla’s numbers in the quarters and years to come. If the numbers at the end of Q2 2018 and its recent strategies with the Model 3, such as its new test drive program and its 5-minute Sign & Drive delivery process are any indication, it seems like Tesla is now actively fighting critics with its results. With Tesla expecting China’s Gigafactory 3 to begin vehicle production within two years of the facility’s construction, the time might soon come when Elon Musk would just have to sit back and let his company’s numbers do the talking.
Watch a part of Linette Lopez’s segment in CNBC‘s Halftime Report in the video below.
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.
Tesla short sellers won big following the company’s massive fall on Wall Street after it reported subpar Earnings on Wednesday.
Tesla short sellers collected about $4.12 billion in single-day profits on Thursday, according to Bloomberg. Shares fell as much as 15 percent during Thursday’s session. It closed as one of the worst days for Tesla on Wall Street in the past three years.
Investors sold off the stock after Tesla said it would aggressively direct its spending toward AI and its Optimus robot project. The company had record revenues, which were driven by one of the strongest quarters in terms of vehicle deliveries in company history.
However, it missed EPS estimates by reporting just $0.33, a far cry from the $0.53 analysts expected.
S3 Partners reported that about 3 percent of Tesla’s outstanding stock is sold short. Managing Director at S3, Ihor Dusaniwsky, provided the short seller’s potential profit, as well as another figure: shorts have likely had paper gains of $8.92 billion this year, as Tesla shares are down 30 percent in 2026.
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Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla has burned short sellers many times in the past, but the company’s latest Earnings Call was a chance for those skeptics to taste some payback. Although the company gave some very transparent information regarding future projects, the rollout of Robotaxi, Optimus, and Semi, many investors took their profits on Thursday.
Notable short sellers like Michael Burry have been transparent about their skepticism around Tesla shares. Burry just revealed three weeks ago that he had opened up a new short on the stock, stating he shorted Tesla shares at $416.22. “Happy it jumped back to this level,” he said in a blog post.
At the time of publication, Tesla shares were down about 3 percent and the stock was trading at $309.92.
Tesla stock (NASDAQ: TSLA) endured one of its sharpest single-day declines in years on July 23, tumbling approximately 14.5 percent and closing near $320 after opening the session around $374. The drop erased more than $140 billion in market value amid heavy trading volume and left the shares at multi-week lows.
The sell-off followed the company’s second-quarter 2026 results, released the previous evening. Tesla reported record revenue of $28.2 billion, up 26 percent year over year, driven by a Q2-record 480,126 vehicle deliveries. Energy storage deployments also rose strongly.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Yet profitability disappointed sharply. Operating income fell 57 percent to $398 million, compressing the operating margin to just 1.4 percent. Non-GAAP earnings per share came in at $0.33, well below the roughly $0.53 analysts had expected. Free cash flow turned negative by $1.1 billion as capital expenditures surged 142 percent to $5.8 billion, largely tied to accelerated spending on artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous systems.
The losses on capex were expected, as Tesla said it would be spending heavily in 2026.
Investors also reacted to lingering uncertainty surrounding key product timelines. During the Earnings Call, management reiterated ambitions for Robotaxi deployment and the Optimus humanoid robot, but offered limited new concrete milestones, renewing questions about execution pace that have long accompanied Tesla’s ambitious roadmap.
The magnitude of the decline places it among Tesla’s more severe one-day percentage losses since its 2010 initial public offering. Historically, the two largest single-day drops (split-adjusted) remain September 8, 2020, when shares fell 21.1 percent amid broader market volatility and valuation concerns, and January 13, 2012, with a 19.3 percent plunge during the company’s early growth struggles.
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Other notable declines include an 18.6 percent drop on March 16, 2020, at the onset of pandemic-related market turmoil. Thursday’s move ranks roughly ninth on the all-time list but stands out as the steepest in more than a year.
Despite the short-term pain, Tesla’s long-term trajectory has repeatedly recovered from such volatility. The latest results underscore both the strength of its core automotive and energy businesses and the near-term costs of heavy investment in next-generation technologies.
SpaceX wants to catch Starship for launch 14, Elon Musk says
Tesla to open source Model S and Model X designs and software
