Investor's Corner
Tesla’s opportunities in the auto market remain intact, declares billionaire investor
Legendary investor Ron Baron is one of the most ardent supporters of Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA). During a recent segment on CNBC, the CEO, CIO and portfolio manager for Baron Capital declared that the opportunities for Tesla as a company in the auto segment are as strong as ever, despite all the volatility it has been facing over the past few months.
The present year has not been kind to Tesla stock. Since hitting $379 per share last year, the electric car maker’s stock has reached as low as $176 per share. Despite ending the second quarter with record deliveries, Tesla also reported a net loss of $408 million, translating to a loss of $2.31 per share. This was below Wall Street’s estimates, which pointed to an adjusted loss of $0.25 per share.
Yet, despite these results, Tesla also ended the second quarter with $5 billion in cash, the highest in the company’s history to date. The Model 3 remains competitive in international markets as well, and the impending operations of Gigafactory 3 in China are poised to bring the affordable versions of the electric sedan to the rapidly-growing, lucrative mainstream Chinese market.
While addressing the CNBC hosts, Baron stated that he has not sold any TSLA stock despite the turbulent nature of the company’s stock. Explaining his stance, Baron noted that Tesla is actually in a unique position in the auto industry because it is showing growth at a time when veteran carmakers are not growing. This, according to the billionaire, shows a notable opportunity for Tesla.
“The opportunity here is 90 million cars a year that are sold, and our guy is now going to sell 350-400,000 cars. Right now, they’re able to expand in a time when no one else is expanding in the automobile industry. So they’re able to build now in China with all the learnings that they’ve had in the United States. They’re building for 70% less than it would cost for the same cars to build in the United States and 30% less than it would have cost to build a year ago,” Baron said.
Baron also emphasized that Tesla is not a static target, even when veteran automakers seem to be putting serious efforts into producing and releasing premium electric cars. For Baron, part of this is due to the fact that experienced carmakers such as BMW are entrenched in the internal combustion engine. At a time when the internal combustion engine is being pushed aside by batteries and electric motors, some of these carmakers are dragging their feet in the adoption of compelling EVs, translating to an even bigger opportunity for Tesla.
“The quality of (Tesla’s) cars improve. The distances improve. The opportunity has not shrunk. In fact, the reason they have this opportunity is all these car companies have hundreds of billions of dollars invested in plants that make motors. So their business is making motors. That’s what they do. They make motors. So if your competitive advantage is you make motors better than anyone else in the world, and some guy comes along and says, ‘hey, you know what, all that stuff, all those motors you make, we don’t need them anymore,’ are you gonna drop all the motors that you’re making and go make a battery, (even though) you’re five or ten years behind? Tesla has an opportunity because other people are sort of slow walking,” Baron explained.
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Wall Street has a generally skeptical stance on Tesla as of writing. Based on 27 analysts polled by TipRanks in the last three months, seven had a “Buy” rating, 6 had a “Hold” rating, and 14 maintained a “Sell” rating. The average price target for Tesla shares currently stands at $245.62, marking an 8% upside from the current levels of TSLA stock.
Watch Ron Baron’s discussion on Tesla in the video below.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
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Cybertruck
Tesla Cybertruck production snaps back after ugly supplier fight
Cybertrucks are piling up again at Giga Texas after Tesla’s court win against a parts supplier.
Cybertruck production at Giga Texas is showing its first visible recovery since Tesla sued a supplier last month over withheld manufacturing tooling.
Aerial observer Joe Tegtmeyer flew over the Austin factory Wednesday morning and counted roughly 100 or more Cybertrucks filling the outbound lot, a sharp jump from the thin numbers seen in recent weeks. The flyover came a day after a judge granted Tesla a temporary restraining order against Angstrom Automotive Group, the parts supplier at the center of the dispute.
Tesla filed an emergency lawsuit in late July after Angstrom told the automaker it planned to close the Troy, Texas facility where Tesla’s die-cast tools, trim dies and other Cybertruck stamping equipment were housed. According to Tesla’s complaint, a shipment of 700 finished parts never left the building, and when Tesla sent representatives to retrieve its equipment, accompanied by law enforcement, they were turned away. Angstrom allegedly then asked for an extra $250,000 a week to keep operating, which Tesla’s filing described as holding its own property for ransom.
TESLA: U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Wolfe of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Waco Division granted Tesla a Temporary Restraining Order and Writ of Replevin in its dispute with Angstrom Automotive (Case No. 6:26-cv-00477).
The order authorizes… https://t.co/E1DKcQSxMn pic.twitter.com/LR8aAiV2Og
— S.E. Robinson, Jr. (@SERobinsonJr) August 5, 2026
The restraining order gives Tesla immediate right of entry to Angstrom’s facility to recover the tooling. It is temporary, with a fuller hearing still to come, but the speed of Wednesday’s rebound suggests the Angstrom shortage was indeed the main bottleneck limiting Cybertruck output. Outbound lot counts are an imperfect measure of actual production, since finished trucks can sit for days before shipping, but a lot that full after a lean stretch is a meaningful signal.
Cybertruck output at Giga Texas has fluctuated all year as Tesla worked through supply issues and introduced new trims, including a cheaper Dual Motor AWD version that drew strong early demand.
Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya has cautioned investors shorting SpaceX shares, drawing a direct parallel to the intense short-selling pressure Tesla faced in its early public years.
Responding to reports of elevated short interest in the newly public rocket, satellite, and AI company, Palihapitiya noted that similar dynamics played out with Tesla, where aggressive short sellers ultimately “went broke.”
SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) went public on June 12, 2026, in the largest IPO on record, pricing at $135 per share. Shares quickly surged to an all-time high of $225.64 just days later, briefly implying a valuation exceeding $2 trillion. The stock has since retreated sharply amid valuation concerns, lockup expiration fears, and broader market dynamics.
By early August, it traded near $108–$125, representing a roughly 50 percent decline from the peak and bringing the market capitalization closer to the $1.5–1.7 trillion range. On August 4, shares closed up more than 9 percent at $125.33 ahead of earnings before facing pressure in after-hours and premarket trading.
Short interest has climbed dramatically. According to S3 Partners data widely cited in market reports, short positions reached approximately 219.3 million shares by late July, about 34 percent of the limited public float of roughly 640 million shares, and represented a notional value of around $24.6 billion.
Utilization of shares available to borrow hit 95 percent, with borrow fees rising. This level of shorting exceeded the dollar value of short bets against Tesla at the time and built rapidly ahead of two catalysts: the company’s first post-IPO earnings and an August 6 lockup expiration that could free up to 911.5 million additional shares.
CEO Elon Musk has issued warnings of his own. In mid-July, as short interest approached one-third of the float, he posted that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” reiterating his view that the company could ultimately be worth more than Earth if it achieves its goals.
On August 4, just before earnings, Musk responded to the latest short-interest data by saying, “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
SpaceX delivered its first quarterly results as a public company after the close on August 4. Second-quarter revenue rose 92 percent year-over-year to $7.8 billion, beating consensus estimates near $6.8–6.9 billion.
The net loss narrowed to $541 million, or 9 cents per share, better than the roughly 23–24 cent loss expected. Starlink/connectivity contributed about $4.3 billion (up 66 percent), while the AI business generated $2.6 billion (up roughly 250 percent). Capital expenditures were heavy at $18.4 billion, largely tied to AI infrastructure. Management projected a $100 billion annualized revenue run rate by year-end 2026 and outlined a path toward $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030.
The combination of Chamath’s historical reminder, Musk’s repeated alerts, and the company’s ambitious growth targets underscores the high-stakes debate surrounding SPCX. Short sellers are positioned for near-term supply pressure from the lockup, while long-term bulls point to Starlink scale, Starship progress, and AI compute expansion as reasons the bears may ultimately face the same fate as many early Tesla skeptics.
Investor's Corner
SpaceX and Nvidia team up on Musk’s orbital AI bet
SpaceX revealed a new Nvidia satellite partnership, then Musk pledged an exclusive Nvidia hardware commitment.
SpaceX and Nvidia are now working together on the hardware that will power Musk’s orbital data center ambitions. SpaceX announced on X on Tuesday that it is partnering with Nvidia to design the compute payload for Starmind AI1, the first satellite in a planned constellation built to run AI workloads directly in orbit. Each Starmind satellite will carry Nvidia’s Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs, according to the post, which included renderings of the payload design.
The announcement landed hours before SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company, where Musk went further, saying the company has committed to building its AI infrastructure exclusively on Nvidia hardware. “We think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture. We think it’s the best AI computer, and we greatly value our close cooperation and partnership on many levels with Nvidia,” Musk told investors on the call,. “So we’re exclusive to Nvidia.”
Musk said SpaceX plans to deploy Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 rackscale system, codenamed Kyber, both on the ground and in space. He set a target of 2 gigawatts of compute capacity online by the end of this year, scaling to roughly 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
Starmind has been in development since Musk confirmed the name in June, following an xAI trademark filing that tipped off the project before SpaceX made it official. The idea is massive in scope and instead of moving data down to ground based servers, satellites equipped with onboard processors and large solar arrays would compute AI workloads in orbit and beam results back to Earth. SpaceX has already filed with the FCC for a constellation of up to one million satellites to support the effort, citing constant solar power and the absence of zoning restrictions as advantages over terrestrial data centers.
The Nvidia exclusivity marks a shift in tone from just two weeks ago, when Musk was busy knocking down a report that SpaceX had ordered $52 billion worth of Nvidia GPUs through Foxconn, calling it fake news at the time. The dollar figure in that rumor may have been wrong, but the underlying direction seems correct. SpaceX’s AI division already leases Colossus compute capacity to Anthropic and Google, and Tuesday’s earnings report showed AI revenue climbing sharply as those deals ramp up.
Nvidia shares rose roughly 3% in Tuesday trading on the news, while SpaceX stock climbed nearly 9% during the day before giving back gains after hours as investors digested the earnings report’s capital spending figures.
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Tesla Cybertruck production snaps back after ugly supplier fight
