Investor's Corner
Tesla shareholders vote in favor of keeping Elon Musk as Chairman
Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) is keeping Elon Musk as chairman of its board. During Tesla’s 2018 Annual Shareholder Meeting, which was held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA on Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. PST, shareholders ultimately decided to allow Musk to stay as both CEO and chairman of Tesla’s board of directors.
The results of the vote come as a vote of confidence for Musk, who has battled online criticism on a heightened scale since Tesla’s first-quarter earnings call, where he refused to answer inquiries from Bernstein and RBC analysts due to the questions being “boring and boneheaded.” Apart from this, Musk also continues to battle a consistent stream of doubts about Tesla’s ability to meet its ever-elusive Model 3 production goals.
The challenge to Musk’s authority as chairman of Tesla’s board came in April, when shareholder Jing Zhao, who owns 12 shares of the company’s common stock, submitted a proposal calling for Musk’s removal from his chairman post. According to Zhao, Tesla’s growing size, as well as Musk’s commitments to SpaceX and The Boring Company, might cause “conflicts” down the road. Proxy advisers Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis supported Zhao’s proposal.
During the 2018 Annual Shareholder Meeting, however, the initiative to remove Elon Musk as Tesla’s chairman came to an unsuccessful end, as investors opted to keep the serial tech entrepreneur at the head of the company by “more than a super majority vote.”
In a report on Tuesday, analysts from Needham & Co. stated that Tesla’s Annual Shareholder Meeting would ultimately be all about the Model 3’s production ramp rates. The firm, which has a “Hold” rating on Tesla stock, also stated that it expects Model 3 production to turn profitable by 2019. Needham analysts further indicated that Tesla should see a near-term benefit as it starts delivering the Model 3 Performance, which costs $78,000 with all options except Autopilot.
“Margins and average selling price should see some near-term benefit as Tesla starts delivering the Performance version of Model 3 (fully loaded at $78K), but in order to reach the target gross margin of about 25%, the Model 3 needs to sell all configurations including the base model, which won’t come until 2019 at the earliest. Tesla should be able to generate more than $10K/car it sold, and if Model 3 ramps well in the next few quarters, its cash flow will substantially increase.” the analysts wrote, according to a Barron’s report.
Tesla is currently attempting to hit a production rate of 5,000 Model 3 per week by the end of Q2 2018. While the compact electric car’s manufacturing has had its setbacks over the past few quarters, recent reports about the Model 3 line are starting to get more positive. In May alone, Tesla registered a record 18,000 new Model 3 VINs, a number that was matched only by the company’s production of the vehicle from mid-2017 to March 2018.
A leaked email from Elon Musk further revealed that the Model 3 line is now at a consistent rate of 3,500 vehicles per week. By the end of May, reports also emerged stating that Tesla is flying in six airplanes’ worth of new robots and equipment from Europe. These robots, which are reportedly set to be installed in Gigafactory 1, are expected to address further production bottlenecks in the Model 3 battery module line.
As of writing, Tesla stock is trading up 0.16% at $291.14 per share during after-hours trading.
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.
