Investor's Corner
Tesla shares pop amid upbeat sentiment on energy business, Model 3 production
Tesla shares (NASDAQ:TSLA) are up 6.42% on Wednesday’s intraday, trading at $309.85 per share amid positive sentiments over the company’s capability to meet its Model 3 production targets for Q2 2018 and its growing energy business.
During Tesla’s recently-held 2018 Annual Shareholder Meeting, Elon Musk revealed that the Model 3 line is currently producing a steady rate of 3,500 vehicles per week. Due to a recent set of upgrades, Musk stated that Tesla would likely hit its target of producing 5,000 Model 3 per week by the end of the second quarter.
“Despite a lot of difficulties, all parts of the Model 3 production system have demonstrated a 500 car per day capability or a 3,500 per week capability. We just did a big set of upgrades, and it’s quite likely that we will achieve a 5,000 car a week (production rate) by the end of this month,” Musk said.
Apart from assuring investors that the Model 3 line is steadily approaching its production goal, Musk also discussed what could very well be the dark horse of Tesla’s ecosystem — its energy business. During the Annual Shareholder Meeting, Musk reiterated a recent report stating that the company has deployed a total of 1GWh of energy storage worldwide to date. Addressing the attendees of the meeting, Musk noted that Tesla’s energy projects would only get bigger every year.
“In less than a year from now, we will do another Gigawatt (project). The rate of stationary storage deployment is going to grow exponentially. For many years to come, each incremental year will be about as much as all the preceding years, which is a crazy, crazy growth rate,” Musk said.
The updates provided by Elon Musk and the company’s executives during the Annual Shareholder Meeting appear to have struck a note of confidence for the company’s investors. During Wednesday’s pre-market trading, Tesla stock surged almost 4%, and it only continued to rise from there.
In a recent note, Baird analyst Ben Kallo reiterated his “Outperform” rating on Tesla stock, citing the company’s positive expectations for the Model 3 and its expectation to achieve positive GAAP net income and cash flow by Q3 and Q4 2018, according to a MarketWatch report. Kallo also mentioned the re-election of three board members as a vote of confidence in Tesla’s management, adding that the company’s energy storage business is an “opportunity” that is currently “underappreciated” by some investors.
A Tesla Model 3 being assembled. [Credit: Tesla]
“While we do not model GAAP profitability for conservatism, we believe TSLA will be able to achieve sustainable operating cash flow and operating profit in the intermediate-term, which would be a significant catalyst, in our opinion. Shareholders approved the re-election of the board of directors by a significant margin, which we believe provides a vote of confidence in management,” Kallo wrote.
In an interview with CNBC News, ARK Invest analyst Sam Korus echoed Kallo’s positive sentiment about Tesla’s energy business, stating that the company’s progress in its battery technology could very well make Tesla around two years ahead of the competition.
“Everyone is so focused on the short-term, but on long-term goals, they are actually ahead of schedule. One of the biggest things that came out of yesterday was Elon Musk said that for battery cells, they could be at below $100 per kilowatt-hour by the end of this year. If you look at analyst reports just three years ago, that cost for battery cells would’ve been unheard of. This puts Tesla roughly two years ahead of the competition when it comes to battery costs and technology,” Korus said.
As of writing, Tesla shares are trading up 6.42% at $309.85 per share.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
Electric vehicle maker Lucid Group has denied rumors of an imminent bankruptcy after a report from this morning sent the stock on a dramatic drop on Wall Street, seeing losses of more than 40 percent during trading hours.
Lucid’s Director of Communications, Nick Twork, responded to the report from Eletric-Vehicles.com, which stated the company’s restructuring advisor, AlixPartners, was asked to review two decisions: taking Lucid shares private or filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The report also claims AlixPartners told the Lucid board to “concentrate on Gravity production while improving its quality, and to temporarily hold back the Lucid Air, the sedan that has defined the company since its launch.”
Twork said:
$LCID The rumors are completely false. The company has sufficient liquidity to carry its operations well into next year, as recently published in its last quarterly filings, and it has not formed any special Board committee to explore the scenarios reported today. Our focus is…
— Nick Twork (@ntwork) July 14, 2026
Shares rebounded after the response to the report, halving its losses as the trading day neared 3 p.m. Eastern.
Lucid has struggled to get its sales off the ground and into more respectable numbers, but the company is in its early years, when things are hard to begin with. It is also backed by several notable investors, including the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), which has nearly limitless money and likely would not ditch an investment of this size so soon.
Lucid shares were down just 14 percent at the time of publication, a far cry from the 55 percent its losses topped out at during the day.
Tesla received a price target upgrade just on the heels of what was a crazy successful quarter for its automotive business, as the company reported a delivery beat of over 15 percent for Q2.
Jefferies analysts are upping Tesla’s price target (NASDAQ: TSLA) to $400 from $375, while maintaining their “Hold” rating on shares, and the strong automotive deliveries from Q2 is a big reason. However, there are some other catalysts that Jefferies believes position Tesla for a strong position in the second half of the year.
Strong Deliveries
Tesla reported 480,000 deliveries for Q2, while Wall Street was between 395,000 and 405,000, as an overall consensus. It was an incredibly strong quarter from a delivery perspective, and Tesla sold well more than it produced during the three months.
Tesla crushes Wall Street expectations, beats delivery estimates by over 15 percent
While vehicle deliveries are not necessarily looked at in the light that they used to be, Tesla still maintains a lot of advantages for keeping deliveries strong. With the loss of the $7,500 EV Tax Credit last year, Tesla still maintains a strong demand case for its EVs.
Robotaxi Performance
Tesla has been operating Robotaxi for over a year now, as it launched in Austin in mid-2025. That program has expanded to Houston and Dallas, the San Francisco Bay Area, and, most recently, Miami, Florida, the suite’s first appearance in the Sunshine State.
While the Robotaxi suite is still in its early phases and Tesla is working through things like fleet size and wait times, the company has been able to undercut the pricing of its competitors and has a great safety record.
Merger Speculation with Tesla and SpaceX
This is perhaps the biggest topic that many are speaking about with Tesla and SpaceX, and it is the one thing that seems to be on the mind of every investor.
Jefferies warns that growing talk of a Tesla-SpaceX merger could cause Tesla stock to trade more like a SpaceX proxy, which may disconnect it from underlying automotive fundamentals. SpaceX has a lot going for it, especially its compute deals that have been widely publicized as of late.
Profitability in New Projects Could Take Some Time
Tesla has a few long-term ventures in the pipeline, most notably the Optimus project and Robotaxi, which is launched but will take several years to expand to a meaningful level that resonates with everyday people.
This is something that investors need to be careful of. Tesla’s projects could take some time to round out, so Jefferies advises that these may carry initial losses, rather than immediate profit. Seasoned Tesla investors have echoed something like this for a long time; they knew going in it would not be an open-and-shut strategy. It was going to take time.
These new projects are no different.
Investor's Corner
NASA taps SpaceX to launch the telescope that could unlock new worlds
NASA’s Roman Space Telescope heads to orbit this August aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy with massive scientific ambitions.
SpaceX is set to play a central role in one of NASA’s most anticipated science missions in years. The company’s Falcon Heavy rocket, currently the most powerful operational launch vehicle in the world, will carry the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into orbit on August 30 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Roman is now in final preparations inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, where on June 26 technicians used a crane to lift the observatory into a specialized stand for fueling and pre-launch testing.
Roman is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy, whose career helped shape how the agency approaches space science.
NASA chose SpaceX Falcon Heavy because of Roman’s needs to reach a specific orbit far from Earth, well beyond where a standard Falcon 9 can deliver it. The Falcon Heavy, which first flew in 2018, has since become NASA’s go-to option for missions that need serious muscle without the cost and complexity of older launch systems.
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Roman will carry a field of view at least 100 times wider than the Hubble Space Telescope, meaning it can photograph enormous swaths of the universe in a single shot rather than the narrow slices Hubble captures. That difference in scale is significant. While Hubble reshaped our understanding of the cosmos over 30 years, Roman is built to work faster and wider, surveying hundreds of millions of galaxies at once.
One of Roman’s most compelling capabilities is its potential to discover and photograph planets orbiting stars outside our solar system, and with enough precision to directly image planets that would otherwise be lost. That means scientists could study the atmosphere and surface characteristics of distant worlds rather than simply confirming they exist. Combined with Roman’s sweeping field of view, the telescope could detect thousands of exoplanets, and some of those planets may be in habitable zones where liquid water could exist. No telescope currently in operation has this level of power and capability. That capability alone could change what we know about other worlds, and perhaps finally answer the question: are we the only intelligent lifeforms in existence?
What Roman actually finds once it reaches orbit is an open question, and that is exactly what makes this launch worth watching.
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