Investor's Corner
Tesla short and borderline troll celebrated for Model 3 parking lot surveillance work
It is not difficult to see that Tesla is an extremely polarizing company. Headed by a polarizing figure such as Elon Musk, it is no surprise to see the electric car maker attracting a devoted group of supporters and an equally dedicated group of critics. Among Tesla’s staunchest critics are short-sellers betting against the company, some of whom maintain an active presence on Twitter.
One of Tesla’s most prominent short-sellers on Twitter is Mark Spiegel of Stanphyl Capital, who has a heavy bet against the electric car maker. Spiegel has become a mainstay in anti-Tesla discussions, frequently posting incendiary tweets on his account and appearing on television to air his thesis about the company. One of Spiegel’s recent tweets, a screenshot of which could be found below, involves him proudly blocking a Supercharger station with his Porsche Boxster S — an act intended to inconvenience owners and incite reactions from Tesla supporters.
Just yesterday, Reuters published a report about the work being done by a number of Tesla bears. Unlike Spiegel, the subjects of the article were small-time investors who are personally betting against the company. Among these were Brodie Ferguson, a 25-year-old Canadian with a short position on TSLA, and small business owner Paul Shust, who also maintains a critical stance against the company.
Surprisingly, the Reuters report also included the work of an anonymous but self-proclaimed Tesla short, called @Latriffe, who has taken it upon himself to track the activity in Tesla’s overflow lot at the Burbank Airport. After the Q2 2018 earnings call, Latriffe announced on his Twitter account that he would be putting the Burbank Airport lot under 24/7 surveillance since he hypothesized that the mass number of vehicles being taken to the location was proof that demand for the Model 3 was declining, or that cars being produced were defective. This argument was contradicted by Tesla in the second quarter earnings call, when Tesla worldwide head of sales Robin Ren stated that demand for the electric sedan remains high.
Reuters writers Michelle Price and Sarah Lynch, who penned the article, celebrated the efforts of the Tesla short-sellers on Twitter, dubbing the piece as a “story on the fascinating world of amateur sleuthing and research on Tesla that some would say puts most Wall Street analysts to shame.” The reaction from Tesla’s supporters on the social media platform was immediate, with many calling out the writers for including the still-anonymous Latriffe as a valid source in the article. As it turns out, the TSLA bear’s interactions with Tesla’s supporters online were questionable at best.
Big thanks to @Latrilife @brodieferguson @Paul_M_Huettner and many others for sticking with me and @SarahNLynch on this story on the fascinating world of amateur sleuthing and research on Tesla that some would say puts most Wall Street analysts to shame https://t.co/WfOCsFPmaq
— Michelle Price (@michelleprice36) August 29, 2018
Tesla bull @tslalytix has compiled a number of the short-seller’s messages sent to the company’s supporters, and they are quite disturbing. Included in his posts are homophobic slurs, misogynistic messages, and sexual innuendos addressed to Tesla supporters and Elon Musk (to name a few). Tslalytix’s compilation of the short-seller’s screenshots could be accessed here, but be warned as a number of the posts include strong language. Amidst the complaints from Tesla supporters, Michelle Price clarified in a later tweet that they followed due procedure when they cleared the Tesla short as a source for the article.
Ha, I love the assumption of knowledge in this tweet accusing us of making assumptions of knowledge about anonymous Twitter accounts. For the record, we did multiple and varied checks on the one anonymous source we quote.
— Michelle Price (@michelleprice36) August 30, 2018
As Tesla approaches the final month of the third quarter, the heat surrounding the company is only bound to increase. Tesla is currently attempting to hit profitability, while hitting new production records for the Model 3. The company’s production rate during the first two months of Q3 is somewhat encouraging, particularly since Elon Musk confirmed in the Q2 earnings call that Tesla was able to hit a pace of 5,000 Model 3/week during “multiple weeks” in July. August’s production figures could be a pleasant surprise as well, as Bloomberg‘s Model 3 production tracker registered a production rate of 6,000 Model 3 per week at one point. VIN registrations are also encouraging, as Tesla passed the 100,000-vehicle mark during the month.
Being the most shorted stock in the market, it is not surprising to see the amount of vitriol directed at Tesla. That said, there are times when TSLA bears miss their mark. Last July, for example, Gordon L. Johnson, an analyst from Vertical Research Group and one of the company’s more vocal critics in Wall Street, made a grave mistake when he published a note to clients based on a fallacious report against Tesla. He later apologized to his firm’s clients about his error.
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Investor's Corner
Tesla Robotaxi gets a massive upgrade in Nevada
Nevada regulators just approved a massive expansion of Tesla’s robotaxi fleet across the entire county.
Tesla’s robotaxi footprint in Nevada just grew by roughly 500 times in a single regulatory vote.
The Nevada Transportation Authority approved Tesla’s full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit on Thursday, clearing the way for the company to deploy up to 5,000 driverless vehicles across Clark County over the next 12 months. The decision came during a four hour general session meeting that Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt watched live and reported on X, noting the vote replaces the interim order that had limited Tesla to just 10 robotaxis on a narrow stretch of the Las Vegas Strip.
EXCLUSIVE: Tesla has just officially received approval for its full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit in Nevada, clearing the way for Tesla to launch a paid public Robotaxi service in Las Vegas.
This officially allows @Tesla to deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis over the next… pic.twitter.com/DPs5UtUlrE
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 20, 2026
That earlier cap, covered here after it surfaced on August 13, came with restrictions that looked stricter than what Tesla runs in Austin: a 45 mph speed ceiling, no airport pickups, and a geofence confined to the Strip corridor. The new approval extends Tesla’s operating authority to all of Clark County, with room to request an even wider geofence across the state.
Tesla representatives at the meeting said they have no intention of putting 5,000 cars on the road right away. Commercial rides are expected to start within 30 days, pending vehicle inspections, insurance filings, and fare approval, the standard steps every robotaxi operator in Nevada has had to clear.
Tesla’s own Robotaxi account replied to the news with a short line, The golden future is upon us.
The timing lines up with Tesla’s broader robotaxi push this month. The company is preparing to open Cybercab rides to the public in Austin as soon as this month, and it opened a sweepstakes for riders to win a seat at the launch event. Tesla filed its original application for a 5,000 vehicle Nevada fleet back in June, a request regulators trimmed to 10 vehicles when they issued the interim order in July. Thursday’s vote effectively grants the number Tesla asked for from the start.
Zoox, the Amazon owned robotaxi operator, has run in Nevada since 2025 and was capped at 100 vehicles before Thursday’s decision. Tesla’s new ceiling puts it well ahead of that comparison on paper, though the company has said its actual fleet size will depend on how quickly FSD v15 rolls out, the software update executives have called the gateway to scaling unsupervised robotaxi operations nationwide.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.
Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.
The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”
Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”
Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”
Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.
Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.
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