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.
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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.
Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
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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
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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.
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