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Investor's Corner

Tesla stock slides 9% amid reports that Elon Musk and board will meet with SEC next week

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8 years ago

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Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA) was down as much as 9%, hitting a low of $305.70 during intraday trading on Friday, amid reports that Elon Musk and the electric car maker’s board of directors are preparing to meet with the Securities and Exchange Commission as early as next week. The upcoming meeting with the SEC will reportedly be focused on how Musk announced and handled the aftermath of his tweet last week, when he stated that funding was “secured” for Tesla’s possible privatization at $420 per share.

The Tesla CEO recently admitted in an hourlong interview with the New York Times that he was getting exhausted, and that the pressure from the Model 3 ramp and attacks from TSLA short-sellers are contributing to his stress. Interspersed with Musk’s interview in the NYT piece were statements from several unnamed sources who alleged that the board had been angry at Musk over his go-private tweets, and that the board was worried about the CEO’s use of the drug Ambien. Honest and raw quotes from Elon Musk, such as his statement that “from a personal pain standpoint, the worst is yet to come” despite Tesla’s progress in its operations, painted a rather gloomy picture of the company — particularly its leader.

Tesla has had to deal with several pieces of negative news this week. Just recently, Tesla’s alleged saboteur and self-proclaimed “whistleblower” Martin Tripp published pictures of supposedly damaged Model 3 battery packs that were reportedly installed on vehicles. The photos, as well as a list of Model 3 VINs allegedly equipped with the damaged batteries, were picked up by several media outlets before Tripp decided to delete his Twitter account. Stuart D. Meissner, Tripp’s lawyer in his countersuit against Tesla, also took on another client — Karl Hansen, a former Tesla security employee at Gigafactory 1, who is also suing the electric car maker.

Hansen’s claims against Tesla rival those of Martin Tripp’s, with the former employee alleging that Tesla did not disclose the theft of $37 million worth of copper and raw materials that were stolen from Gigafactory in the first half of 2018. Hansen also accused Tesla of wiretapping and hacking employees’ computers and mobile phones. Capping off Hansen’s lawsuit was his grandest claim yet — that Tesla did not disclose to law enforcement and the US Drug Enforcement Agency that some Gigafactory employees were involved in drug trafficking. Tesla, for its part, denied Hansen’s accusations.

“Mr. Hansen’s allegations were taken very seriously when he brought them forward. Some of his claims are outright false. Others could not be corroborated, so we suggested additional investigative steps to try and validate the information he had received second-hand from a single anonymous source. Because we wanted to be sure we got this right, we made numerous attempts to engage further with Mr. Hansen to understand more about what he was claiming and the work that he did in reaching his conclusions. He rejected each of those attempts, and to date has refused to speak with the company further. It seems strange that Mr. Hansen would claim that he is concerned about something happening within the company, but then refuse to engage with the company to discuss the information that he believes he has.”

Tesla was also hit with reports alleging that the company was sending workers from GA3 home early despite not meeting the day’s production goal. UBS also claimed in a report that Tesla’s $35,000 Standard trim Model 3 would cause the company to lose $5,900 on every vehicle sold. UBS’ findings stand in stark contrast to conclusions drawn by Detroit veteran Sandy Munro, who estimated that the $35,000 base Model 3 should give Tesla a profit margin of 18% after conducting a thorough teardown of the electric sedan.

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Amidst the negativity surrounding the stock, Tesla received some votes of confidence this week. Several Wall Street analysts, including known TSLA bears, raised their price targets for the company. Auto analysts from Evercore ISI also concluded after an extensive tour of Tesla’s Fremont factory — particularly the Model 3 assembly lines — that the company should be able to hit a production rate of 8,000 Model 3 per week with very little capital expenditure. The Evercore ISI analysts further noted that Tesla is well on its way to achieving a steady weekly production rate of 5,000-6,000 Model 3 per week.

With its latest drop, Tesla shares are now down 0.9% in 2018, compared to the S&P 500’s 6% gain. As of writing, Tesla stock is trading  -8.19% at $307.97 per share. 

Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.

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Simon is an experienced automotive reporter with a passion for electric cars and clean energy. Fascinated by the world envisioned by Elon Musk, he hopes to make it to Mars (at least as a tourist) someday. For stories or tips--or even to just say a simple hello--send a message to his email, simon@teslarati.com or his handle on X, @ResidentSponge.

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner

Elon Musk sat beside Trump as AI leaders signed a voluntary White House safety accord.

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14 hours ago

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September 29, 2026

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Elon Musk had the seat right next to President Donald Trump on Tuesday as the White House hosted the leaders of America’s biggest artificial intelligence companies for a lunch that ended with a voluntary industry accord on AI safety.

A seating chart Trump posted on Truth Social placed Musk at the president’s left in the East Room, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on his right, according to an Associated Press reporter. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also attended, along with Vice President JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson.

After the lunch, Trump told reporters outside the West Wing that the executives had signed “The White House Accord on Superintelligence: A Joint Commitment on Frontier SI Responsibilities.” Johnson described it as a voluntary statement of principles built on “robust internal controls and layers of internal and external review,” while Zuckerberg said company boards would independently review reports from outside auditors. Trump called the document “morally binding,” said he would name a new AI czar within days, and signed an executive order formally renaming artificial intelligence “super intelligence,” CNBC reported.

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Musk was not in the room for Tesla alone. Since SpaceX absorbed xAI, he runs the company behind Grok and one of the largest AI training operations anywhere. On September 25, he said another 220,000 Nvidia GB300 chips would come online at Colossus 2 within a week, with more expected in November and December.

SpaceX confirms third massive compute deal at Colossus data center

 

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Musk also used the trip to restate his energy ambitions. “SpaceX is aiming together with Tesla to do 200 gigawatts of solar production per year,” he said at an event in Washington. It is the same combined target he laid out that feeds directly into Terafab, the Tesla and SpaceX chip venture that will need enormous amounts of power.

The showing between Musk and Trump has come a long way, since the two had the very public split in mid 2025 after Musk opposed the “Big Beautiful Bill” and left DOGE. They reconciled at Charlie Kirk’s memorial that September, and Trump later called their relationship “good”. Since then, Musk has joined Trump’s China delegation in May and attended last week’s White House state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping.

For Tesla, that access to government official could pay dividends. As Teslarati noted in January, federal autonomy rules, NHTSA oversight and a single national standard for driverless vehicles all run through an administration Musk can more easily reach directly as Tesla works to scale Robotaxi and Cybercab beyond Texas.

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Investor's Corner

Tesla showrooms picked clean ahead of Q3 end as demand looks strong

Published

1 day ago

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September 29, 2026

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Credit: @thaichiminh1907/X

Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) showrooms have been picked clean ahead of the end of the third quarter of the year, as demand looks to be strong and delivery estimates for new vehicles are pushed into late 2026 and early 2027.

Tesla appears to have sold out of many of its Model 3 and Model Y trim levels in the United States, as only the Model Y RWD and Model Y All-Wheel-Drive are available for delivery before the end of the year.

Additionally, many showrooms are either completely empty or void of all but just one demo unit within the buildings themselves in an effort to bolster what could be one of Tesla’s best quarters in vehicle deliveries in recent memory.

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Additionally, when I spoke to the guys at Tesla Mechanicsburg two weeks ago, when I returned the Model Y L, their third hauler of the week had just arrived, and every vehicle on it, along with every vehicle in their delivery lot, was accounted for and had a name attached to it for delivery.

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Tesla saw a 25 percent increase in deliveries in Q2 compared to the same quarter the year before. The vast majority of the 480,126 units it delivered, 467,762 vehicles to be exact, were the Model 3 and Model Y.

In Q3 2025, Tesla delivered 497,099 vehicles, once again a figure that was dominated by the company’s two mass-market vehicles. Analysts have unusually wide predictions for this quarter, likely because so many firms missed the Q2 delivery figure by such a substantial margin; Wall Street predicted 408,000 cars, while Tesla delivered 480,000.

Goldman Sachs has Tesla slotted for 435,000 deliveries in Q3, while JPMorgan said it anticipates 482,000. The median guess is about 449,000 deliveries for Q3.

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Interested in ordering a Tesla? Use my referral code for three free months of Full Self-Driving (Supervised) here.

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Elon Musk

SpaceX turned a heralding moment for Starship into its greatest

Starship reached orbit despite losing an engine, deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites on Flight 14.

Published

2 days ago

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September 28, 2026

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SpaceX’s Starship reached orbit for the first time on Monday, and for a few nail-biting minutes it looked like it wouldn’t. During ascent on Flight 14, one of Ship 41’s six Raptor engines shut down early, and SpaceX’s livestream host Dan Huot told viewers the team had decided not to commit to orbit. Minutes later, after what Huot described as a lot of conversation in the control room, the final poll came back in favor, and a roughly 19 second burn of a single Raptor pushed the ship into orbit about 170 miles up.

The reversal matters because SpaceX had written the exit ramp into the mission plan. The company said it would only fire the orbital insertion burn if flight controllers confirmed enough backup hardware remained for the deorbit burn, a condition Teslarati laid out ahead of the flight. Losing an engine was exactly the scenario that rule was built for.

Pressing forward fits Elon Musk’s history. Falcon 1 failed three straight times before its fourth launch reached orbit in 2008, with SpaceX nearly out of money, and Starship was developed by flying prototypes until they broke. What changed this year SpaceX going public, and with $SPCX sliding below its IPO price in July when Flight 13 slipped, the short interest climbed significantly, as Teslarati reported at the time. A Starship potentially lost today with revenue generating next-gen Starlink satellites aboard would have landed directly on shareholders.

That pressure showed up after orbit. SpaceX cut a flight planned to last nearly 10 hours to about three, moving splashdown from west of Chile to the North Pacific near Hawaii. SpaceX gave no reason, though Musk said this month the company was being extremely cautious about debris risk. The single Raptor for deorbit worked, and Ship 41 completed its flip and landing burn before breaking apart in the water, an outcome SpaceX expected. Musk has structured SpaceX’s governance to shield long term bets from market pressure.

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The payload is the bigger business story. Musk posted that all 26 Starlink V3 satellites deployed and are “operating nominally.” Each V3 is rated for about 1 Tbps of downlink and 160 Gbps of uplink, so this single launch adds roughly 26 Tbps, about 10 times what a Falcon 9 load of V2 Mini satellites adds. The V3 is too large for Falcon 9, making Starship the only vehicle that can build out the planned 100,000 satellite constellation, at up to 60 per flight once it reaches routine service. Unlike the 20 V3 units on Flight 13, which reentered on a suborbital path, these will raise their orbits and could begin serving customers within weeks and bring in hundreds of millions of additional dollars in projected Starlink revenue.

SpaceX has already begun winding down Falcon 9 Starlink launches from Florida in favor of Starship. Reported targets put Flight 15 as early as October 19, leaving about three weeks to diagnose Monday’s engine shutdown before the next orbital attempt.

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