Investor's Corner
Tesla gets ‘Strong Buy’ rating amid Panasonic’s pledge to ramp Gigafactory 1 battery production
Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA) recently received a vote of confidence from one of Wall Street’s veteran investment research firms. In a note on Tuesday, Zacks Investment Research upgraded Tesla from a “Hold” rating to a “Strong Buy” rating, citing the electric car maker’s strong performance in the third quarter. The research firm also gave TSLA a price target of $381, suggesting an upside of around 13% from the stock’s current price.
In its note to its clients, Zacks Investment Research pointed out that Tesla’s third-quarter figures show that the company is making progress despite meeting several challenges over the past quarters. The research firm further noted that Tesla’s upcoming focus on its energy business bodes well for the company’s potential in the future.
“In third-quarter 2018, Tesla’s earnings per share and revenues surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimates. Also, both earnings and revenues improved year over year. In third-quarter 2018, Tesla produced 80,142 vehicles. This included 53,239 Model 3s, and 26,903 Model S and Model X vehicles. Deliveries to customers amounted to 55,840 Model 3 along with 27,660 Model S and X.
“These numbers are close to estimates and indicate that the company is making good progress despite hurdles. The company is focusing to grow its energy storage deployment and aims to deploy at least three times of what is deployed in 2017. Over the past six months, shares of Tesla outperformed the industry it belongs to. Moreover, over the past one month, the Zacks Consensus Estimates for both the current quarter and current year earnings are moving upwards.”
An upgrade from Zacks Investment Research bodes well for Tesla stock. The research firm, after all, utilizes a quantitative stock-rating system, which relies entirely on mathematics. This means that the company’s findings and conclusions are unaffected by headwinds in Wall Street or any similar external factor. This approach has made Zacks the research firm of choice for over 200 brokerages, as well as numerous Wall Street analysts.
Tesla’s upgraded rating from Zacks comes amidst reports that Panasonic Corp has pledged to ramp the production of its battery cells at Tesla’s Gigafactory 1 in Nevada. In an announcement on Wednesday, Panasonic reported a decline in its quarterly profit due to the rising costs of its operations in the Gigafactory. Despite this, the Japanese company stated that it was in talks to augment its $1.6 billion investment and take capacity at Gigafactory 1 over the 35 GWh it is expected to reach by the end of March 2019.
In a statement to Reuters, Panasonic Chief Executive Kazuhiro Tsuga stated that as Tesla ramps its vehicle production, the battery maker will ramp battery production as well. The Panasonic executive further noted that while Elon Musk attracts a substantial amount of noise due to his behavior online, Tesla’s fundamentals seem to be stable.
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“Investment for capacity beyond 35 GWh means that Tesla would also need to make substantial investment in vehicle production, so we will closely align with each other. Though Elon’s comments are unpredictable, we will continue to monitor Tesla’s operations to ensure no chaos there and will work in step with the company. But I don’t see the U.S. electric car maker’s business operations have been put into chaos,” Tsuga said.
Since ending the third quarter on a high note, Tesla appears to have hit overdrive with its Model 3 production ramp. In October alone, for example, Tesla registered more than 61,000 Model 3 VINs — equal to the total VINs the company filed during the first 11 months of the electric car’s production. Tesla has also introduced a new Mid Range Model 3 variant this month, which puts the electric sedan closer to its target $35,000 base price.
As of writing, Tesla stock is trading +2.02% at $336.53 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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SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.
The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.
Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.
The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.
As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.
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Elon Musk
Tesla AI boss reveals how big Optimus is going to get
Tesla’s Optimus chief corrected himself on X, confirming a staggering 10 million robot production target.
![Tesla Optimus Gen 3 [Credit: Tesla]](https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/tesla-optimus-gen3-diner.jpg)
Tesla’s Optimus program has a new number attached to it, after Ashok Elluswamy, the executive who has run the humanoid robot program since June 2025, posted a three word correction on X Thursday, “Correction, 10 million robots.”
The line clarifies the long term annual capacity Tesla is building toward its planned second Optimus production line at Gigafactory Texas, a figure Musk has cited repeatedly since last year’s shareholder meeting.
The scale is worth noting, because ten million robots a year would mean Tesla building more units annually than most countries sell in new cars. Tesla has framed this as a second line, not the first. The buildout is happening in two phases: a roughly one million unit per year line inside Tesla’s Fremont factory, installed on the floor space vacated when Model S and Model X production ended earlier this year, and a much larger dedicated facility under construction at Giga Texas that broke ground on its first steel structure in May. That Texas facility is the one Elluswamy’s correction refers to, and is expected to reach volume production sometime in 2027.
Correction, 10 million robots https://t.co/0z4nyQNTzp
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) July 30, 2026
Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress
Elluswamy took over Optimus from Milan Kovac last summer and has spent the months since talking up the program’s trajectory. Elon Musk has also floated the ten million figure at Tesla’s 2025 shareholder meeting.
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Ending Model S and Model X production to make room for the first Optimus line was one of the more consequential manufacturing decisions in the company’s recent history, retiring two flagship vehicles in favor of a robot that has yet to enter mass production. Musk has previously estimated per unit production costs at $20,000 to $25,000 once Tesla reaches a million units a year, though he hasn’t said what that cost looks like at ten times the volume.
SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.
The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.
SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters
Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.
SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.
With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.
Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.
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Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.
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