Investor's Corner
Tesla (TSLA) gets more bullish outlook from Wall St. amid go-private initiative
Wall Street analysts covering Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) are starting to show a more bullish outlook towards the electric car maker. Since Tesla posted its Q2 financial results on August 1, analysts have upped their earnings estimates for the company, taking forecasts for 2019 up by more than 68%.
Mott Capital Management founder Michael Kramer notes that the improving outlook among Wall St. analysts comes as Tesla continues the production ramp of the Model 3. In the company’s Q2 earnings call, Elon Musk noted that Tesla was able to sustain the Model 3’s 5,000/week production rate during “multiple weeks” in July. Encouraging signs about the Model 3 ramp continued to emerge this week as well, after Tesla registered more than 16,000 new VINs for the electric car in a seven-day period. Bloomberg‘s Model 3 tracker, which has gotten more accurate over the past few months, also estimates the production of the vehicle to be at over 5,800 per week.
After August 1, analysts have narrowed their losses for the company in 2018 from $6.79 to $5.85. Revenue estimates for the full year were also revised higher by 4%, and are now seen rising by almost 74% versus the past year to $20.5 billion. Revenue estimates before August 1 among Wall St. analysts were at $19.5 billion. Apart from this, earnings estimates from Wall St. became more bullish since August started, with analysts now forecasting earnings to rise by more than 68% to $2.83 from $1.73. This signified the first time that analysts upped their forecast for next year.
While Wall St. analysts still believe that Tesla stock may be currently overvalued, the average price target for the company has been raised to $321.40, which is roughly 10% below the current price of the stock. This represents a nearly 13% average price increase since the end of July. Kramer noted that among 28 analysts covering Tesla, 32% currently have a Buy or Outperform rating on the company, while 36% have a Sell or Underperform rating. Among these is Oppenheimer analyst Colin Rusch, who upgraded Tesla from Perform to Outperform and set a price target of $385 after the company’s Q2 earnings call.
“While we have been cautious on Model 3 ramp, we believe gross-margin performance on Model 3 will carry the stock over the next 12 months,. With higher volumes and slower spending, we believe Tesla has reached a critical inflection point in its development,” Rusch wrote in a report to clients.
Tesla stock continues to be a battleground between the company’s supporters and critics. Since Elon Musk dropped a bombshell announcement last week about the possibility of Tesla going private, the company’s stock has proven to be volatile. After Musk’s announcement last Tuesday, TSLA ended the day at $379.58 per share. Tesla stock has since dropped back to the $350 range, ending Monday at $356.41 per share, despite Elon Musk releasing a follow-up blog post explaining why he announced that funding for Tesla’s privatization had been “secured.”
Amidst the controversy surrounding Musk’s announcement, fellow billionaire Mark Cuban, who owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, expressed his support for Musk. In an interview with CNBC, Cuban noted that Musk’s unorthodox business decisions, as well as his eccentric behavior, are things that contribute to Tesla’s potential.
“When you invest in an entrepreneur, you get the personality. This is a guy who is sleeping in the factory. This is a guy who is pushing, pushing, pushing. I would tell shareholders ‘be grateful that you have somebody that committed to the company,’ and recognize that being unique is what has helped make Tesla so successful,” Cuban said.
Tesla has formed a special committee to evaluate proposals for the company’s privatization. The committee, comprised of Brad Buss, Robyn Denholm and Linda Johnson Rice, who are independent directors, has noted that it is waiting to receive a formal proposal from Elon Musk as of Tuesday morning.
As of writing, Tesla stock is trading at -1.06% at $352.90 per share.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
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.
Tesla Robotaxi gets a massive upgrade in Nevada
Tesla admits to slow Model Y Robotaxi integration, but for a good reason
