Investor's Corner
Tesla’s Elon Musk calls for an end to TSLA’s end-of-quarter vehicle delivery blitzes
Over the years, it has practically become a tradition for Tesla to engage in a massive “end-of-quarter push” that involves the company working double time in an effort to deliver as many vehicles to as many customers as possible. This, at least according to CEO Elon Musk, must change, as Tesla must come up with a way to reduce the size of its delivery wave in the final weeks of a quarter. By doing so, the company could save on costs, and employees would be saved from burnout.
Musk’s statements about Tesla’s end-of-quarter vehicle delivery blitzes were shared in an email, a screenshot of which was recently shared on Twitter. As per the message, Musk noted that the current quarter is all about minimizing the cost of vehicle deliveries. Thus, it would make sense if the company could avoid spending heavily on expedite fees, overtime, and temporary contractors, just to have everyone burned out at the beginning of the next quarter. The final line of the email is quite notable, as Tesla’s end-of-quarter pushes have partly been done to meet the market’s quarterly expectations.
Here's the full text of @elonmusk's email sent to Tesla employees last night.
Elon making moves to decrease size of end-of-quarter delivery wave. Less attention given to quarterly earnings now that Tesla has been killing it every quarter.
via @DriveTesla1 pic.twitter.com/FpEnqDRqCl
— Dave Lee (@heydave7) November 27, 2021
The following is Musk’s email:
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Per my email several weeks ago, our focus this quarter should be on minimizing *cost* of deliveries, rather than spending heavily on expedite fees, overtime, and temporary contractors just so that cars arrive in Q4.
What has happened historically is that we sprint like crazy at end of quarter to maximize deliveries, but then deliveries drop massively in the first few weeks of the quarter. In effect, looked at over a six month period, we won’t have delivered any extra cars, but we would have spent a lot of extra money and burned ourselves out to accelerate deliveries in the last two weeks of each quarter!
We will still have quite a big wave of deliveries in the last few weeks of December, as we don’t yet have high volume production in Europe or Texas, which means a lot of cars on boats from China to Europe and on trucks/rail from California to the east coast arriving late in the quarter, but this is nonetheless the right time to start reducing the size of the wave in favor of a steadier and more efficient pace of deliveries. The right principle is: take the most efficient action, as though we were not publicly traded and the notion of “end of quarter” didn’t exist.
Thanks,
Elon
#Denver @tesla dominated deliveries this week. Unconfirmed reports of 200+ cars delivered both Friday, Saturday alone. Along side Tesla were 30 volunteers providing 40+ hours helping deliver and teach new owners, including a new #Model3 for @kimbal. Props to @elonmusk and team! pic.twitter.com/bmIaCZQNdg
— Sean Mitchell (@seanmmitchell) September 30, 2018
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The Tesla CEO’s thesis on his message makes quite a lot of sense, especially considering the lengths that the company and its employees have gone through during the final weeks of every quarter. It was not rare in the past to have practically the entire workforce of Tesla working on vehicle deliveries, and in areas such as the United States and China, even regular owners have stepped in to help the company deliver as many electric cars as possible.
In Q3 2018, for example, Tesla volunteers across the United States helped with the company’s end-of-quarter push, aiding new owners by helping them download the Tesla mobile app and answering questions about their new vehicles. In Denver alone, some Tesla owners volunteered and provided over 40 hours of their personal time to help out. The same was true for China, as experienced owners also made it a point to aid newcomers with their electric cars’ features.
But while community-driven initiatives are admirable, Tesla has reached a point and volume where the company must focus intently on efficiency. Relying on end-of-quarter blitzes with millions of vehicles to be delivered would likely not be sustainable, after all, As Musk noted, this would involve the creation of a steadier and more efficient pace of vehicle deliveries. Such should be more plausible in the coming months, especially as Tesla starts operations in Gigafactory Berlin and Giga Texas.
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Elon Musk
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
SpaceX’s Starship flew successfully Friday, landing both stages and deploying its first Starlink V3 satellites.
Starship’s thirteenth test flight delivered exactly what SpaceX needed with a clean liftoff, two successful stage recoveries, and the first real payload the vehicle has ever carried to space. Booster 20 and Ship 40 lifted off at 5:51 p.m. CT from Starbase, and by the time the mission wrapped roughly an hour later, both halves of the rocket had done exactly what they were supposed to do.
Booster 20 separated from Ship 40 a few minutes into the flight and stuck a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about six minutes after liftoff. That is a meaningful turnaround from Flight 12 in May, when the booster lost several engines during its boostback burn before a hard water landing attempt.
Starship as seen from Starlink satellites pic.twitter.com/e2hvfmnewh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2026
Starship 40’s performance was arguably the bigger win. The vehicle deployed the first 20 operational Starlink V3 satellites Starship has ever carried, then flew a suborbital arc to a landing in the Indian Ocean that SpaceX commentator Dan Huot called the company’s softest splashdown yet. “This is a dream scenario for this team that’s trying to get this heat shield data,” Huot said on the live broadcast, according to Space.com’s live coverage. “I’m a little over the moon right now. Wow. Lucky number 13.”
Unlike the mass simulators SpaceX flew on Flight 12, these were production Starlink V3 satellites, meant to extend solar arrays and antennas and attempt to link with the broader constellation before reentering minutes later. Getting real hardware through a full deploy sequence on only the second flight of the V3 generation keeps Starship on schedule for the payload work NASA is counting on for future Artemis lunar landings.
What an awesome launch, really seems like everything went super well and it was all incredibly smooth.
SpaceX is awesome. Very interested to see how the market will respond on Monday pic.twitter.com/KSHmyBfV55
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 25, 2026
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— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 25, 2026
The flight also arrives at a moment when SpaceX needed a win. SPCX has traded below its $135 IPO price since mid-July, as Teslarati reported when the mission slipped to Friday, and short interest has climbed to roughly a third of the tradable float. A clean flight will not fix a balance sheet, but it does answer the one question SpaceX absolutely needed answered this week: whether the fixes made after the July 16 abort would hold up under real flight conditions. They did, on both stages, on the first try after the redesign.
SpaceX has not set a target date for Flight 14, though the company has said it wants to push toward an orbital attempt on the next mission. After Friday, that goal looks a lot more within reach.
Tesla short sellers won big following the company’s massive fall on Wall Street after it reported subpar Earnings on Wednesday.
Tesla short sellers collected about $4.12 billion in single-day profits on Thursday, according to Bloomberg. Shares fell as much as 15 percent during Thursday’s session. It closed as one of the worst days for Tesla on Wall Street in the past three years.
Investors sold off the stock after Tesla said it would aggressively direct its spending toward AI and its Optimus robot project. The company had record revenues, which were driven by one of the strongest quarters in terms of vehicle deliveries in company history.
However, it missed EPS estimates by reporting just $0.33, a far cry from the $0.53 analysts expected.
S3 Partners reported that about 3 percent of Tesla’s outstanding stock is sold short. Managing Director at S3, Ihor Dusaniwsky, provided the short seller’s potential profit, as well as another figure: shorts have likely had paper gains of $8.92 billion this year, as Tesla shares are down 30 percent in 2026.
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Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla has burned short sellers many times in the past, but the company’s latest Earnings Call was a chance for those skeptics to taste some payback. Although the company gave some very transparent information regarding future projects, the rollout of Robotaxi, Optimus, and Semi, many investors took their profits on Thursday.
Notable short sellers like Michael Burry have been transparent about their skepticism around Tesla shares. Burry just revealed three weeks ago that he had opened up a new short on the stock, stating he shorted Tesla shares at $416.22. “Happy it jumped back to this level,” he said in a blog post.
At the time of publication, Tesla shares were down about 3 percent and the stock was trading at $309.92.
Tesla stock (NASDAQ: TSLA) endured one of its sharpest single-day declines in years on July 23, tumbling approximately 14.5 percent and closing near $320 after opening the session around $374. The drop erased more than $140 billion in market value amid heavy trading volume and left the shares at multi-week lows.
The sell-off followed the company’s second-quarter 2026 results, released the previous evening. Tesla reported record revenue of $28.2 billion, up 26 percent year over year, driven by a Q2-record 480,126 vehicle deliveries. Energy storage deployments also rose strongly.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Yet profitability disappointed sharply. Operating income fell 57 percent to $398 million, compressing the operating margin to just 1.4 percent. Non-GAAP earnings per share came in at $0.33, well below the roughly $0.53 analysts had expected. Free cash flow turned negative by $1.1 billion as capital expenditures surged 142 percent to $5.8 billion, largely tied to accelerated spending on artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous systems.
The losses on capex were expected, as Tesla said it would be spending heavily in 2026.
Investors also reacted to lingering uncertainty surrounding key product timelines. During the Earnings Call, management reiterated ambitions for Robotaxi deployment and the Optimus humanoid robot, but offered limited new concrete milestones, renewing questions about execution pace that have long accompanied Tesla’s ambitious roadmap.
The magnitude of the decline places it among Tesla’s more severe one-day percentage losses since its 2010 initial public offering. Historically, the two largest single-day drops (split-adjusted) remain September 8, 2020, when shares fell 21.1 percent amid broader market volatility and valuation concerns, and January 13, 2012, with a 19.3 percent plunge during the company’s early growth struggles.
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Other notable declines include an 18.6 percent drop on March 16, 2020, at the onset of pandemic-related market turmoil. Thursday’s move ranks roughly ninth on the all-time list but stands out as the steepest in more than a year.
Despite the short-term pain, Tesla’s long-term trajectory has repeatedly recovered from such volatility. The latest results underscore both the strength of its core automotive and energy businesses and the near-term costs of heavy investment in next-generation technologies.
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