Connect with us

Investor's Corner

Tesla (TSLA) surges 14% in 2018 ahead of February 7 earnings report

Published

9 years ago

on

Tesla’s market cap has increased by more than $2 billion this week, with shares (NASDAQ: TSLA) rising more than 3% in the week and nearly 14% for the year-t0-date.  As the California-based electric car maker and energy firm enter the second month of the year, investors’ sentiments appear to be optimistic ahead of Tesla’s upcoming Q4 2017 earnings report.

According to analysts polled by FactSet, Tesla is expected to report an adjusted loss of $3.04 a share on sales of $3.3 billion in the quarter, a significant difference from its figures the previous year. By comparison, the California-based electric car maker and energy firm posted an adjusted loss of 69 cents a share on sales of $2.3 billion during Q4 2016. Still, Tesla shares have gained 42% in the past 12 months, more than doubling gains for the S&P 500 index Dow Jones Industrial Average.

While expectations are high that losses would be significant during the last quarter of 2017, many investors in the online forum community have remarked that they expect Tesla to recover and grow in the months to come as well. Many even noted that the behavior of Tesla’s stocks this January follow a pattern that’s similar to market trends back in 2013, when the company’s shares soared amid a successful debut of its Model S luxury sedan.

Positive investor sentiment is also shared by Baird analyst Ben Kallo, who recently published a note about his expectations for the Elon Musk-led electric car maker and energy firm. According to the analyst, Tesla’s early issues with Model 3 production during Q3 2017, coupled with the company’s adjusted guidance for the car’s optimum manufacturing and delivery, might ultimately affect the company’s stocks positively. Kallo even noted that Tesla’s adjusted Model 3 delivery timeline, published earlier this month, seemed to have “de-risked” the company’s shares.

“We think shares will react favorably if the company guides to more than 10,000 Model 3 deliveries in the first quarter of 2018. Additionally, we believe Tesla can fund the Model 3 ramp without raising additional capital, but think a raise would remove an additional overhang,” Kallo wrote in his report, according to Barron’s.

Overall, Kallo noted that Tesla’s stocks would likely hit $411 in the near future. Investors in the online community were a bit more generous, with some speculating that the $500 barrier might be breached by the Silicon Valley-based electric car firm before the end of this year.

Advertisement
-

Tesla ended Q4 2017 by hitting a number of milestones. Deliveries for the Model S and the Model X reached new records, exceeding the company’s initial target of delivering 100,000 cars within the year. Two new vehicles — the Tesla Semi and the next-generation Roadster — were also revealed. Apart from these, the pace of Model 3 deliveries also improved significantly, with Tesla stating that during the final days of December, the production of the mass market compact electric sedan extrapolated to over 1,000 units per week.

 

Disclosure: I have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions.

Related Topics:

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.

Advertisement
Comments

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.

Published

8 hours ago

on

September 29, 2026

By

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.

Advertisement
-

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

 

Advertisement
-

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.

Continue Reading

Investor's Corner

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

Published

23 hours ago

on

September 29, 2026

By

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.

Advertisement
-

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.

Advertisement
-

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.

Advertisement
-

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

Continue Reading

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

on

September 28, 2026

By

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.

Advertisement
-

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.

Continue Reading