Investor's Corner
Tesla becomes 3rd most-shorted stock behind AMZN, AAPL as Q3 rush begins
Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) recently lost its place as the No.1 most shorted company in the US stock market, giving away the position to Amazon. Even more recently, Apple also overtook Tesla in the US market’s rankings for most-shorted companies, making the electric car maker as the 3rd most-shorted stock in the US market as of writing.
The updates to Tesla’s short interest was posted yesterday by S3 Partners LLC Managing Director of Predictive Analytics Ihor Dusaniwsky, who shared Tesla’s latest stats on Twitter. Dusaniwsky noted that Tesla’s short interest currently stands at $9.6 billion, which corresponds to 31.83 million shares, or 24.96% of the company’s float. The S3 Managing Director also noted that Tesla shorts are currently up $1.68 billion since Elon Musk announced his intentions to take the company private last month.
$TSLA short interest $9.60 bn, 31.83 mm shares short, 24.96% of float. Shs shorted down 2.9mm since The Tweet.#tesla is now only the 3rd largest U.S. short behind $AMZN & $AAPL. Shorts are up $404mm in MTM profits today,up $1.68 billion since The Tweet & down only $27 million YTD pic.twitter.com/coB9E3pTtb
— Ihor Dusaniwsky🇺🇦 (@ihors3) September 4, 2018
Tesla’s latest stats on its short interest shows what appears to be a slight yet consistent decline in the number of TSLA shares that are held short. Just last week, for example, the S3 Partners executive noted that Tesla’s short interest stood at $9.83 billion, which translates to around 32.43 million shares, or 25.43% of the company’s float.
Back in May, there were 39 million TSLA shares that were held short — the highest in Tesla’s history. That being said, as Tesla started to find its footing with the production of the Model 3, the number of Tesla shares that are held short have seen a steady decline, dropping to 34.9 million shares at the end of July. Even amidst the controversy surrounding Elon Musk’s attempt to take Tesla private in August, Tesla’s short interest seems to have continued its slight decline, falling to 32.7 million shares by the middle of the month.
Tesla is currently attempting to hit its Model 3 production targets for the third quarter. After hitting its then-elusive goal of producing 5,000 Model 3 per week at the end of Q2 2018, Tesla is now looking to sustain and ramp the manufacturing of the electric sedan. This is highlighted in the company’s production target of building 50,000-55,000 Model 3 in Q3 2018. As of Friday last week, reports have claimed that Tesla had produced more than 34,700 Model 3 in the quarter so far. That’s less than 16,000 vehicles away from the lower end of the company’s Q3 target for the Model 3.
The final months of Tesla’s quarters usually correspond to unorthodox measures that the company adopts to meet its self-imposed targets. Back in Q1 2018, Tesla’s goal was only to build 2,500 Model 3 in a week — a feat that was almost achieved after a seven-day blitz that saw the company manufacture just over 2,000 of the electric cars in one week. In Q2 2018, Tesla adopted even more radical strategies to hit its goal of producing 5,000 Model 3 per week. Some of these strategies involved building GA4, an entirely new assembly line set up at the grounds of the Fremont factory, as well as air-freighting robots and equipment from Europe to the United States to quickly address production bottlenecks in Gigafactory 1.
With these in mind, it would not be surprising if Tesla initiates an aggressive push for the Model 3 and its operations this September. With less than four weeks to go before the end of Q3, and with the company actively trying to become profitable this quarter, the coming days would likely be very compelling.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
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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.
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