Investor's Corner
TSLA analyst summarizes Model 3 ramp: “Tesla failed on its original plan, but achieved a world-class result”
Elon Musk was not exaggerating when he described the Model 3 ramp as a “bet-the-company” situation. After handing over the first 30 units of the Model 3 in July 2017, Elon Musk candidly welcomed Tesla’s employees to “production hell.” As the following year would prove, the vehicle’s ramp would be exactly that — a challenging, upward climb filled with multiple painful bottlenecks.
Elon Musk mentioned during an episode of the Recode Decode podcast last month that Tesla is now at a point where it is no big deal for the company to produce 5,000 Model 3 per week. Musk noted, though, that Tesla’s employees had to put “excruciating effort” in refining and improving the Model 3 ramp to get to where it is today. The result of this effort was recently described by a Wall Street analyst after a visit to the Fremont factory.
Pierre Ferragu of New Street Research is one of Tesla’s most prominent supporters in Wall Street. The analyst, who holds a $530 price target on the electric car maker, stated in a note on Tuesday that Tesla made a lot of mistakes during the Model 3 ramp. Ferragu even described the Fremont factory as a “crowded mess” in its current state due to the facility’s complexities. An example of this was an intricate conveyor belt system that was eventually scrapped and replaced with human workers, resulting in the process being 30% less productive than what Tesla initially anticipated.
While Tesla’s failures with the Model 3 ramp were notable, Ferragu stated that it is these failures that make Tesla a company that is worth supporting. The Wall Street analyst wrote that Tesla’s production processes are only bound to get better from this point, particularly as the company is in a constant state of improvement. Ferragu pointed out that the lessons that Tesla learned from its initial failures with the Model 3 ramp would likely result in future sites for the vehicle’s production — such as Gigafactory 3 in Shanghai — to be optimized faster and more efficiently.
“All these (mistakes) feed a lot of (the) bear argument on the company. We see it the exact opposite way. Failure is where one learns the most. By shooting way too high, Tesla failed on its original plan, but achieved a world-class result. The next production sites will be much more efficient, and will ramp very rapidly.”
The Wall Street analyst’s optimistic outlook on Tesla comes amidst yet another vote of confidence from CFRA, an independent investment research firm. In a recent note to its clients, CFRA raised its price target for the electric car maker to $420 per share, an 11% increase from its previous PT of $375. The firm stated that its updated price target was due to the “limited impact” of competing electric cars in 2019, as well as improving headwinds in China. Just like the New Street Research analyst, CFRA also cited further improvements and efficiencies in Model 3 production as one of the reasons behind its positive stance on Tesla.
While Tesla has already achieved milestones in its Model 3 ramp, it should be noted that the company is only halfway towards its target numbers for the electric sedan’s production. Tesla eventually aims to manufacture 10,000 Model 3 per week, particularly as the vehicle starts getting delivered to territories such as Europe and Asia. In this light, Ferragu stated in his note that Tesla’s Model 3 ramp to 10,000 per week would likely be a far less painful process for the company.
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“The road to 7,000 units per week seems easy, and limited capital expenditures will be required (in the low tens of millions) to get to 10,000,” the analyst wrote.
As of writing, Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA) is trading down 1.70% at $353.58 per share.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
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.
SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) got an absolutely crazy price target rating from Raymond James after the company experienced a tough first few weeks following its Initial Public Offering (IPO).
Despite the tumultuous start, SpaceX has plenty of believers, and the company’s massively successful Starship launch last Friday, its 13th test flight of the massive rocket, went so smoothly that Raymond James analysts pushed its price target on the company to roughly 7 times its current trading level.
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
The firm officially put a “Strong Buy” rating and an $800 price target on the stock. It currently trades at around $113. Its all-time high is $225.64, reaching this trading level shortly after shares first went public.
Raymond James’ price target is tied to the firm’s confidence after Starship’s 13th test flight. Analysts at the firm said it was an incremental step that reduces engineering risks, citing the widely successful heat shield test that CEO Elon Musk recently detailed, the smooth deployment of Starlink V3 satellites, and a successful in-space engine relight.
SpaceX also managed to see Starship splash down safely in the Indian Ocean, while the Super Heavy Booster fell down to the Gulf of America with no incidents.
It is interesting to see these launches have such a tremendous impact on the stock and what investors think of it. After SpaceX initially delayed the Starship launch last week, shares fell tremendously. Most probably did not realize that the stand-down is a standard practice, especially if everything is not perfect.
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The mission was initially aborted due to an issue with Raptor engines. This was resolved, and Starship launched last Friday after another delay on Thursday, which was caused by weather.
Now that analysts have seen what SpaceX launches are capable of and how impressive the feat is, firms are adjusting their price targets accordingly, making it known that they have high expectations for the space exploration company.
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.
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