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.
“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.
Investor's Corner
NASA taps SpaceX to launch the telescope that could unlock new worlds
NASA’s Roman Space Telescope heads to orbit this August aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy with massive scientific ambitions.
SpaceX is set to play a central role in one of NASA’s most anticipated science missions in years. The company’s Falcon Heavy rocket, currently the most powerful operational launch vehicle in the world, will carry the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into orbit on August 30 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Roman is now in final preparations inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, where on June 26 technicians used a crane to lift the observatory into a specialized stand for fueling and pre-launch testing.
Roman is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy, whose career helped shape how the agency approaches space science.
NASA chose SpaceX Falcon Heavy because of Roman’s needs to reach a specific orbit far from Earth, well beyond where a standard Falcon 9 can deliver it. The Falcon Heavy, which first flew in 2018, has since become NASA’s go-to option for missions that need serious muscle without the cost and complexity of older launch systems.
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Roman will carry a field of view at least 100 times wider than the Hubble Space Telescope, meaning it can photograph enormous swaths of the universe in a single shot rather than the narrow slices Hubble captures. That difference in scale is significant. While Hubble reshaped our understanding of the cosmos over 30 years, Roman is built to work faster and wider, surveying hundreds of millions of galaxies at once.
One of Roman’s most compelling capabilities is its potential to discover and photograph planets orbiting stars outside our solar system, and with enough precision to directly image planets that would otherwise be lost. That means scientists could study the atmosphere and surface characteristics of distant worlds rather than simply confirming they exist. Combined with Roman’s sweeping field of view, the telescope could detect thousands of exoplanets, and some of those planets may be in habitable zones where liquid water could exist. No telescope currently in operation has this level of power and capability. That capability alone could change what we know about other worlds, and perhaps finally answer the question: are we the only intelligent lifeforms in existence?
What Roman actually finds once it reaches orbit is an open question, and that is exactly what makes this launch worth watching.
Elon Musk
California snubs Tesla in its newly passed EV incentive that favors Rivian and Lucid
California passed a $135 million EV incentive that rewards Rivian and Lucid while sidelining Tesla
California just drew a line in the EV incentive sand to put Tesla on the wrong side of it. The state recently passed a $135 million program offering first-time electric vehicle buyers a direct incentive with no application required, but the rules were written in a way that leaves Tesla at a structural disadvantage compared to Rivian and Lucid.
The program caps eligible vehicles at $50,000 for new EVs and $25,000 for used ones. That pricing threshold rules out a significant portion of Tesla’s lineup, though some lower-priced Model 3 and Model Y configurations would still qualify. California-based automakers are exempt from the price cap entirely, regardless of what their vehicles cost. Rivian, headquartered in Irvine, and Lucid, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, both benefit from that exemption. Rivian’s R2 starts at roughly $45,000 but has versions above the cap. Lucid’s Air and Gravity start at $70,990 and $79,990 respectively, well above any threshold a non-California company would face.
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Tesla built its reputation and a significant portion of its early market share in California, where EV adoption has consistently led the nation. The company operates its original factory in Fremont, California, and the state was home to Tesla’s headquarters for most of its existence. That changed in 2021 when Tesla moved its corporate headquarters to Austin, Texas. Since then, the relationship between the company and California Governor Gavin Newsom has been openly adversarial, with Musk and Newsom trading public criticism on multiple occasions.
California’s EV incentive landscape has shifted repeatedly in recent years, and Tesla has previously lost eligibility for state-level programs as its vehicles exceeded income-adjusted price thresholds. The federal $7,500 EV tax credit, which Tesla models have qualified for and lost depending on policy cycles, is no longer available after it expired without renewal, making state-level programs more meaningful to buyers than they have been in years.
The practical impact for buyers is more nuanced than the headline suggests. California residents purchasing a Tesla under $50,000 for the first time can still access the incentive. But the exemption written for California-based manufacturers is a structural advantage that rewards where a company plants its headquarters flag rather than where it builds its products, and Tesla moved that flag to Texas.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s newest logo confirms everything about what it’s become
SpaceX officially absorbed xAI under the SpaceXAI brand, completing the largest private merger in history.
SpaceX made its corporate transformation official in May 2026 when Elon Musk posted on X that xAI would cease to exist as a standalone company. “xAI will be dissolved as a separate company, so it will just be SpaceXAI, the AI products from SpaceX,” he wrote.
A new SpaceXAI logo was announced today, visually embedding the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity, which can be seen as a deliberate design choice that signals the merger is not a partnership but a full absorption and XAi a core function of the same company. The same way Starlink is not a separate brand but a SpaceX product. The announcement closed the loop on a process that began February 2, 2026, when SpaceX acquired xAI in the largest private merger in history, valued at $1.25 trillion. SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion.
We are now @SpaceXAI. pic.twitter.com/ema66xDWC9
— SpaceXAI (@SpaceXAI) July 6, 2026
The reason SpaceX bought xAI was stated plainly by Musk at the time of the deal: to build orbital data centers. SpaceX had simultaneously filed with the FCC to launch up to one million satellites designed to function as AI compute nodes in low Earth orbit, escaping what Musk described as the energy constraints limiting AI development on Earth.
xAI provided the AI software stack, with Grok, the X platform, and the Colossus supercomputer infrastructure in Memphis with over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, while SpaceX provided the rockets, Starlink, and the capital base to fund it. The two companies needed each other. xAI was burning $2.5 billion in losses on $250 million in revenue. SpaceX was generating an estimated $8 billion in profit on $15 billion in revenue and needed an AI narrative to command the valuation it was targeting for its IPO.
What SpaceX has done, regardless of how the orbital AI vision ultimately plays out, is walk into a public market as something no company has been before: a rocket manufacturer, satellite internet provider, AI software company, social media platform, and supercomputer operator under one ticker. Whether that combination is worth $2 trillion depends entirely on which of those businesses you believe in most.
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