Investor's Corner
TSLA’s biggest bull is beating Wall St just as hard as Tesla is beating legacy automakers
Last May 2019, ARK Invest founder and CEO Cathie Wood posted a bold call about electric car maker Tesla. Wood was considered as one of Tesla’s most ardent bulls then, holding a $4,000 per share long-term price target on the company. It was an amount that some in Wall Street seemingly refused to take seriously, but in May, Wood doubled down, publishing a new bull case valuation for Tesla, implying that the company could hit a share price of $6,000.
Proving Critics Wrong
Criticism and mockery came quickly. Tesla bears and short-sellers, many of whom were smelling blood in the water then with TSLA’s ~$200 per share price, immediately criticized Wood. Jim Chanos, one of Tesla’s biggest short-sellers who has been pounding the table with the idea that the electric car maker is worth zero, criticized ARK’s forecasts for the company’s gross margins. Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University, flat-out refused to acknowledge Wood’s point, stating that the $1 trillion valuation that ARK was tying to Tesla was “more fairy tale” than reality.
That was May 2019, and Tesla was being battered left and right by analysts posting bearish outlooks on the company. Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas even posted a “bear case” price of $10 per share for Tesla stock, pulling down the electric car maker even further. Yet even then, Wood remained steadfast and unwavering, and ARK continued to buy TSLA shares.
Sixteen months later, Tesla is now trading at about $420 per share — after a five-for-one stock split in August. Instead of following the bearish outlooks of critics from the previous year, Tesla stock had risen tenfold, driven partly by the company’s steady demand for its vehicles and its evident edge against competitors, both from new companies and legacy automakers alike. Tesla is now worth more than five times Ford and General Motors combined, and the company seems poised to reach even newer heights with its energy storage business and battery production plans.
All About Innovation
This has not stopped the critics, of course, with Wood and ARK’s analysts dealing with negativity from groups such as TSLAQ on a consistent basis. Wood, for her part, welcomes the critics. In a statement to Forbes, the ARK founder stated that “It almost makes me feel comfortable, to be honest, because it means if we’re right, then the rewards will be pretty enormous.” Considering ARK’s performance so far, Wood seems to be right on the money. Tesla’s massive rise, for one, has helped propel ARK Invest into one of the fastest-growing and top-performing investment firms in the market, with its flagship ARK Innovation Fund being up 75% in 2020. ARK Innovation Fund has returned an annual average of 36% over the past five years, almost three times that of the S&P 500.
In a way, ARK Invest could be seen as a disruptor on its own, similar to the companies that it so ardently supports. The firm makes its research freely available online for anyone to access, and it also shares the logs for its trades. Even ARK’s workforce is not the run-of-the-mill Wall Street, with Wood preferring to hire young analysts with specialized backgrounds in niche subjects such as molecular biology or computer engineering, as they are likely to be equipped with the necessary skills and background to spot the next trend. This has allowed ARK to take strong positions in numerous emerging technologies, such as autonomous vehicles and DNA sequencing.
ARK’s position in Tesla and the pandemic, which has accelerated the adoption of companies and technologies that are included in the company’s ETF, have helped grow its assets almost threefold this year. Today, ARK holds about $29 billion worth of assets and is valued conservatively by Forbes at about $500 million. “Coronavirus has catapulted our innovative platforms into high gear because they solve problems. Innovation solves problems,” Wood noted. Considering that Wood holds an over-50% ownership of ARK, she currently has a net worth of about $250 million, earning her the No.80 spot in Forbes’ sixth annual list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women.
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Betting on Disruption
In a way, ARK’s eventual victory over critics reflects much of Wood’s background. Wood started her career in finance when she apprenticed at Los Angeles fund Capital Group from 1977 to 1980. During her time there, she saw firsthand how interest rates that were approaching 20% adversely affected the market. Wood graduated in 1981 and joined Jennison Associates in New York as an economist. While there, she made an early call that inflation and interest rates had peaked, prompting dismissal from her superiors. As fate would have it, Wood was right.
Wood was eventually moved to Jennison’s equity research division, where she covered the wireless telecom companies in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. She saw firsthand the economic and societal changes that came as mobile phones became ubiquitous. She later moved New York-based AllianceBernstein as chief investment officer for thematic portfolios in 2001, and by the time the 2008 financial crisis hit, Wood figured that a fresh approach was needed for ETFs. In 2012, Wood proposed putting actively managed portfolios of innovative firms inside an ETF structure, but the idea was shunned at AllianceBernstein.
ARK Invest was launched two years later, but the first years of the firm were challenging, with the flagship fund ranking in the bottom quartile of its peer group, as per data from Morningstar. To keep the firm afloat, Wood dug into her savings and sold minority stakes and initiated partnerships with massive firms like Japan’s Nikko Asset Management and the mutual fund firm American Beacon, two companies that now own 39% of ARK. These efforts paid off for Wood, as ARK took off in 2017, thanks to its bets on stocks like Netflix, Salesforce, Illumina, Square, and Athenahealth. Wood also started buying Bitcoin in 2015 at $250 a coin, which the CEO calls an “insurance policy” against inflation.
Overall, Wood’s approach has allowed ARK Invest to thrive in one of the most challenging periods in recent years. The coronavirus pandemic hit hard in March, and the stock market proceeded to plunge. Using her nose for innovative companies, Wood proceeded to focus ARK’s portfolio on fast-growing companies that she believes have the potential to lead the world towards recovery. Together with Tesla, ARK proceeded to load up stocks from education-software company 2U, real estate platform Zillow, and Slack, a workplace messaging platform.
Tesla is a difficult company to value, with Elon Musk describing it more as a collection of startups that are working alongside one another. The company has confounded Wall Street for years, and continues to do so. But if ARK’s performance is anything to go by, Tesla’s valuation and performance may be most accurately analyzed by a firm with an outlook that’s just as disruptive and unique. And this, for Wood, is something that could very well make ARK even more successful in the future.
SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
Cybertruck
Tesla Cybertruck production snaps back after ugly supplier fight
Cybertrucks are piling up again at Giga Texas after Tesla’s court win against a parts supplier.
Cybertruck production at Giga Texas is showing its first visible recovery since Tesla sued a supplier last month over withheld manufacturing tooling.
Aerial observer Joe Tegtmeyer flew over the Austin factory Wednesday morning and counted roughly 100 or more Cybertrucks filling the outbound lot, a sharp jump from the thin numbers seen in recent weeks. The flyover came a day after a judge granted Tesla a temporary restraining order against Angstrom Automotive Group, the parts supplier at the center of the dispute.
Tesla filed an emergency lawsuit in late July after Angstrom told the automaker it planned to close the Troy, Texas facility where Tesla’s die-cast tools, trim dies and other Cybertruck stamping equipment were housed. According to Tesla’s complaint, a shipment of 700 finished parts never left the building, and when Tesla sent representatives to retrieve its equipment, accompanied by law enforcement, they were turned away. Angstrom allegedly then asked for an extra $250,000 a week to keep operating, which Tesla’s filing described as holding its own property for ransom.
TESLA: U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Wolfe of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Waco Division granted Tesla a Temporary Restraining Order and Writ of Replevin in its dispute with Angstrom Automotive (Case No. 6:26-cv-00477).
The order authorizes… https://t.co/E1DKcQSxMn pic.twitter.com/LR8aAiV2Og
— S.E. Robinson, Jr. (@SERobinsonJr) August 5, 2026
The restraining order gives Tesla immediate right of entry to Angstrom’s facility to recover the tooling. It is temporary, with a fuller hearing still to come, but the speed of Wednesday’s rebound suggests the Angstrom shortage was indeed the main bottleneck limiting Cybertruck output. Outbound lot counts are an imperfect measure of actual production, since finished trucks can sit for days before shipping, but a lot that full after a lean stretch is a meaningful signal.
Cybertruck output at Giga Texas has fluctuated all year as Tesla worked through supply issues and introduced new trims, including a cheaper Dual Motor AWD version that drew strong early demand.
Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya has cautioned investors shorting SpaceX shares, drawing a direct parallel to the intense short-selling pressure Tesla faced in its early public years.
Responding to reports of elevated short interest in the newly public rocket, satellite, and AI company, Palihapitiya noted that similar dynamics played out with Tesla, where aggressive short sellers ultimately “went broke.”
SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) went public on June 12, 2026, in the largest IPO on record, pricing at $135 per share. Shares quickly surged to an all-time high of $225.64 just days later, briefly implying a valuation exceeding $2 trillion. The stock has since retreated sharply amid valuation concerns, lockup expiration fears, and broader market dynamics.
By early August, it traded near $108–$125, representing a roughly 50 percent decline from the peak and bringing the market capitalization closer to the $1.5–1.7 trillion range. On August 4, shares closed up more than 9 percent at $125.33 ahead of earnings before facing pressure in after-hours and premarket trading.
Short interest has climbed dramatically. According to S3 Partners data widely cited in market reports, short positions reached approximately 219.3 million shares by late July, about 34 percent of the limited public float of roughly 640 million shares, and represented a notional value of around $24.6 billion.
Utilization of shares available to borrow hit 95 percent, with borrow fees rising. This level of shorting exceeded the dollar value of short bets against Tesla at the time and built rapidly ahead of two catalysts: the company’s first post-IPO earnings and an August 6 lockup expiration that could free up to 911.5 million additional shares.
CEO Elon Musk has issued warnings of his own. In mid-July, as short interest approached one-third of the float, he posted that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” reiterating his view that the company could ultimately be worth more than Earth if it achieves its goals.
On August 4, just before earnings, Musk responded to the latest short-interest data by saying, “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
SpaceX delivered its first quarterly results as a public company after the close on August 4. Second-quarter revenue rose 92 percent year-over-year to $7.8 billion, beating consensus estimates near $6.8–6.9 billion.
The net loss narrowed to $541 million, or 9 cents per share, better than the roughly 23–24 cent loss expected. Starlink/connectivity contributed about $4.3 billion (up 66 percent), while the AI business generated $2.6 billion (up roughly 250 percent). Capital expenditures were heavy at $18.4 billion, largely tied to AI infrastructure. Management projected a $100 billion annualized revenue run rate by year-end 2026 and outlined a path toward $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030.
The combination of Chamath’s historical reminder, Musk’s repeated alerts, and the company’s ambitious growth targets underscores the high-stakes debate surrounding SPCX. Short sellers are positioned for near-term supply pressure from the lockup, while long-term bulls point to Starlink scale, Starship progress, and AI compute expansion as reasons the bears may ultimately face the same fate as many early Tesla skeptics.
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