Investor's Corner
Tesla's battle lines are drawn with retail investors on one side and Wall St on another
There are very few stocks in the market that inspire such volatility as American electric car maker Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA). The company has been on a tear lately, propelled by positive Q4 2019 results and emphasized by an ever-growing number of ardent supporters online. Yet amidst these victories, it appears that Tesla has finally reached a point where the battle lines are now being drawn between the company’s supporters, particularly its retail investors and analysts from Wall Street.
Tesla is a tricky company to evaluate, mainly since it covers several industries. The electric car maker is currently the second-largest automaker in the world by market value, though it only produces and delivers a fraction of the vehicles that veteran car companies sell every year. In 2019, Tesla sold just over 367,000 vehicles. Volkswagen, the third-largest automaker according to market cap, sold over 6 million units.
But the Tesla story is never just about the company’s electric cars. A look at Tesla’s mission shows that the company’s goals are bigger than just selling cars and making money doing so. Tesla aims to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainability, and making electric cars that are better than petrol-powered vehicles is but a crucial part of the puzzle. This also means that there are dimensions to the company that lies far beyond that of its electric car business.
It is this last point where the divergence is most evident between Tesla’s supporters and Wall Street analysts. Tesla shareholders, many of whom actually own the company’s products, are intimately familiar with CEO Elon Musk’s overall plans and goals, as well as the scope of the company’s numerous business. Very few of those who own a Model 3, for example, are not aware that Tesla also makes solar roof tiles, or residential batteries like Powerwalls, or grid-scale batteries like Megapacks for that matter.
Unfortunately, a good number of analysts who cover TSLA stock seem to be stuck under the impression that the company is an automaker, full stop. A look at analysts and critics who frequent media outlets such as CNBC shows that very few actually consider the potential, or even recognize the existence of Tesla Energy, a business that legendary billionaire Ron Baron believes could be just as big as the company’s electric car business. Even fewer acknowledge the value of Tesla’s Autopilot data, which are gathered from real-world miles.
This could be seen in Wall Street’s estimates on Waymo, a Google-based company aimed at developing and deploying a self-driving service. Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak wrote in a note to clients last year that the startup is worth $105 billion because of its self-driving technology, and that’s a conservative estimate. Before last year’s update, Nowak valued Waymo at a far more optimistic $175 billion. In comparison, Tesla’s current valuation, as of last Friday’s close, stood at $134 billion. That amount included the company’s auto business, its energy business, and its autonomous driving tech.
As is the nature of Tesla stock, the company’s full potential is usually acknowledged and considered only by the company’s most ardent supporters on the Street. So for now, there is very little chance that the perception of Tesla between its retail supporters and traditional analysts will converge anytime soon. This divergence became a focal point in the company’s recent Q4 2019 earnings call, when Elon Musk admitted that retail investors might have a better grasp of the company’s plans than conventional Wall Street analysts.
“I do think that a lot of retail investors actually have deeper and more accurate insights than many of the big institutional investors and certainly better insight than many of the analysts. It seems like if people really looked at some of the smart retail investor analysts and what some of the smart smaller retail investors predicted about the future of Tesla, you would probably get the highest accuracy and remarkable insight from some of those predictions,” Musk said.
Tesla will likely remain a polarizing company for years to come. That said, Tesla Energy’s ramp is upon the market already, and the company’s Solarglass Roof V3 are now being installed to a growing number of homes in the United States. Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system is also closing in on being feature-complete. Overall, it seems that it will only be a matter of time before the true potential of Tesla emerges, and when it does, one would have to deny a whole lot of the company to consider it just as an automaker.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
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
— 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.
Tesla short sellers won big following the company’s massive fall on Wall Street after it reported subpar Earnings on Wednesday.
Tesla short sellers collected about $4.12 billion in single-day profits on Thursday, according to Bloomberg. Shares fell as much as 15 percent during Thursday’s session. It closed as one of the worst days for Tesla on Wall Street in the past three years.
Investors sold off the stock after Tesla said it would aggressively direct its spending toward AI and its Optimus robot project. The company had record revenues, which were driven by one of the strongest quarters in terms of vehicle deliveries in company history.
However, it missed EPS estimates by reporting just $0.33, a far cry from the $0.53 analysts expected.
S3 Partners reported that about 3 percent of Tesla’s outstanding stock is sold short. Managing Director at S3, Ihor Dusaniwsky, provided the short seller’s potential profit, as well as another figure: shorts have likely had paper gains of $8.92 billion this year, as Tesla shares are down 30 percent in 2026.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla has burned short sellers many times in the past, but the company’s latest Earnings Call was a chance for those skeptics to taste some payback. Although the company gave some very transparent information regarding future projects, the rollout of Robotaxi, Optimus, and Semi, many investors took their profits on Thursday.
Notable short sellers like Michael Burry have been transparent about their skepticism around Tesla shares. Burry just revealed three weeks ago that he had opened up a new short on the stock, stating he shorted Tesla shares at $416.22. “Happy it jumped back to this level,” he said in a blog post.
At the time of publication, Tesla shares were down about 3 percent and the stock was trading at $309.92.
Tesla stock (NASDAQ: TSLA) endured one of its sharpest single-day declines in years on July 23, tumbling approximately 14.5 percent and closing near $320 after opening the session around $374. The drop erased more than $140 billion in market value amid heavy trading volume and left the shares at multi-week lows.
The sell-off followed the company’s second-quarter 2026 results, released the previous evening. Tesla reported record revenue of $28.2 billion, up 26 percent year over year, driven by a Q2-record 480,126 vehicle deliveries. Energy storage deployments also rose strongly.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Yet profitability disappointed sharply. Operating income fell 57 percent to $398 million, compressing the operating margin to just 1.4 percent. Non-GAAP earnings per share came in at $0.33, well below the roughly $0.53 analysts had expected. Free cash flow turned negative by $1.1 billion as capital expenditures surged 142 percent to $5.8 billion, largely tied to accelerated spending on artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous systems.
The losses on capex were expected, as Tesla said it would be spending heavily in 2026.
Investors also reacted to lingering uncertainty surrounding key product timelines. During the Earnings Call, management reiterated ambitions for Robotaxi deployment and the Optimus humanoid robot, but offered limited new concrete milestones, renewing questions about execution pace that have long accompanied Tesla’s ambitious roadmap.
The magnitude of the decline places it among Tesla’s more severe one-day percentage losses since its 2010 initial public offering. Historically, the two largest single-day drops (split-adjusted) remain September 8, 2020, when shares fell 21.1 percent amid broader market volatility and valuation concerns, and January 13, 2012, with a 19.3 percent plunge during the company’s early growth struggles.
Other notable declines include an 18.6 percent drop on March 16, 2020, at the onset of pandemic-related market turmoil. Thursday’s move ranks roughly ninth on the all-time list but stands out as the steepest in more than a year.
Despite the short-term pain, Tesla’s long-term trajectory has repeatedly recovered from such volatility. The latest results underscore both the strength of its core automotive and energy businesses and the near-term costs of heavy investment in next-generation technologies.
SpaceX wants to catch Starship for launch 14, Elon Musk says
Tesla to open source Model S and Model X designs and software
