Investor's Corner
Tesla bulls take a stand against negative TSLA narratives in Q3’s aftermath
Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) bulls are taking a stand as pervading negative narratives sweep TSLA following the release of the electric car maker’s third-quarter results. Tesla hit new records in Q3, producing 96,155 vehicles and delivering around 97,000. These record numbers, which were 3,000 off a target quoted in a leaked Elon Musk email, resulted in a steep drop in TSLA and an unforgiving interpretation from the company’s ardent critics.
As the electric car maker deals with the aftermath of its record-breaking third-quarter results, a number of TSLA bulls have taken a stand with their optimistic take on the company’s Q3 figures. While these analysts admitted that Tesla was not able to meet Elon Musk’s internal 100,000 delivery goal for the third quarter, some were firm in the notion that Tesla’s 16.2% year-over-year improvement in deliveries was nothing to scoff at either.
Longtime TSLA bull and Baird analyst Ben Kallo reiterated his “Outperform” rating and $355 price target on the electric car maker following the company’s release of its Q3 2019 results. Macquarie analyst Maynard Um, another notable TSLA bull, kept his “Outperform” rating and optimistic $400 price target for Tesla as well. Commenting on Tesla’s production and delivery results, Um was direct, stating that “we are not concerned about demand.”
Canaccord Genuity also maintained its “Buy” rating on Tesla, together with its $350 price target. According to the financial firm, Tesla reported “essentially inline Q3 deliveries with record net new orders.” Canaccord added that it is “encouraged that production woes appear to have abated” for the electric car maker, as shown in Tesla’s record numbers.
Even Wedbush Securities, whose TSLA analyst Dan Ives has expressed frustration at the electric car maker in previous quarters, maintained its “Neutral” rating and $220 price target on the company. Wedbush noted that “In our opinion, this was an impressive delivery number for Tesla overall that should be viewed as a positive step in the right direction.”
Loup Ventures managing partner Gene Munster, also a longtime TSLA bull, pointed to a particularly interesting detail in the company’s Q3 report. In a blog post on Loup Ventures’ official website, Munster stated that in the third quarter, Tesla appears to have established the fact that its vehicles have a stable, organic demand among consumers.
“The optics of the announcement may have been diluted, but the substance was impressive. Tesla built and sold a record number of vehicles in Q3. Deliveries were up 16% y/y on a tough comp from Q3 of 2018 when deliveries more than doubled sequentially to 83k. In the update letter, the company said that they achieved record net orders and that nearly all of those orders came from people without previous reservations. In other words, all signs point to the fact that organic demand, which is the crux of the bull/bear debate, is intact,” he wrote.
Objectively speaking, Q3 2019 was a successful quarter for Tesla, and despite the pervading negative narrative surrounding the company, the fact remains that the electric car maker just reached record numbers once more, and it is not showing any signs of slowing down. With Gigafactory 3’s Model 3 production seemingly just around the corner, it is likely far too early or simply unwise to dismiss Tesla’s chances of meeting its self-imposed delivery goals for 2019.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch
SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.
The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.
Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.
The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.
As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.
Elon Musk
Tesla AI boss reveals how big Optimus is going to get
Tesla’s Optimus chief corrected himself on X, confirming a staggering 10 million robot production target.
Tesla’s Optimus program has a new number attached to it, after Ashok Elluswamy, the executive who has run the humanoid robot program since June 2025, posted a three word correction on X Thursday, “Correction, 10 million robots.”
The line clarifies the long term annual capacity Tesla is building toward its planned second Optimus production line at Gigafactory Texas, a figure Musk has cited repeatedly since last year’s shareholder meeting.
The scale is worth noting, because ten million robots a year would mean Tesla building more units annually than most countries sell in new cars. Tesla has framed this as a second line, not the first. The buildout is happening in two phases: a roughly one million unit per year line inside Tesla’s Fremont factory, installed on the floor space vacated when Model S and Model X production ended earlier this year, and a much larger dedicated facility under construction at Giga Texas that broke ground on its first steel structure in May. That Texas facility is the one Elluswamy’s correction refers to, and is expected to reach volume production sometime in 2027.
Correction, 10 million robots https://t.co/0z4nyQNTzp
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) July 30, 2026
Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress
Elluswamy took over Optimus from Milan Kovac last summer and has spent the months since talking up the program’s trajectory. Elon Musk has also floated the ten million figure at Tesla’s 2025 shareholder meeting.
Ending Model S and Model X production to make room for the first Optimus line was one of the more consequential manufacturing decisions in the company’s recent history, retiring two flagship vehicles in favor of a robot that has yet to enter mass production. Musk has previously estimated per unit production costs at $20,000 to $25,000 once Tesla reaches a million units a year, though he hasn’t said what that cost looks like at ten times the volume.
Elon Musk
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
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.
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.

