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Tesla (TSLA) bull and ARK founder shows where Wall St goes wrong

A blue Tesla Model S Plaid unit with new aeros attacks the Nurburgring. (Photo: Stefan Baldauf/Auto Motor Uund Sport)

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Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) stock fell last week unexpectedly after the company’s Battery Day event. But Cathie Wood, a TSLA bull and the founder of ARK Invest, broke down Wall Street’s response and showed why analysts misunderstood some of the electric automaker’s revealings at the event.

Wood, who currently holds the CEO and CIO positions at ARK, broke down several mishaps that Wall Street analysts made during their post-Battery Day evaluations. ARK is one of the biggest bulls of TSLA globally, and the firm loaded up on stock following the event.

New Vehicle with a Lower Price

Wood indicated that when traditional automakers announce price cuts to current vehicles, it usually means that there is trouble. “Higher inventories and lower sales,” Wood wrote in a Tweet. However, Musk and Tesla did not unveil a lower price or discount on a current model. The company announced that within a few years, it would have another vehicle available for purchase, which would be sold for $25,000. This development leads to the indication that Tesla is beginning to reach price parity with gas cars.

Tesla’s broad range of expertise

Tesla is not just a car company, and many analysts forget to factor in its energy business and its software expertise in its valuation. While Battery Day was obviously about the company’s cells, it is not the only thing going on in Tesla’s world. Analysts who are following TSLA must be aware that EVs and ICEs are two different worlds, and they should be experts in more than just gas-powered cars as the market changes.

Wood notes that “Analysts following $TSLA should be expert in energy storage, robotics, artificial intelligence, and software-as-service. While they are expert at the internal combustion engine, traditional auto analysts are not equipped to analyze EVs, particularly $TSLA.”

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The fact is, the EV market is substantially different from the ICE market, and trends are significantly different. Tesla also sells its vehicles in a completely different manner than the traditional automakers do. Tesla does not do sales, promotions, or even use dealerships to sell cars. All vehicles are sold for the same price, eliminating the stress of the car-buying experience.

A skyrocketing EV industry, which Tesla leads

Tesla is leading the charge in the accelerating expansion of the EV market, and the next several years will show that the world’s drivers are leaning toward electric transportation. “According to @skorusARK‘s battery research, #EV sales will scale nearly 20-fold from roughly 1.8 million last year to 35 million, 40% of total global auto sales, during the next five to six years.”

Tesla also expects to grow exponentially over the next few years thanks to more production facilities, more efficient manufacturing, and more affordable models. The company plans to deliver 500,000 cars this year but has its sights set on 20 million vehicles worldwide by 2030.

The declining automotive industry has not seen exponential growth in around 100 years, Wood writes. Since the EV market has expanded, ARK expects an exponential growth territory for the sector for at least five to ten years.

Despite Wall Street’s unexpected decline of TSLA shares last week following Battery Day, the company is beginning to regain some of the momentum it felt during mid-September. As of now, TSLA stock has recovered from the post-Battery Day dip, which saw shares fall to around $380 apiece. At the time of writing, TSLA was trading at $420.10, up $12.76 during the Monday session.

Disclaimer: Joey Klender is a TSLA Shareholder.

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Joey has been a journalist covering electric mobility at TESLARATI since August 2019. In his spare time, Joey is playing golf, watching MMA, or cheering on any of his favorite sports teams, including the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, Miami Heat, Washington Capitals, and Penn State Nittany Lions. You can get in touch with joey at joey@teslarati.com. He is also on X @KlenderJoey. If you're looking for great Tesla accessories, check out shop.teslarati.com

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Investor's Corner

Tesla crushes Wall Street expectations, beats delivery estimates by over 15 percent

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Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) beat Wall Street expectations of 406,000 vehicles delivered in Q2 by reporting 480,126 deliveries for the three months ending in June.

Tesla reported it delivered 467,762  Model 3 and Model Y units, while 12,364 Model S, Model X, and Cybertrucks switched hands during the quarter. The Model S and Model X were officially sunset this past quarter and will no longer be part of the company’s Production & Delivery reports moving forward.

The quarter is a pleasant surprise and a good rebound from Q1, when Tesla slightly missed the Wall Street consensus of 365,645 cars by reporting 358,023 deliveries for the first three motnhs of the year.

Energy storage deployments also provided some strength in Tesla’s delivery report, hitting 13.5 GWh for Q2. This is a particular division of Tesla’s business that has been overwhelmingly robust over the past few years, truly being a strong point of the company’s overall model.

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For the year, Tesla analysts still predict deliveries to trend in the 1.69 million unit region, a modest 3 to 5 percent increase from the 1.64 million cars the company delivered last year. Tesla will likely return to more sequential and noticeable year-over-year growth as the Cybercab project starts to ramp up considerably in the next few years.

Tesla has some other potential catalysts to spur vehicle deliveries, too. Not only is it expecting Cybercab to truly start making a change in the next few years, but other vehicles could be entering the company’s lineup.

Tesla sends production Cybercab with no steering wheel, pedals to on-road testing

The slightly longer Model Y L has been a highly speculated release candidate in the U.S. It has already done incredibly well in China, and U.S. buyers have been wanting slightly more interior space than the Model Y. Now that the Model X is gone, it is more needed than ever.

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Q2 highlights a pretty stable automotive division within Tesla, and no true concerns arise from these figures, especially considering it managed to beat expectations convincingly.

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Investor's Corner

Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’

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Credit: MarcoRP | X

Tesla short seller Michael Burry, the subject of the film “The Big Short,” where he was portrayed by Steve Carell, has revealed he has opened a new bet against the stock.

In a new update to his Substack newsletter in a post titled “Trading Post June 30, 2026,” Burry revealed a new set of bets against Tesla, Caterpillar, NVIDIA, Applied Materials Inc., and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.

In regard to Tesla, Burry wrote:

“And finally I shorted Tesla at 416.22. Happy it jumped back to this level.”

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This means Burry likely opened his new short position after the company’s recent rally on Wall Street, which saw Tesla shares sink in mid-May, only to recover to well over the $400 mark. Currently, shares trade at around $427.

The company saw a big Tuesday as shares climbed considerably, over 10 percent. The size of the Tesla short was not provided, nor did Burry give any information on the position’s structure, the number of shares, dollar value, or whether options were used in the short.

The Tesla and SpaceX merger everyone is talking about is quietly building

Over the years, Burry has been one of the more vocal critics of Tesla, calling its share price “media inflated,” and saying it was “ridiculously overvalued” as recently as December.

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The company has largely transitioned away from being known as an automotive company and instead is much more widely regarded as an AI play, mostly due to its Full Self-Driving efforts, Optimus robot development, and data collection related to both.

This has not pulled those skeptics away from being vocal about their distaste for how Tesla is valued, but there’s no denying that the company is a global force in many things, including sustainable energy, automotive, and AI.

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Investor's Corner

SpaceX gets initial stock coverage from Tesla’s biggest bull

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SpaceX Starship V3 flight 12
SpaceX Starship V3 flight 12 (Credit: SpaceX)

Wedbush Securities is initiating stock coverage on SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), marking the first comments on the company since it went public several weeks ago. Wedbush and its analyst handling coverage, Dan Ives, are widely bullish on fellow Musk company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).

Ives wrote his first note initiating coverage of SpaceX shares on Wednesday with a $190 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating. The firm believes the company is well positioned off of its IPO because of its wide array of projects, including AI compute power and infrastructure, connectivity projects, and launches.

“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity,” Ives wrote, “Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel and increasing deal flow for its Colossus clusters.”

Elon Musk called it Epic: The full story of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 12

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Wedbush leans heavily on Starlink, which they say is the “profitability driver given the strength of its recurring revenue base of ~12 million subscribers as of June 5th.” Ives believes Starlink is still in the “early innings” of penetrating the global telecommunications and broadband market, as it only holds less than a 1 percent share. However, this number is sure to increase over time.

It also highlights the importance of Starship, which it says is an “essential layer” of SpaceX’s overall success. SpaceX developing and displaying the ability to reuse rockets is a major cost and reliability advantage “as it reduces the necessary hardware launch costs while generating a feedback loop for future flights to improve their launch flight rate without accelerating capex spend.”

Finally, SpaceX’s recent AI/Compute projects are also very elementary, Ives writes. It is worth mentioning Wedbush said its $190 price target is derived from a valuation forecast that sees the company yielding roughly $2.48 trillion of implied enterprise value.

There are also some factors that Wedbush did not take into account with its initial coverage. The firm wrote in the note:

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“We note that there is optional value coming from Starship’s accelerating scale towards sub-$200/kg unit economics, orbital data centers, and enterprise AI monetization as these factors could drive meaningful upside but these face major hurdles, so we do not take that into account with our valuation.”

SpaceX shares are down just over 2 percent today, trading at around $167 at the time of publication.

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