Investor's Corner
Tesla (TSLA) stock price is the highest it's been in 2019, closing in on 52-week high
Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA) recently crossed the $360 barrier, effectively hitting a year-to-date high. If Tesla maintains this momentum, the electric car maker may find itself within striking distance of its all-time high, especially if its Q4 2019 results are positively received by the market.
Tesla opened Friday at $361.05 per share, rising as high as $365.21 as of writing. This is the highest that Tesla has been in 2019 so far, with the closest one being November 19, when TSLA stock knocked on $359.99 before closing at $359.52. In a way, this bodes well for Tesla, considering that just a couple of months ago, the electric car maker’s shares were at the $240-$250 level.
Tesla has not had an easy time in 2019, being bogged down by pessimistic outlooks from Wall Street and missed internal targets. Following a first-quarter and second-quarter loss, TSLA stock dipped so much that it traded as low as $176.99 per share on June 3. Tesla recovered in a relatively slow and steady manner, at least until its blockbuster Q3 2019 earnings, which exceeded Wall Street’s expectations.
This fourth quarter, Tesla has yet another opportunity to surprise. CEO Elon Musk has been quite subdued this Q4, refraining (at least for now) from declaring hyper-ambitious targets for the company in terms of its production and delivery numbers. During the second-quarter earnings call, Musk noted that Q3 will likely be a break-even quarter, and Q4 will be profitable. These expectations were broken in the third quarter when instead of breaking even, Tesla posted a profit.
Amidst Elon Musk’s relative silence, Tesla does have some positive momentum carrying it towards the end of the year. Unlike past quarters, Tesla does not seem to be engaging in its now-trademark end-of-quarter delivery push, which involves the company going all hands on deck around the clock in a mad dash to deliver as many vehicles as possible during the final month of a quarter. It appears that deliveries are ongoing en masse this Q4, but the sense of near-desperate urgency present in past quarters does not seem to be there.
Apart from these, signs are abounding that Tesla Model 3 demand remains healthy. As noted by observations from the Tesla community, the all-electric sedan seemed to be sold out for 2019, with only a few areas assuring customers of delivery before the end of the year. In several territories in Europe and even in Asia, Model 3 deliveries for new orders are now estimated for Q1 2020.
Tesla has also been progressing well in its efforts to expand its reach to other countries. Gigafactory 3 Phase 1 has been fully completed, and mass production of the company’s Made-in-China Model 3 has begun. Tesla has also received a license to sell the all-electric sedan locally. Furthermore, the Made-in-China Model 3 has been granted government incentives, which will likely make the vehicle more attractive to mainstream buyers. Just recently, truckloads of Tesla Model 3 have been spotted being transported from Gigafactory 3, giving the impression that initial deliveries may just be around the corner.
Of course, Tesla does need to meet its ambitious targets to fully meet its own guidance. The electric car maker has estimated that it would deliver about 360,000 to 400,000 vehicles in 2019. Following Q3’s results, Tesla will need to deliver about 105,000 vehicles in the fourth quarter to meet this goal. If it does, then it would not be surprising if Tesla stock ends up being in striking distance of its all-time-high of $383.45 per share, which was achieved on June 19, 2017.
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 Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
Tesla’s Supercharger Diner probably just secured more locations
