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Tesla dips amid Elon Musk’s 12-month vehicle forecast, TSLA coverage observations

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Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA) is dropping after the opening bell on Monday, on the heels of Elon Musk’s new guidance for the company’s performance in the following 12 months, as well as a fresh round of criticisms from its dedicated skeptics.

Musk’s estimate came as part of a discussion about the impact of Tesla in the auto industry. In his tweet, Musk stated that there are 2.5 billion cars and trucks on the planet; thus, even replacing 1% of that number will require a production rate of 25 million vehicles per year. “Tesla will make over 500k cars in next 12 months, but that’s a mere 2% of 25M or 0.02% of global vehicle fleet. Car industry slow -> demand >> supply,” Musk wrote.

Apart from Musk’s comments about Tesla’s production in the coming year, the CEO also discussed his disappointment at the coverage the electric car maker has been receiving from mainstream media. Musk mentioned a number of publications in his tweets, including Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. True to form, the Wall Street Journal promptly published a negative piece about Tesla on Monday, criticizing, of all things, how the company “can’t stop dreaming big.”

Tesla has been facing a notable amount of criticism after it released its Q1 vehicle delivery and production report, which revealed that the company showed a roughly 30% decline in electric car deliveries and a 12% decline in production compared to Q4 2018. Tesla’s vehicle deliveries actually grew 110% in the first quarter of 2019 compared to Q1 2018, but these figures mostly got lost in the pileup of negative coverage that the company received after releasing its first-quarter results.

Among the most prominent voices that immediately went on the offensive against Tesla was short-seller and Greenlight Capital CEO David Einhorn, who promptly wrote a letter to investors claiming that “the wheels are falling off” at Tesla, which is allegedly “on the brink” due to slowed demand, “desperate” price cutting, cutting CapEx, layoffs, and the departure of senior executives. Einhorn further blasted the company for allegedly using its customers as “guinea pigs,” while predicting that “without initial surge demand elsewhere, TSLA will struggle to even maintain first quarter unit volumes.”

In response to the Greenlight Capital CEO’s allegations, Fox Business Network’s Charlie Gasparino noted that Tesla’s senior executives remain confident in the company as well as its financial state. Gasparino described the sentiments of Tesla’s senior executives as follows.

“Bankers are now, when you see sort of controversy like this, people questioning the numbers of Tesla, whether it’s selling enough cars, and particularly their cash position, that’s the signal for bankers to go and pitch financing deals to Tesla, and they are doing it actively as we speak. But what the company is saying is much different than what Einhorn is saying. This is what the company is telling bankers: they don’t believe there’s a need for financing in the near-term. What they describe as near-term, three months, maybe six months. They don’t think that their cash position is eroding as fast as the street and Mr. Einhorn and other people think it’s eroding. They believe in the near-term, that their finances are fine,” Gasparino said.

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Tesla’s senior executives reportedly maintain support for Elon Musk as well. “Now, we should also point out that Tesla executives and these are senior executives, the conversation always turns to crazy Elon. They describe him as ‘crazy,’ ‘a handful,’ but here’s the best one: ‘a weird dude.’ But they also say, despite his quirks, they describe him as a genius. They also believe in the company, despite all the competition that’s coming at them from others in the electric car space who are gonna get the sort of government handouts that Tesla got early on. They think they have the best electric car in the world. They are well-poised, they got the right guy leading it, (and it’s) a guy who will work 24/7 to make it work,” Gasparino added.

As of writing, Tesla is trading at -3.08% at $259.46 per share.

Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.

Simon is an experienced automotive reporter with a passion for electric cars and clean energy. Fascinated by the world envisioned by Elon Musk, he hopes to make it to Mars (at least as a tourist) someday. For stories or tips--or even to just say a simple hello--send a message to his email, simon@teslarati.com or his handle on X, @ResidentSponge.

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Elon Musk

SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch

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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.

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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.

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Tesla Optimus Gen 3 [Credit: Tesla]

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.

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.

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Elon Musk

SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites

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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.

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