Investor's Corner
Tesla dips amid Elon Musk’s 12-month vehicle forecast, TSLA coverage observations
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.
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Cybertruck
Tesla Cybertruck production snaps back after ugly supplier fight
Cybertrucks are piling up again at Giga Texas after Tesla’s court win against a parts supplier.
Cybertruck production at Giga Texas is showing its first visible recovery since Tesla sued a supplier last month over withheld manufacturing tooling.
Aerial observer Joe Tegtmeyer flew over the Austin factory Wednesday morning and counted roughly 100 or more Cybertrucks filling the outbound lot, a sharp jump from the thin numbers seen in recent weeks. The flyover came a day after a judge granted Tesla a temporary restraining order against Angstrom Automotive Group, the parts supplier at the center of the dispute.
Tesla filed an emergency lawsuit in late July after Angstrom told the automaker it planned to close the Troy, Texas facility where Tesla’s die-cast tools, trim dies and other Cybertruck stamping equipment were housed. According to Tesla’s complaint, a shipment of 700 finished parts never left the building, and when Tesla sent representatives to retrieve its equipment, accompanied by law enforcement, they were turned away. Angstrom allegedly then asked for an extra $250,000 a week to keep operating, which Tesla’s filing described as holding its own property for ransom.
TESLA: U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Wolfe of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Waco Division granted Tesla a Temporary Restraining Order and Writ of Replevin in its dispute with Angstrom Automotive (Case No. 6:26-cv-00477).
The order authorizes… https://t.co/E1DKcQSxMn pic.twitter.com/LR8aAiV2Og
— S.E. Robinson, Jr. (@SERobinsonJr) August 5, 2026
The restraining order gives Tesla immediate right of entry to Angstrom’s facility to recover the tooling. It is temporary, with a fuller hearing still to come, but the speed of Wednesday’s rebound suggests the Angstrom shortage was indeed the main bottleneck limiting Cybertruck output. Outbound lot counts are an imperfect measure of actual production, since finished trucks can sit for days before shipping, but a lot that full after a lean stretch is a meaningful signal.
Cybertruck output at Giga Texas has fluctuated all year as Tesla worked through supply issues and introduced new trims, including a cheaper Dual Motor AWD version that drew strong early demand.
Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya has cautioned investors shorting SpaceX shares, drawing a direct parallel to the intense short-selling pressure Tesla faced in its early public years.
Responding to reports of elevated short interest in the newly public rocket, satellite, and AI company, Palihapitiya noted that similar dynamics played out with Tesla, where aggressive short sellers ultimately “went broke.”
SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) went public on June 12, 2026, in the largest IPO on record, pricing at $135 per share. Shares quickly surged to an all-time high of $225.64 just days later, briefly implying a valuation exceeding $2 trillion. The stock has since retreated sharply amid valuation concerns, lockup expiration fears, and broader market dynamics.
By early August, it traded near $108–$125, representing a roughly 50 percent decline from the peak and bringing the market capitalization closer to the $1.5–1.7 trillion range. On August 4, shares closed up more than 9 percent at $125.33 ahead of earnings before facing pressure in after-hours and premarket trading.
Short interest has climbed dramatically. According to S3 Partners data widely cited in market reports, short positions reached approximately 219.3 million shares by late July, about 34 percent of the limited public float of roughly 640 million shares, and represented a notional value of around $24.6 billion.
Utilization of shares available to borrow hit 95 percent, with borrow fees rising. This level of shorting exceeded the dollar value of short bets against Tesla at the time and built rapidly ahead of two catalysts: the company’s first post-IPO earnings and an August 6 lockup expiration that could free up to 911.5 million additional shares.
CEO Elon Musk has issued warnings of his own. In mid-July, as short interest approached one-third of the float, he posted that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” reiterating his view that the company could ultimately be worth more than Earth if it achieves its goals.
On August 4, just before earnings, Musk responded to the latest short-interest data by saying, “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
SpaceX delivered its first quarterly results as a public company after the close on August 4. Second-quarter revenue rose 92 percent year-over-year to $7.8 billion, beating consensus estimates near $6.8–6.9 billion.
The net loss narrowed to $541 million, or 9 cents per share, better than the roughly 23–24 cent loss expected. Starlink/connectivity contributed about $4.3 billion (up 66 percent), while the AI business generated $2.6 billion (up roughly 250 percent). Capital expenditures were heavy at $18.4 billion, largely tied to AI infrastructure. Management projected a $100 billion annualized revenue run rate by year-end 2026 and outlined a path toward $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030.
The combination of Chamath’s historical reminder, Musk’s repeated alerts, and the company’s ambitious growth targets underscores the high-stakes debate surrounding SPCX. Short sellers are positioned for near-term supply pressure from the lockup, while long-term bulls point to Starlink scale, Starship progress, and AI compute expansion as reasons the bears may ultimately face the same fate as many early Tesla skeptics.
Investor's Corner
SpaceX and Nvidia team up on Musk’s orbital AI bet
SpaceX revealed a new Nvidia satellite partnership, then Musk pledged an exclusive Nvidia hardware commitment.
SpaceX and Nvidia are now working together on the hardware that will power Musk’s orbital data center ambitions. SpaceX announced on X on Tuesday that it is partnering with Nvidia to design the compute payload for Starmind AI1, the first satellite in a planned constellation built to run AI workloads directly in orbit. Each Starmind satellite will carry Nvidia’s Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs, according to the post, which included renderings of the payload design.
The announcement landed hours before SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company, where Musk went further, saying the company has committed to building its AI infrastructure exclusively on Nvidia hardware. “We think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture. We think it’s the best AI computer, and we greatly value our close cooperation and partnership on many levels with Nvidia,” Musk told investors on the call,. “So we’re exclusive to Nvidia.”
Musk said SpaceX plans to deploy Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 rackscale system, codenamed Kyber, both on the ground and in space. He set a target of 2 gigawatts of compute capacity online by the end of this year, scaling to roughly 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
Starmind has been in development since Musk confirmed the name in June, following an xAI trademark filing that tipped off the project before SpaceX made it official. The idea is massive in scope and instead of moving data down to ground based servers, satellites equipped with onboard processors and large solar arrays would compute AI workloads in orbit and beam results back to Earth. SpaceX has already filed with the FCC for a constellation of up to one million satellites to support the effort, citing constant solar power and the absence of zoning restrictions as advantages over terrestrial data centers.
The Nvidia exclusivity marks a shift in tone from just two weeks ago, when Musk was busy knocking down a report that SpaceX had ordered $52 billion worth of Nvidia GPUs through Foxconn, calling it fake news at the time. The dollar figure in that rumor may have been wrong, but the underlying direction seems correct. SpaceX’s AI division already leases Colossus compute capacity to Anthropic and Google, and Tuesday’s earnings report showed AI revenue climbing sharply as those deals ramp up.
Nvidia shares rose roughly 3% in Tuesday trading on the news, while SpaceX stock climbed nearly 9% during the day before giving back gains after hours as investors digested the earnings report’s capital spending figures.
Tesla’s mysterious Robovan makes a sneak peek with Optimus in Terafab video
Tesla Cybertruck production snaps back after ugly supplier fight
