Investor's Corner
Morgan Stanley outlines Tesla’s 8 key drivers for further expansion
Recently, Morgan Stanley (MS) released a note on Tesla’s future capacity expansion. The note discussed key drivers that would push Tesla’s growth further in terms of model/segment and factory footprint. Each driver is discussed below.
Produce in markets where they want to sell & diversify outside China
“Cars don’t ship like iPhones, and there are benefits in high localization,” wrote the Morgan Stanley analysts. The investment bank expects “to see significant diversification going forward.”
Gigafactory Shanghai has proven to be an excellent move for Tesla. Tesla China has significantly contributed to the company’s growth since the Shanghai factory started operations. Giga Berlin and Giga Texas are poised to have the same impact when they are operational.
Make each new factory its ‘best’ factory
The Morgan Stanley note stated that there may be room to improve Tesla’s factories, specifically design, cost, and automation.
Tesla always strives to improve and be more efficient. The company’s constant push to improve can be seen in the slight differences and improvements in each Gigafactory. For example, Tesla Giga Shanghai’s layout and design seem based on the GA4 tent the company built when the company was ramping Model 3 production.
Giga Berlin seems to follow the same design, but Tesla has invested in some impressive machines for production in Europe. For instance, Elon Musk has talked about Giga Berlin’s paint shop for quite some time, describing it as one of the most advanced paint shops in the world.
Then there is Giga Texas, which will be Tesla’s Cybertruck factory. The Cybertruck’s unique stainless steel exoskeleton would probably introduce some tough production challenges that would undoubtedly bring about solutions in ways only Tesla could solve.
Spread bets across national regimes
Morgan Stanley writes that “the industry has learned some recent valuable lessons on overdependence on concentrated/extended supply chains.”
In the last earnings call, Elon Musk shared that Tesla faced some supply chain challenges in the first quarter, which the team handled well. Some rumors suggest that Tesla may be interested in investing in its own factory for chips to avoid similar supply chain challenges in the future. Tesla also stepped forward to help a global shipping company with its vast amounts of shipping data, hinting that Tesla is learning more about supply chain processes.
Tesla’s drivers for technological growth
Morgan Stanley lists two drivers related to Tesla tech that could help the company’s expansion. One tech-related driver states Tesla should set technology standards in major regions by getting there first.
The second driver related to tech states that battery economics drive expansion. “We believe battery vertical integration co-located with final assembly ideally suited to volume of 500k to 1mm units per plant,” noted the Wall Street firm.
Drivers for Tesla’s global market expansion
In its note, Morgan Stanley wrote that Tesla should aggressively reduce prices to prevent/delay encroachment from big tech. The note specifically mentions the Apple Car, calling it the “stalking horse.” Granted, Apple might be able to develop software for vehicles that is much better than software found in the cars of Tesla competitors. However, mass-producing a vehicle would be a challenge for a tech company like Apple with no car production experience.
The Wall Street firm also lists that Tesla partnerships could be a natural outcrop of the company’s global/scaled strategy. “We see scope for Tesla to work with other OEMs (both legacy and startups) in areas such as batteries, full EV skateboards, OS, and other products and services.
Tesla and Elon Musk have always been open to working with other automakers to drive its main goal forward: to expedite the move towards a solar electric economy.
The Teslarati team would appreciate hearing from you. If you have any tips, email us at tips@teslarati.com or reach out to me at maria@teslarati.com.
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.

