Investor's Corner
Tesla Investor Day is key to further stock growth, Morgan Stanley says
Tesla Investor Day on March 1 will be a key factor in furthering the company’s stock growth, Morgan Stanley said in a new note to investors.
While Tesla stock (NASDAQ: TSLA) continues to rebound after a sluggish 2022, Morgan Stanley is undoubtedly impressed with the automaker’s recovery in 2023. However, the firm, led by analyst Adam Jonas, said the “window of opportunity” has closed in terms of valuation, and Tesla will need to present something relatively substantial at its Investor Day event in March:
“While we reiterate the Overweight rating on Tesla shares, we believe the window of opportunity on ‘valuation’ has closed. Further upside from here will require a more substantial narrative change following the March 1st Investor Day.”
Tesla has utilized its leverage in high margins to adjust prices accordingly in 2023, which has undoubtedly surged the company’s demand. Tesla has never had a demand problem, according to CEO Elon Musk, just a supply issue as the company has struggled to keep up with its evergrowing order log.
Despite this, Tesla made moves with its pricing early in 2023, cutting Model Y marks by $13,000. Other cars had price cuts as well, and Tesla even adjusted its figures in other markets, like China, which saw a 13.5 percent decrease after the New Year.
With the Model Y’s entire lineup recently being included in the IRS’s list of vehicles qualifying for federal tax incentives, it gives buyers even more reason to purchase the car. However, an increase in demand is not what Morgan Stanley is looking for.
Invitations for the March 1st Investor Day were sent out earlier this week, and the casting design featured on the invites triggered a variety of theories and guesses as to what the main sentiment of the event will be. However, whatever it is, Morgan Stanley and Jonas said in their note that potential catalysts stemming from the Master Plan Part 3 would have to give investors another layer of belief that substantial growth is possible moving forward.
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Even still, the note also entails that, while Tesla may need something relatively groundbreaking moving forward to justify another spike in valuation, the company still maintains a healthy lead over its competitors.
Jonas notes that Tesla shares are up 68 percent this year, while Lucid and Rivian are up 51 and 5 percent, respectively. “Tesla will, short term, invest their margin into price (lower) while, longer term, we expect Tesla will invest their innovation into margin.”
Additionally, Jonas stated that Tesla has specific leverage over competitors:
“At the same time, we remain concerned about the ability of EV competitors (startups and legacy players) to withstand the cost and scale advantages Tesla enjoys as it continues to drive prices lower and share higher in a potential shakeout for the EV industry.”
Companies like Ford, Lucid, and others have also adjusted prices to keep up with Tesla, while companies like Volvo, Volkswagen, and General Motors have denied that price cuts are the answer to compete with the EV leader. Regardless of the pricing strategies the companies employ, Tesla is likely still the most suitable options in terms of charging infrastructure, as well as EV software and tech.
Morgan Stanley reiterated its ‘Overweight’ rating with a $220 price target.
Disclosure: Joey Klender is a TSLA Shareholder.
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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
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— 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.
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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.
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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.
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