Investor's Corner
Tesla (TSLA) ‘likely to clear a rising bar’ for Q3 deliveries, Credit Suisse says
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) has lofty expectations for its third-quarter delivery numbers, but Credit Suisse analysts Dan Levy and AJ Denham are convinced that the electric automaker is “likely enough to clear a rising bar.”
Levy and Denham also raised their “Blue Sky Scenario” price target to $630.
In a note to investors, Levy and Denham write that they expect Tesla’s Q3 2020 deliveries to be around 140,000 cars. They believe that this is “enough to clear likely buy-side consensus ~ 135-140k. While our expectation would require a record month for Tesla in September (~65k units), we believe this is feasible given Tesla’s typical quarter-end wave.”
* While the bar has risen on the 3Q delivery release, we believe Tesla may have just enough to clear it | Credit Suisse
Blue Sky PT $630$TSLA pic.twitter.com/a82lORbJlv
— David Tayar (@davidtayar5) October 1, 2020
Tesla stereotypically turns up the heat and increases production and deliveries during the final two weeks of a quarter. In the past, the last two weeks have proven to be a boost to the company’s delivery figures as Tesla requires an “all hands on deck” approach to finish out the quarter strong.
“While the bar has risen on the 3Q delivery release, we believe Tesla may have just enough to clear it,” the analysts said.
140,000 Q3 deliveries would be Tesla’s largest quarterly display yet. “We assume June/July combined deliveries of ~75k; for context, this is the highest first two months of a quarter for Tesla, ahead fo the prior high of ~50k in Oct/Nov 2019, and all ahead of Oct/Nov 2019 of ~47k.” This number is astronomical, but the analysts believe it is doable because of U.S. demand and a quickly growing Chinese sector.
“While aggressive, we believe this is feasible given Tesla’s typical quarter-end wave.”
Earlier this month, CEO Elon Musk emailed Tesla employees, stating that there is the potential for “record deliveries” this quarter. The previous record was 112,000 in Q4 2019. Levy and Denham indicate that the bar has shifted after this email was sent and that a larger number of deliveries should be expected for Q3.
Finally, Levy and Denham believe that the post-Battery Day decline has been wiped away and that even a miss at the estimated delivery figure would still keep the stock higher than most price targets. “We’d expect the stock to remain elevated (even if temporarily trading off), as investors would ultimately look past the miss, focusing on Tesla’s robust growth narrative.”
A robust Q3 showing could open the doors for Tesla to achieve its yearly delivery target of 500,000 vehicles. Tesla would need a 160,000 Q3 delivery figure to slice the target in half, but around 140,000 would undoubtedly contribute to the cause.
Tesla will announce quarterly delivery figures within the next few days, and its Q3 2020 Earnings Call will be toward the end of the month, as usual.
Disclaimer: Joey Klender is a TSLA Shareholder.
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.
Investor's Corner
SpaceX gets an absolutely crazy price target after rough IPO
SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) got an absolutely crazy price target rating from Raymond James after the company experienced a tough first few weeks following its Initial Public Offering (IPO).
Despite the tumultuous start, SpaceX has plenty of believers, and the company’s massively successful Starship launch last Friday, its 13th test flight of the massive rocket, went so smoothly that Raymond James analysts pushed its price target on the company to roughly 7 times its current trading level.
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
The firm officially put a “Strong Buy” rating and an $800 price target on the stock. It currently trades at around $113. Its all-time high is $225.64, reaching this trading level shortly after shares first went public.
Raymond James’ price target is tied to the firm’s confidence after Starship’s 13th test flight. Analysts at the firm said it was an incremental step that reduces engineering risks, citing the widely successful heat shield test that CEO Elon Musk recently detailed, the smooth deployment of Starlink V3 satellites, and a successful in-space engine relight.
SpaceX also managed to see Starship splash down safely in the Indian Ocean, while the Super Heavy Booster fell down to the Gulf of America with no incidents.
It is interesting to see these launches have such a tremendous impact on the stock and what investors think of it. After SpaceX initially delayed the Starship launch last week, shares fell tremendously. Most probably did not realize that the stand-down is a standard practice, especially if everything is not perfect.
The mission was initially aborted due to an issue with Raptor engines. This was resolved, and Starship launched last Friday after another delay on Thursday, which was caused by weather.
Now that analysts have seen what SpaceX launches are capable of and how impressive the feat is, firms are adjusting their price targets accordingly, making it known that they have high expectations for the space exploration company.

