Investor's Corner
Tesla stock (TSLA) holding steady amid signs of Model 3 sustained ramp, vote of confidence from Detroit
Tesla shares (NASDAQ:TSLA) are holding steady following Monday’s steep dive after investors weighed in on the now-deleted wild remarks made by CEO Elon Musk over Twitter. As signs emerge that Model 3 production ramp will remain consistent, bolstered by positive sentiment from Detroit after veteran Sandy Munro concluded that Tesla could exceed a 30% profit margin on its mass-market electric car, investors see these as indicators for potentially more upbeat sentiments to come.
Tesla stock has been a battleground since the company announced that it has hit its target of producing 5,000 Model 3 per week at the end of the second quarter. Amidst reservations from a number of Wall St. analysts who believe that the Model 3’s optimal production pace is unsustainable, the company’s shares took a dive. Tesla stock briefly got a reprieve on July 10, after the company announced its plans of building its third Gigafactory in China. Since then, however, the electric car maker’s stock continued to be volatile, until its notable plunge on Monday, when shares fell over 3.5% amidst controversy resulting from Elon Musk’s controversial and now-deleted statements on Twitter during the weekend. In Monday’s after-hours trading, Tesla shares were at $307.20, a significant drop from Friday’s close of $318.87.
As markets opened on Tuesday, however, Tesla stock began holding, as the backlash from Musk’s incendiary weekend Twitter session appeared to taper off. Behind this weekend’s report of Musk’s donations to the GOP and his Twitter issues, after all, signs are emerging that Tesla’s problems with the Model 3 are ending.
This weekend alone, Tesla started shipping ~100 Model 3 Performance to its showrooms to be utilized as test drive units. This follows the electric car’s successful appearance at the 2018 Goodwood Festival of Speed in England, where it attracted a significant amount of interest from the event’s attendees. Tesla’s VIN registrations have also seen a notable spike since the end of the second quarter, with the company registering more than 19,000 new Model 3 VINs since the beginning of the month. It should be noted that Tesla started manufacturing the Model 3 in mid-2017, and it was only able to hit the 19,000 mark this March.
Apart from signs that the Model 3’s 5,000/week production could actually be sustained, more encouraging news for Tesla came in the form of a new Autoline Network segment featuring Detroit veteran Sandy Munro. Munro, a teardown expert and CEO of Munro & Associates, has been studying the Model 3 for months, and while his initial impressions on the vehicle were predominantly negative, he was eventually won over by Tesla’s battery technology and electronics. According to Munro, Tesla could see more than 30% profit on the Model 3, thanks to the California-based electric car company’s in-house development and optimal utilization of the vehicle’s components.
Munro noted that the Tesla Model 3’s electronics, which he previously compared to a military-grade flight controller, is a “symphony of engineering.” The Detroit veteran also praised Tesla’s 2170 cells for the Model 3, which are 20% larger than the Model S and X’s 18650 cells but carry 50% more power. Perhaps the most notable among Munro’s conclusion, however, was mentioned by Autoline Network in its video’s comments section. According to the network, Munro stated that he expects even the $35,000 Standard Range RWD Model 3 to still make a “double-digit gross profit.”
Munro’s findings are in line with the results outlined by a German teardown company earlier this year, which estimated that the materials used for the Model 3 cost around $18,000 per vehicle. Coupled with Tesla’s pledge to reduce its cobalt use (cobalt is among the most expensive components of its batteries) over the next few years, Tesla’s profit margins for the Model 3 appear to have a lot of potential.
As the dust clears, it seems like Elon Musk’s recent statement in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek will come to pass — Tesla’s production hell with the Model 3 is ending, and the coming year would be very, very encouraging.
As of writing, Tesla shares are trading up 1.34% at $314.12 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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Investor's Corner
Tesla Robotaxi gets a massive upgrade in Nevada
Nevada regulators just approved a massive expansion of Tesla’s robotaxi fleet across the entire county.
Tesla’s robotaxi footprint in Nevada just grew by roughly 500 times in a single regulatory vote.
The Nevada Transportation Authority approved Tesla’s full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit on Thursday, clearing the way for the company to deploy up to 5,000 driverless vehicles across Clark County over the next 12 months. The decision came during a four hour general session meeting that Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt watched live and reported on X, noting the vote replaces the interim order that had limited Tesla to just 10 robotaxis on a narrow stretch of the Las Vegas Strip.
EXCLUSIVE: Tesla has just officially received approval for its full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit in Nevada, clearing the way for Tesla to launch a paid public Robotaxi service in Las Vegas.
This officially allows @Tesla to deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis over the next… pic.twitter.com/DPs5UtUlrE
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 20, 2026
That earlier cap, covered here after it surfaced on August 13, came with restrictions that looked stricter than what Tesla runs in Austin: a 45 mph speed ceiling, no airport pickups, and a geofence confined to the Strip corridor. The new approval extends Tesla’s operating authority to all of Clark County, with room to request an even wider geofence across the state.
Tesla representatives at the meeting said they have no intention of putting 5,000 cars on the road right away. Commercial rides are expected to start within 30 days, pending vehicle inspections, insurance filings, and fare approval, the standard steps every robotaxi operator in Nevada has had to clear.
Tesla’s own Robotaxi account replied to the news with a short line, The golden future is upon us.
The timing lines up with Tesla’s broader robotaxi push this month. The company is preparing to open Cybercab rides to the public in Austin as soon as this month, and it opened a sweepstakes for riders to win a seat at the launch event. Tesla filed its original application for a 5,000 vehicle Nevada fleet back in June, a request regulators trimmed to 10 vehicles when they issued the interim order in July. Thursday’s vote effectively grants the number Tesla asked for from the start.
Zoox, the Amazon owned robotaxi operator, has run in Nevada since 2025 and was capped at 100 vehicles before Thursday’s decision. Tesla’s new ceiling puts it well ahead of that comparison on paper, though the company has said its actual fleet size will depend on how quickly FSD v15 rolls out, the software update executives have called the gateway to scaling unsupervised robotaxi operations nationwide.
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SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.
Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.
The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”
Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”
Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”
Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.
Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.
Tesla Robotaxi gets a massive upgrade in Nevada
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