Investor's Corner
Tesla (TSLA) drops in the aftermath of Q1 earnings: Here’s Wall St’s take
Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA) experienced a 3% drop on Thursday’s intraday as the electric car maker felt the aftermath of its Q1 2019 earnings. The company posted a loss of $702 million or $4.10 a share in the first quarter, which is almost comparable to Q1 2018’s loss of $4.19 per share.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the company’s executives explained during the Q1 2019 earnings call that the company’s lower-than-expected performance was due to one-time items and circumstances such as delivery delays for the Model 3 in Europe and China. With Tesla back in the red, here is what Wall Street analysts are now saying.
Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives, a longtime TSLA bull, downgraded Tesla from “Outperform” to “Neutral” while adjusting his price target for the company from $365 per share to a far more conservative $275 per share. Ives also penned a scathing note on Thursday, calling Tesla’s Q1 results as one of the “top debacles” Wedbush has ever seen, and criticizing the company’s executives for their belief that demand and profitability will “magically” return in the coming quarters.
“In our 20 years of covering tech stocks on the Street, we view this quarter as one of the top debacles we have ever seen while Musk & Co. in an episode out of the Twilight Zone act as if demand and profitability will magically return to the Tesla story. Ultimately we believe the company’s guidance is aggressive and management/board is not taking aggressive enough cost-cutting actions and shutting down future endeavors to preserve capital and give a sustained path to profitability for the Street. We no longer can look investors in the eye and recommend buying this stock at current levels until Tesla starts to take its medicine and focus on the reality around demand issues which is the core focus of investors,” Ives wrote.
Ryan Brinkman of JP Morgan noted that a negative reaction was already expected considering Elon Musk’s previous comments about Tesla’s inability to turn a profit in Q1. Brinkman, who has an “Underweight” rating and a $200 price target on TSLA stock, also pointed out Tesla’s willingness to do a capital raise this year. “Management also seemed less opposed to an equity capital raise, acknowledging “some merit” to the idea, which in our view serves to highlight dilution risk that likely rises after 1Q cash flow and cash balance tracked weaker than JPM and consensus expectations. While 2Q deliveries guidance appears potentially aggressive, the full year outlook for 360-400K implies a further roughly +35% to +45% sequential increase from 1H19 to 2H19, further highlighting the execution risk entailed in meeting the figures that are implied needed to generate positive earnings and cash flow,” he wrote.
Joseph Spak from RBC noted that Tesla’s Q1 numbers were “uglier than expected,” while stating that a capital raise will likely be held this year. Similar to Brinkman, Spak reiterated his “Underweight” rating and $200 price target for Tesla stock. “Elon talked about putting Tesla on a ‘Spartan diet’ and while we don’t doubt the company spent inefficiently in the past, the low capex+R&D and of course the lower sales, are not hallmarks of a hyper-growth company, yet TSLA continues to be valued as one,” he wrote.
Evercore ISI analyst Arndt Ellinghorst also proved bearish on the company, expressing his reservations about Tesla in a segment of CNBC‘s Street Signs. The analyst was skeptical of the demand for Tesla’s vehicles, even noting that the Model S sedan and the Model X SUV are already starting to look “quite old.” “If you claim that demand is huge and unlimited then the key question is, why do you lower your mix? Why do you lower your pricing? I mean the S and the X are quite advanced in any normal life cycle of a product so they would really need a significant refresh in order to restore the pricing. The brand will be less exclusive than it has been in the past,” the Evercore ISI analyst said.
Not all analysts covering the company were bearish after Tesla’s release of its first-quarter results. In a note, Piper Jaffray analyst Alexander Potter opted to look into the coming quarters for a potential recovery, while pointing out that Tesla’s shortcomings in Q1 were the result of several factors. “Although logistical challenges—long with lower transaction prices—had an obvious impact on Q1 profitability, we think this was temporary,” analyst Alexander Potter wrote in a note. “Guidance implies a second-half recovery for both deliveries and margins, and this seems reasonable to us. The first quarter suffered from a particularly nasty combination of headwinds, including seasonality, a big buildup of non-US deliveries (negative for logistics costs and working capital), as well as the expiration of tax incentives in the United States,” Potter wrote.
As of writing, Tesla is trading down -3.35% at $250.00 per share.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
Elon Musk
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
OpenAI will cut SpaceX-owned Cursor’s model access in November, citing Musk’s history of broken contracts.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced late Friday that it is ending its partnership with Cursor, cutting off the coding tool’s access to its models on November 12. The move comes two weeks after SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, folding the popular AI coding assistant into Elon Musk’s growing SpaceXAI division.
In a post on its website, OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” the company wrote. OpenAI pointed to two specific incidents: X, now part of SpaceX, allegedly breaking the terms of an existing OpenAI contract after Musk bought Twitter.
That lawsuit is the backdrop for all of this. Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015, left the board in 2018, and sued Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, arguing they abandoned the company’s nonprofit mission for profit. A federal jury sided with OpenAI in May, finding Musk waited too long to sue rather than ruling on the merits of his claims. Musk said at the time he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit, calling the outcome a “calendar technicality” rather than a real judgment.
SpaceX’s interest in Cursor predates that verdict by weeks. The company first struck a deal with Cursor in April, securing an option to acquire it for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for joint development work instead. As Teslarati reported at the time, the logic was straightforward: Cursor was paying retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its most direct competitors, every time a developer used its product, while SpaceX had idle capacity on its Colossus supercomputer, roughly the equivalent of a million Nvidia H100 GPUs, that Cursor could use to train its own models instead. SpaceX exercised the option in June, days after its own IPO, and the deal closed in mid-August.
Once it closed, Musk moved fast. On an all-hands call with more than 1,000 Cursor employees, he reportedly told staff that SpaceXAI’s Grok was playing catchup in the AI race, unlike Tesla and SpaceX in their own markets, and singled out Anthropic as the company to catch. Cursor CEO Michael Truell now reports directly to Musk inside SpaceXAI.
Losing OpenAI’s models leaves Cursor leaning harder on Anthropic’s Claude, which has its own compute agreement with SpaceX, and on Cursor’s in-house Composer model, the one SpaceX’s compute was supposed to accelerate in the first place. OpenAI framed the November deadline as maximum notice under its contract, and said it wants to “go above and beyond” to help developers through the transition. Whether Anthropic makes the same call is now the open question in AI coding.
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.
Elon Musk
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.
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
Tesla Theater might be getting plenty more streaming platforms
