Investor's Corner
Tesla’s Q3 results and Wall St’s reaction: When record deliveries is bad news
Tesla’s (NASDAQ:TSLA) third-quarter results set new production and vehicle delivery records for the electric car maker. With a total of 96,155 electric cars produced and about 97,000 delivered between July and September, as well as an update that revealed that the company achieved record net orders in Q3, Tesla’s results were objectively impressive.
Yet, the market’s reaction to Tesla’s Q3 results was unforgiving. TSLA stock dipped over 4% in after-hours trading following the company’s release of its record third-quarter results. Bearish outlooks were shared by analysts covering the company once more, and questions about the demand for Tesla’s vehicles were rekindled.
A key driver of this negative narrative was Tesla’s reported miss of Wall Street’s expectations, as analysts polled by FactSet had an average estimate of 99,000 deliveries for Q3 2019. It should be noted that this estimate did not represent the latest consensus numbers from the greater number of analysts covering the company prior to the release of the Q3 production and delivery results.
FactSet usually utilizes about 10-12 analyst estimates to create a consensus, but over 20 analysts are covering Tesla. If one were to list the average estimates from 21 financial firms covering the electric car maker, one would see that Tesla’s “miss” might not really be a miss at all. In fact, it would appear that Tesla actually met Wall Street’s expectations.
Among New Street, Baird, BAML, Nomura, CSFB, Macquarie, Bernstein, DB, Cowen, JPM, OpCo, CE, MS, UBS, Wolfe, JMP, Needham, ISI, RBC, Barclays, and Wedbush, the actual delivery estimates among analysts covering the company was 94,422 units, comprised of 76,831 Model 3 and 17,591 Model S and X. That’s more conservative compared to Tesla’s 97,000 deliveries, comprised of 79,600 Model 3 and 17,400 Model S and X.
In a way, a good part of the bearish narrative that emerged following the release of the Q3 2019 results was due to a delivery target quoted in a leaked Elon Musk email that made the rounds just days before the end of the quarter. In the message, Musk rallied Tesla’s employees to push deliveries since the company has a chance of hitting 100,000 deliveries in Q3. That 100,000 delivery target was not official guidance from Tesla, but it seemed like it was practically considered as such by some analysts covering the electric car maker.
With Tesla’s official delivery figures falling short of the 100,000 mark, it became pretty easy to frame the narrative as a disappointing quarter for deliveries. The numbers are anything but, especially considering that sales among veteran automakers in the United States experienced a difficult third quarter.
Japanese carmakers Toyota and Honda, two of the US’ leading Asian automakers, suffered double-digit declines that were worse than analysts anticipated. Ford, the maker of America’s most popular vehicle, also saw its sales sink by 4.9% year-over-year. Compared to these, Tesla’s 16.2% year-over-year improvement in deliveries is quite impressive.
In the aftermath of Tesla’s Q3 2019 results and the unfortunate reaction of the market, is Tesla completely blameless? Not completely. It is unfortunate, but executives such as Elon Musk must realize that at this point, Tesla is playing a game that is not exactly fair, as evidenced by the CEO’s informal delivery target seemingly being considered as guidance by some analysts. In this light, emails with lofty forecasts might prove unwise in the future, or stronger safeguards must at least be placed to ensure that no internal emails are leaked.
As of writing, Tesla stock is trading -6.53% at $227.26 per share.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
Investor's Corner
Tesla crushes Wall Street expectations, beats delivery estimates by over 15 percent
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) beat Wall Street expectations of 406,000 vehicles delivered in Q2 by reporting 480,126 deliveries for the three months ending in June.
Tesla reported it delivered 467,762 Model 3 and Model Y units, while 12,364 Model S, Model X, and Cybertrucks switched hands during the quarter. The Model S and Model X were officially sunset this past quarter and will no longer be part of the company’s Production & Delivery reports moving forward.
🚨 BREAKING: Tesla delivered 480,126 vehicles in Q2, ANNIHILATING Wall Street expectations of 406,000. Production was reported at 451,758.
Deliveries:
Model 3/Y: 467,762
Other Models: 12,364Production:
Model 3/Y: 442,936
Other Models: 8,822 https://t.co/TTHwQAsKt8 pic.twitter.com/7qI4Zj6FE5— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 2, 2026
The quarter is a pleasant surprise and a good rebound from Q1, when Tesla slightly missed the Wall Street consensus of 365,645 cars by reporting 358,023 deliveries for the first three motnhs of the year.
Energy storage deployments also provided some strength in Tesla’s delivery report, hitting 13.5 GWh for Q2. This is a particular division of Tesla’s business that has been overwhelmingly robust over the past few years, truly being a strong point of the company’s overall model.
For the year, Tesla analysts still predict deliveries to trend in the 1.69 million unit region, a modest 3 to 5 percent increase from the 1.64 million cars the company delivered last year. Tesla will likely return to more sequential and noticeable year-over-year growth as the Cybercab project starts to ramp up considerably in the next few years.
Tesla has some other potential catalysts to spur vehicle deliveries, too. Not only is it expecting Cybercab to truly start making a change in the next few years, but other vehicles could be entering the company’s lineup.
Tesla sends production Cybercab with no steering wheel, pedals to on-road testing
The slightly longer Model Y L has been a highly speculated release candidate in the U.S. It has already done incredibly well in China, and U.S. buyers have been wanting slightly more interior space than the Model Y. Now that the Model X is gone, it is more needed than ever.
Q2 highlights a pretty stable automotive division within Tesla, and no true concerns arise from these figures, especially considering it managed to beat expectations convincingly.
Investor's Corner
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
Tesla short seller Michael Burry, the subject of the film “The Big Short,” where he was portrayed by Steve Carell, has revealed he has opened a new bet against the stock.
In a new update to his Substack newsletter in a post titled “Trading Post June 30, 2026,” Burry revealed a new set of bets against Tesla, Caterpillar, NVIDIA, Applied Materials Inc., and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.
In regard to Tesla, Burry wrote:
“And finally I shorted Tesla at 416.22. Happy it jumped back to this level.”
This means Burry likely opened his new short position after the company’s recent rally on Wall Street, which saw Tesla shares sink in mid-May, only to recover to well over the $400 mark. Currently, shares trade at around $427.
The company saw a big Tuesday as shares climbed considerably, over 10 percent. The size of the Tesla short was not provided, nor did Burry give any information on the position’s structure, the number of shares, dollar value, or whether options were used in the short.
The Tesla and SpaceX merger everyone is talking about is quietly building
Over the years, Burry has been one of the more vocal critics of Tesla, calling its share price “media inflated,” and saying it was “ridiculously overvalued” as recently as December.
The company has largely transitioned away from being known as an automotive company and instead is much more widely regarded as an AI play, mostly due to its Full Self-Driving efforts, Optimus robot development, and data collection related to both.
This has not pulled those skeptics away from being vocal about their distaste for how Tesla is valued, but there’s no denying that the company is a global force in many things, including sustainable energy, automotive, and AI.
Wedbush Securities is initiating stock coverage on SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), marking the first comments on the company since it went public several weeks ago. Wedbush and its analyst handling coverage, Dan Ives, are widely bullish on fellow Musk company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).
Ives wrote his first note initiating coverage of SpaceX shares on Wednesday with a $190 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating. The firm believes the company is well positioned off of its IPO because of its wide array of projects, including AI compute power and infrastructure, connectivity projects, and launches.
“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity,” Ives wrote, “Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel and increasing deal flow for its Colossus clusters.”
Elon Musk called it Epic: The full story of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 12
Wedbush leans heavily on Starlink, which they say is the “profitability driver given the strength of its recurring revenue base of ~12 million subscribers as of June 5th.” Ives believes Starlink is still in the “early innings” of penetrating the global telecommunications and broadband market, as it only holds less than a 1 percent share. However, this number is sure to increase over time.
It also highlights the importance of Starship, which it says is an “essential layer” of SpaceX’s overall success. SpaceX developing and displaying the ability to reuse rockets is a major cost and reliability advantage “as it reduces the necessary hardware launch costs while generating a feedback loop for future flights to improve their launch flight rate without accelerating capex spend.”
Finally, SpaceX’s recent AI/Compute projects are also very elementary, Ives writes. It is worth mentioning Wedbush said its $190 price target is derived from a valuation forecast that sees the company yielding roughly $2.48 trillion of implied enterprise value.
There are also some factors that Wedbush did not take into account with its initial coverage. The firm wrote in the note:
“We note that there is optional value coming from Starship’s accelerating scale towards sub-$200/kg unit economics, orbital data centers, and enterprise AI monetization as these factors could drive meaningful upside but these face major hurdles, so we do not take that into account with our valuation.”
SpaceX shares are down just over 2 percent today, trading at around $167 at the time of publication.
Tesla brings Model Y L ‘Launch Series’ to the U.S. at $61,990
Tesla just told us twice that Model Y L is coming to the U.S.
