Investor's Corner
Tesla Q4 Earnings is ‘one of the most important’ for Elon Musk and Co.
Tesla’s (NASDAQ: TSLA) fourth-quarter earnings call is being described as “one of the most important” for CEO Elon Musk and Co. by an analyst.
Wedbush’s Dan Ives describes tomorrow’s earnings as crucial, especially based on Musk’s potential comments regarding 2023 delivery targets, automotive gross margins, and overall outlook for the company moving forward.
While every quarter is important for Tesla we would highlight tomorrow’s call/guidance commentary as one of the most important moments in the history of Tesla and for Musk. Delivery targets for 2023 (1.8 mm the bogey), Auto gross margins, and Musk commentary/outlook key tmrw
— Dan Ives (@DivesTech) January 24, 2023
Tesla’s 2023 Delivery Targets
After delivering a million units in a year for the first time in 2022, with 1.313 million cars delivered globally, Tesla is still going to be looking for year-over-year growth.
“Over a multi-year horizon we expect to achieve 50% average annual growth in vehicle deliveries,” Tesla wrote in its Q3 2022 earnings shareholder deck. “The rate of growth will depend on our equipment capacity, factory uptime, operational efficiency, and the capacity and stability of the supply chain.”
This was a 40 percent increase from 2021 figures. However, it is not necessarily straightforward.
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Tesla dealt with some production shutdowns last year in Shanghai, its biggest contributor to global manufacturing for the past two years. With ramp-ups continuing at Berlin, and products like the Cybertruck expected to launch this year in Texas, along with surges in demand thanks to price decreases, Tesla is sure to see growth this year. However, Ives seems interested in what Musk’s synopsis of the full year could be.
Automotive Gross Margins
After Tesla cut prices globally by as much as $13,000 in the United States and 13 percent in other markets, consumers felt the positives as the cars became more affordable. However, from an investor standpoint, it is much more complicated.
Tesla had the third-best operating margins globally, trailing only Ferrari and BMW. In Q3, the company posted 27.9 percent automotive gross margins, which was unchanged from Q2 but a decrease from the 32.9 percent the company posted in Q1.
Price cuts from Tesla were seen as a way to trigger global demand, which many analysts felt the company was battling against as more competitors entered the EV sector. However, Tesla had raised prices many times over the past two years due to supply chain issues. It seems, while the automaker was making so much per unit, consumers were still looking for an affordable yet competitive EV option from the company.
Overall Outlook for 2023
Perhaps the biggest question on the minds of Tesla investors, especially the company’s “permabulls,” is whether Musk’s attention will remain fixated on Tesla or Twitter. While his acquisition of the social media platform has seemed to take up much of Musk’s time, he has recently solidified that Tesla is the priority.
This has not alleviated the drop the stock felt last year, as Tesla shares dropped over 60 percent in 2022. Slightly recovering so far in 2023 with a 32 percent increase in value so far this year, investors will likely want to know what Musk’s overall plans are for Tesla, and what his potential level of commitment will be.
Many are still questioning how the CEO is splitting his time between the two companies. However, with Tesla expecting to ramp up several projects this year, including a new Semi production facility and the aforementioned Cybertruck, Musk could have his hand in more of the Tesla pie through 2023 than he did in late 2022.
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Ives said in a note to investors:
“Tesla is Musk and Musk is Tesla. With all the worries about Musk’s attention on Twitter, selling Tesla stock, name a new Twitter CEO, and other noise created by this ongoing soap opera….this is a key moment of truth for Musk. Elon needs to give investors comfort around this tight wire balancing act and reiterate his goals for the year and lay out the strategic vision despite a near-term dark macro. Musk is not shy about his negative view of the economy, but how does that weave in with Tesla’s outlook? Also Musk giving some insight into the China situation, Twitter situation will be in the bright spotlight for the Street.”
Wedbush has a $175 price target and maintained its Outperform rating. The firm said it “ultimately believe[s] tomorrow’s call/guidance will be one of the most important moments in Tesla’s (and Musk’s) history.”
Disclosure: Joey Klender is a TSLA Shareholder.
I’d love to hear from you! If you have any comments, concerns, or questions, please email me at joey@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @KlenderJoey, or if you have news tips, you can email us at tips@teslarati.com.
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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