Investor's Corner
Tesla shares rebound over 9% from post-earnings pullback
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) shares rebounded on Monday morning after collapsing late last week following a relatively bullish Earnings Call. The electric automaker’s shares were up over 9% by 1 PM EST.
Last Wednesday, Tesla reported its Earnings for 2021’s Full Year guidance and the year’s final quarter. Tesla reported delivery figures just after the New Year, beating consensus figures by 13 percent and delivering over 936,000 vehicles in 2021 while producing just over 930,000 units.
The Wednesday Earnings Call proved to be more bullish news for investors of Tesla. Musk and Co. reported another Earnings beat with $17.719B in revenues, an improving automotive gross margin, increased free cash flow, and an impressive $2.54 EPS. Wall Street expected $16.65B in revenues, with an EPS of $2.35. Despite the record-setting quarter, Tesla shares dropped sharply last week on Thursday and Friday, contributing to a significant slide in the tech sector as the market continued to experience a blunt selloff.
Shares were down 9.89 percent from Wednesday’s close to Friday’s close.
Tesla has not experienced positive days following Earnings Calls, even when profitability has become a regular expectation for the electric automaker’s quarterly calls. Past post-EC trading days have treated Tesla investors with the perfect inner struggle: Buy more or keep what I have?
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Despite Tesla’s strong financials for Q4, it seemed the market responded to Musk’s quotations regarding Tesla’s future lineup. During the call, the CEO detailed that Tesla would not introduce any new vehicle models this year, putting an end to the speculation of a possible $25,000 Tesla or the arrival of the Cybertruck, which people have waited over two years to own.
“This lack of product is really weird,” John Murphy, a Bank of America analyst with a $1,300 price target on Tesla, said. We estimate it’s going to be 29 other EV models launched in the market. So the market is coming for him, and when we look at market share going forward, he’s going to lose a lot of market share. We can get into specific numbers, but we expect he is going to lose about 50 points of market share in the EV market over the next three to four years,” he said on CNBC.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the $25,000 Tesla wouldn’t be coming this year. (Credit: Alwinart/Twitter)
While other companies do, in fact, have new products coming to the market, the expectation is that consumers will go to whatever car is most desirable. From Tesla’s perspective, their multiple-year lead in software, EV infrastructure, batteries, and manufacturing, may give them peace of mind in knowing that there will be no more new car models this year. Why continue to expand the lineup when the current one is selling, and selling a lot. The Model 3 was Europe’s best-selling EV, and Tesla sold more EVs globally in 2021 than any other company. They may be one of the few companies to have a fully-committed business model that only builds EVs and can do it in massive numbers, but people need cars now, and Teslas may be the most desirable EVs on the market. The question is, when are the other companies going to catch up and compete?
The lack of a “Product Roadmap” update may have culminated in some losses, but not the 10 percent drop-off in stock that is being canceled out this morning. Nevertheless, Tesla shares are on their way back up, along with many others in the auto industry, including Ford (NYSE: F), which gained nearly 4% at the time of writing, and Rivian (NASDAQ: RIVN) up almost 12%.
Disclosure: Joey Klender is a TSLA Shareholder. He does not own shares of Ford or Rivian, which were also mentioned in this article.
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.
SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.
The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.
Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.
The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.
As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.
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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 Optimus Gen 3 [Credit: Tesla]](https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/tesla-optimus-gen3-diner.jpg)
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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