Investor's Corner
Tesla (TSLA) shakes off latest skepticism from Wall St as end-of-Q2 approaches
Tesla shares (NASDAQ:TSLA) are proving quite resilient amidst a new round of skepticism from Wall Street. Just recently, Credit Suisse initiated coverage of Tesla, giving the electric car maker an “underperform” rating over what the firm believed would be the company’s difficulties when veteran automakers like Volkswagen enter the electric vehicle market.
Credit Suisse analyst Dan Levy started his TSLA coverage with a $189 price target for the company, which is about 15% lower than the stock’s closing price on Wednesday. Levy noted that his “underperform” rating is based on the argument that TSLA stock does not reflect key profit risks at its current levels. The analyst added that while Tesla is indeed leading in areas like electrification and software that will “define the future of carmaking,” it is likely to “settle as niche carmaker” amidst the arrival of more experienced competitors.
The Credit Suisse analyst noted that Volkswagen is the very definition of an industry incumbent, being around in the market for a very long time. The company also sold over 40 times Tesla’s volume in 2018, showing the vast gap between the two companies. With these in mind, Levy stated that Tesla is a “small newcomer to an industry which has historically had extremely high barriers to entry.”
“To best understand Tesla’s prospects in its push for electric vehicles (EV) proliferation, we believe it’s worthwhile to compare it to an auto industry incumbent – most appropriately Volkswagen (VW)… With both Tesla and VW committed to EV proliferation, the Tesla vs. VW debate could be relevant for the next decade or more. Both automakers are treating the long-term industry shift to vehicle electrification as an existential matter. Yet they are coming from vastly different positions… Tesla currently leads in areas that will likely define the future of carmaking. Yet it faces risks ahead – reflected in our below-consensus estimates. And despite growth ahead, we believe Tesla is likely to settle as a niche automaker,” Levy wrote.
Quite interestingly, Credit Suisse also initiated coverage on two American automakers: Ford and GM. Both veteran companies received an “outperform” rating from the analyst, describing Ford as a company showing “early signs of improvement with more to come” and GM as “one of the best players in our coverage.” For his part, Levy noted that despite his “underperform” rating on TSLA and the myriad challenges facing the company, Tesla “deserves due credit.”
Tesla is currently conducting its end-of-quarter push, delivering as many vehicles to customers before the end of June. A recently-leaked email from Elon Musk has also indicated that the company is “on track” to set records this quarter, but the company needs to “go all out” in order to complete vehicle deliveries.
As of writing, Tesla stock is trading +0.11% at $219.51 per share.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
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 annihilates Wall Street expectations with strong Q2 delivery showing
Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress
