Investor's Corner
Tesla shares (TSLA) recover despite China’s new import tariffs
After showing recovery on Tuesday, Tesla shares (NASDAQ:TSLA) tumbled during pre-market trading on Wednesday amid China’s imposition of new tariffs over US-made products, including electric vehicles like Tesla. Before the opening bell on Tuesday, $TSLA shares were trading down 5.38% at $253.13. The company’s stocks began rebounding later during the day, however, bouncing back from its pre-market dive, up 1.55% and trading at $271.82 per share as of writing.
China’s announcement of its tariffs on US goods comes on the heels of the Trump’s administration’s plans to impose duties on $50 billion worth of Chinese products, including industrial, transport, and medical materials. According to a Reuters report, China Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang claimed that China had been open to resolving the trade dispute through negotiations, but the US had not been responsive so far.
“The best opportunities for resolving the issues through dialogue and negotiations have been repeatedly missed by the U.S. side,” Shuang said.
It only took China 11 hours to respond to Washington’s tariffs in kind, releasing a list of duties on key American imports. Among these are US-made products such as Tesla’s electric cars, Ford’s vehicles from its Lincoln brand, General Dynamics Corp’s Gulfstream jets, and Brown-Forman Corp’s Jack Daniels’ whiskey.
While the two countries’ tariffs on crucial imports appear alarming, Julian Evans-Pritchard, senior China economist at Capital Economics, said that it would not be surprising if negotiations between America and China would happen soon. According to the economist, it is worth noting that only announcements of the tariffs have been made so far. Neither country has called for enforcement of the duties yet.
“The assumption was China would not respond too aggressively and avoid escalating tensions. China’s response is a surprise for some people. It’s more of a game of brinkmanship, making it clear what the cost would be, in the hopes that both sides can come to agreement and none of these tariffs will come into force,” Evans-Pritchard said.
China’s tariffs, if ever they do get enforced, would likely affect Tesla’s operations in the country. Tesla, after all, is currently in intense competition with local electric car makers in China. As we noted in a previous report, Elon Musk brought up the issue of import taxes that American cars face on the country. Tesla is also engaged in negotiation with officials from Shanghai for the construction of a facility speculated to be the Model Y’s future factory.
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J.P. Morgan analyst Ryan Brinkman reiterated his Underweight rating on Tesla’s stocks, citing the ongoing production difficulties that the company is facing with the Model 3. Brinkman also lowered his estimates and stock price target to $185 from $190. RBC Capital analyst Joseph Spak kept his Neutral rating on $TSLA, though he dropped his stock price target from $380 to $305, according to a MarketWatch report.
While Tesla’s shares took a dive during pre-market trading, IHS Markit Managing Director for Asia Pacific James Chao noted in a statement to Bloomberg that Tesla’s woes are relatively minor. Chao further stated the current challenges that Tesla’s shares are facing are manageable, especially since Elon Musk seems to work best when he is driven into a corner.
“(Elon Musk) is really at the edge here. I think this is the environment that works best in, under a lot of pressure. With the tweet on April Fools, you can see that he thrives in the moment. I think that you can see that he is performing, to a certain extent, 2,020 vehicles in the last week of April, was far beyond what analysts, in general, were looking for.
“The overall story just for Tesla is still intact, which is, while large automakers produce vehicles in every single segment of the market, including segments of the market where they can’t make money; Tesla focuses on one segment — this electric vehicle market — which is highly valued. And I think that story still continues despite short-term cycles.”
As we noted in a previous report, Tesla’s first quarter production and delivery report listed a 40% increase in production from Q4 2017. Tesla was also able to manufacture 2,020 Model 3 during the last week of March. Delivery figures were also strong, with the company delivering 29,980 vehicles in total during the first three months of the year. Among this number, 8.180 were Model 3.
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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