Investor's Corner
Tesla (TSLA) shares surge amid breakout Q4 earnings, shorts burned with $5B loss
Tesla shares (NASDAQ:TSLA) were on a tear on Wednesday’s trading, ending the day at $580.99 per share. At the time, it seemed like a good level for some bulls to enjoy some of their earnings, especially considering that the release of earnings usually results in TSLA’s trademark volatility. But as it turned out, this time around, Tesla was actually just getting started.
Propelled by yet another breakout earnings report, which saw the electric car maker post $7.3 billion in revenue and an earnings per share of $2.14 in the fourth quarter, Tesla shares saw a meteoric rise in Wednesday’s after-hours trading. This rally continued well into Thursday’s pre-market, with shares trading as high as 11%. Amidst this rise, Tesla bears, who have been dealt numerous blows in the past few months, had to swallow yet another painful, white-hot pill on Thursday.Â
S3 Partners’ Ihor Dusaniwsky, who actively tracks Tesla’s short interest, noted that shorts have swallowed $5.42 billion worth of mark-to-market losses in January 2020. What’s pretty remarkable was that $1.28 billion of this number came from Thursday’s pre-market movements alone.
Tesla will likely be a polarizing stock for years to come. Even amidst the company’s radical rise since posting its Q3 2019 earnings, Wall Street analysts are still widely divided on the electric car maker. Among analysts surveyed by Bloomberg, 18 have a “Sell” rating on the stock, twice the number of analysts who have a “Buy” rating. Short interest also remains at about 11% of the company’s float, according to data from IHS Markit.Â
Yet, as TSLA shares climbed following the earnings report on Wednesday, even bearish analysts were forced to adjust their price targets for the company. RBC analyst Joseph Spak, who has an “Underperform” rating on TSLA, adjusted his price target to $530 per share, a far cry from his previous $315 estimate. Spak also admitted to being “misguided” in some of his assumptions about the company, though he continues to insist that Tesla shares are overvalued.
Wedbush also set a new bull case scenario with an optimistic price target of $900 per share. Dan Ives, who was aggravated with Tesla and its executives during the past year’s challenging quarters, recognized that the company’s presence in Shanghai might very well help the electric car maker’s numbers this year.Â
“We believe hitting the important 500k delivery threshold for FY20 is well within reach as now based on our Chinese demand scenario analysis that Tesla has the potential to hit the elusive 1 million overall delivery vehicle mark potentially two years ahead of our original 2024 projections given this current trajectory aiming now at 2022,” he noted.
Piper Sandler posted a bullish outlook for Tesla, with analyst Alexander Potter raising his price target of $553 to $729 per share. In a note to clients, Potter stated that he is giving Tesla more credit for its operating leverage, saying that the company’s “thriftiness continues to impress.” The analyst also noted that Tesla is on a path towards becoming “the world’s only relevant publicly-listed automaker.”
There comes a point in time when even the most persistent bearish arguments get proven so wrong, they become nothing more than noise. This certainly appears to be the case with Tesla shares, with investors supporting the company due to its improving fundamentals. With shorts hurting from this recent rise, it remains to be seen just how high Tesla could fly in the near future.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch
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.
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’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.
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.
Elon Musk
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
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.
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.

