Investor's Corner
Tesla shorts burned anew with TSLA's record $70B market cap and new all-time-high
Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) has dealt another painful blow to short-sellers on Wednesday, as the electric car maker hit a record market cap of $70 billion and shares hit new all-time-highs. TSLA has achieved these milestones as ardent bulls and even longtime bears from Wall Street begin acknowledging the company’s substantial lead in the electric vehicle space.
Tesla continued to show strength on Wednesday’s intraday, with the stock climbing over 2%. This ultimately pushed the electric car maker’s market cap to a record high of $70 billion, marking its place as the world’s 3rd-most valuable carmaker. TSLA shares also traded as high as $389.28, beating the company’s previous all-time high of $386.99, which was reached on June 19, 2017.
In a recent update, S3 Partners Managing Director of Predictive Analytics Ihor Dusaniwsky noted that there appears to be a squeeze going on today, though not at a scale that would qualify as Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s “short burn of the century.” “$TSLA shares shorted is -118k below 1/1/19 level – seems there has been a squeeze of 2019’s first half of the year short activity,” the S3 Partners Managing Director wrote.
While the stock’s current levels are likely not yet enough to trigger a full-on short squeeze, Dusaniwsky has previously stated that there would likely be a good amount of short covering in the $390 range since shorts would be down another -$1.5 billion in mark-to-market losses at those levels. With the ATH now breached and the stock seemingly on the verge of knocking on $390 per share, TSLA shares are now approaching the S3 Partners’ expected short squeeze range.
Tesla is enjoying some momentum as of late. In a recent appearance at CNBC‘s Squawk Box, TSLA bull Colin Rusch of Oppenheimer stated that the electric car maker has already made it through its most difficult days. When faced with the argument from Vanity Fair‘s Bethany McLean that Tesla’s futures may be in some way in danger due to Elon Musk’s capability to raise money and the company’s potential profitability issues, Rusch was quick to point out that such statements are no longer relevant to Tesla at this stage.
“I don’t think this is about Elon anymore. This is about what’s going on in the market with cars. Consumers are going towards premium and sustainable solutions. They’re willing to pay for that sustainability. They’ve got $5 billion of cash on the balance sheet, and they’re growing with a lot of operating leverage. I think your point was relevant a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago, and now it’s just not,” Rusch said.
Even when faced with the argument that more and more people were buying larger trucks and SUVs, Rusch was quick to correct the CNBC panel that such trends are true in the United States, but not necessarily the entire world. The analyst is correct on this point, as large vehicles that are extremely popular in the US such as the Ford F-150 are generally not preferred by consumers at all in large regions such as Europe. This is a reason why the Model 3, a sedan, continues to perform well on the market.
As of writing, Tesla stock is trading +2.67% at $389.11 per share.
Watch Colin Rusch’s of Oppenheimer engage CNBC‘s panel in the video below.
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.
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.
In a striking revelation that underscores the lucrative crossover between Big Tech and space exploration, Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, disclosed a massive $94.1 billion equity stake in SpaceX following the rocket company’s blockbuster initial public offering earlier this year.
The disclosure came in Alphabet’s quarterly filing, marking the first time the long-held private investment has been publicly valued at market prices. Google was an early backer, investing alongside Fidelity in 2015 with roughly $500-900 million at a time when SpaceX was valued around $12 billion.
That bet has delivered extraordinary returns, roughly a hundredfold, transforming a strategic play on satellite internet and launch capabilities into one of Alphabet’s largest assets.
Google, $GOOGL, has said they hold $94 billion in SpaceX, $SPCX, shares after IPO.
— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) July 23, 2026
Of the total holding, approximately $80 billion remains subject to short-term post-IPO lockup restrictions, preventing near-term sales. An additional $14.1 billion faces longer-term restrictions, extending into the third quarter of 2027. This structure limits immediate liquidity but protects against market volatility as SpaceX transitions into public trading.
The SpaceX position contributed significantly to gains in Alphabet’s broader investment portfolio, which also includes a major stake in AI leader Anthropic. Combined, these holdings helped drive nearly $100 billion in investment gains during the second quarter, providing a substantial boost to net income amid ongoing AI spending pressures.
Analysts view the disclosure as validation of Alphabet’s venture strategy beyond its core search and cloud businesses. The investment aligns with deeper ties, including reported multi-billion-dollar deals for AI computing capacity on SpaceX infrastructure. As SpaceX advances Starship flights, Starlink expansion, and ambitious Mars goals under Elon Musk, Google’s stake positions it to benefit from the commercialization of space.
For Alphabet, the windfall highlights how patient, forward-looking bets in transformative sectors can yield outsized rewards. While lockups temper short-term impact, the holding cements SpaceX as a cornerstone of Alphabet’s diversified portfolio in an era where aerospace, AI, and connectivity increasingly intersect. Investors will watch closely as restrictions lift and SpaceX’s public performance unfolds.
Elon Musk
Tesla Semi finally has an FSD timeline and it’s waiting on the Cybercab
Elon Musk told investors Semi self-driving should start working by early 2027, per today’s earnings.
During Wednesday’s’ Tesla Q2 earnings call, an analyst asked Elon Musk when Tesla would look at autonomy for the Semi. His answer set a real timeline for the first time, noting that self-driving on the Tesla Semi is expected to start working “around the end of this year or early next year”.
Musk framed the delay as a matter of priority, not capability. Tesla’s self-driving team is currently focused on Model 3, Model Y, and Cybercab, the vehicles that make up the overwhelming majority of Tesla’s fleet. Since Semi trucks on the road remain a small fraction of that total even after the recent Nevada factory ramp, Musk said it made more sense to keep the software team’s attention on what he called “the march of nines of safety” for the higher volume vehicles first. Autonomous Semi development is “taking a bit of a backseat for the next six months or so,” he said, before adding that it “will definitely be working next year and in time for the scale-up to high production of the Tesla Semi.”
Tesla Semi’s official battery capacity leaked by California regulators
The timeline lines up with what’s already been showing up on public roads. In June, a Tesla Semi was spotted in Sunnyvale wearing a full validation rig, the same rooftop sensor array Tesla mounts on vehicles ahead of an FSD milestone.
A second unit was seen near Fremont days later with a matching camera suite and lens washers. Separately, Tesla analyst Nic Cruz Patane posted video this month of the production Semi’s exterior camera array, ten AI4 based units built directly into the truck rather than added later.
Tesla Semi AI4 cameras. The production version has 10 cameras on its exterior.
These trucks are designed to be autonomous. pic.twitter.com/GH3BamxIBQ
— Nic Cruz Patane (@niccruzpatane) April 14, 2026
Musk also gave the reason autonomy on the Semi matters in the first place, a persistent shortage of qualified truck drivers. “There is a really serious shortage of truckers,” he said on the call, framing a self-driving Semi as important both for addressing that shortage and for improving safety and comfort for the drivers running the truck today.
The timing also tracks with the Semi’s production reality. Tesla’s Q2 shareholder letter, dropped language promising the Semi would reach volume production this year. Musk pointed to 4680 battery cell output as the near-term constraint on Semi and Cybercab production. A software timeline landing in early 2027 gives Tesla’s autonomy team room to work while the hardware ramp catches up behind it.
It’s worth nothing that this isn’t necessarily a promise the Semi ships driverless next year. Musk’s own language, self-driving “working” by early 2027, describes internal validation catching up to hardware already riding on every production truck, not a public unsupervised rollout.
Tesla stock tumbles after earnings, one of its sharpest single-day declines
Elon Musk is not happy about this Tesla Full Self-Driving approval delay
