Investor's Corner
The finer points of Tesla’s (TSLA) S&P 500 Inclusion
This week, it was announced that Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) would join the S&P 500 Index on December 21st. The news shot the stock up nearly $100 in just two days, with most of the surge coming directly after the Tuesday announcement. While it is impressive enough that Tesla is finally being included in the S&P, some finer points aren’t being discussed, like Tesla’s young age compared to other companies in the index and its massive size going into the inclusion date.
Tesla’s 2020 performance on Wall Street has been more than impressive, and it was only a matter of time before larger, more prestigious investment indexes would look to acquire the electric car company. After soaring from $86 to over $500 throughout the year, Tesla broke yet another record this week after beating its all-time high price per share on Thursday.
Tesla could be the 6th most valuable company in the Index
With the surge in stock price comes an extreme growth in terms of company market cap, and the substantial increase in price per share has contributed significantly to Tesla’s valuation. If Tesla were to be added to the S&P today, it would be the sixth-largest company in the Index, in front of Berkshire Hathaway and behind Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company.
The only companies that would be considered more valuable than Tesla would be Alphabet Inc. Class A Shares, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple, all of which are the leaders in their respective industries. Although Apple and Microsoft could be considered a 1-2 punch in the tech world, the other companies are all surely at the head of the pack in their respective sectors.
Tesla will be one of the youngest companies in the Index
With Tesla being founded in 2003, it will be 17 years old when it joins the S&P 500 Index in December. That makes the company’s addition even more significant because its impact in such a short span of time is evident. While many of us recognize Tesla as the EV tech leader, the company could be considered the leader in the automotive sector altogether. This is simply incredible when you consider that Tesla has only had cars on the road since 2008 and has only been a mass-market carmaker since 2017 when the Model 3 was introduced.
However, Tesla has a tremendous influence on other car companies. Legacy automakers are fighting to stay relevant and admitting that they must make a transition to electrification. With Tesla leading that charge, new tricks are being taught to old dogs. It is just a matter of whether the old dogs choose to continue learning “new tricks.” If they don’t, they will slowly fade away as EVs become more popular on the road.
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Tesla is one of the only car companies in the Index
Tesla will join GM and Ford, two of the biggest names in the automotive sector, in the Index. The S&P 500 inclusion requirements are lofty, like an $8.2B market cap, have at least 10% of its shares outstanding, have its most recent quarter be profitable, and have a consecutive string of at least four profitable quarters.
2020 has not been the most forgiving year for many companies, and automotive manufacturers are no exception. Demand for new vehicles has effectively fallen off the table because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it has caused many once-successful car companies to taste the losses of momentum. Companies that make affordable, petrol-powered sedans also are experiencing dropoffs in demand because people cannot afford new vehicles.
Because of this, large car companies that are publicly listed on NASDAQ are missing out on their opportunities to string together consecutive quarters and provide profitable margins to their investors. But Tesla isn’t having this issue because their cars are more than just vehicles. They are software devices. They are new ways to get from Point A to Point B. And, with many people worried about climate issues, electric cars are the only acceptable way to travel.
Tesla is joining the S&P during a year where growth was virtually impossible
To grow on the past points made, this year was supposed to be dramatically difficult for almost every company on the planet that wouldn’t increase work efficiency in a pandemic. Early winners were companies like Zoom, who created communication possibilities while not being near other people. Nobody would have thought that a company selling $35,000+ cars would see this much growth, but it has.
Tesla’s company mission attacks more than one issue in today’s world. Many investors and firms alike forget this fact: Tesla isn’t just a car company. They’re making solar panels, big batteries, and cars. Not to mention, their energy products are suitable for both commercial and residential use, making them desirable for a large market.
If we all could go back to the beginning of the pandemic, we would bet that car companies wouldn’t do well this year. They didn’t. But Tesla did, and it is because their identity as a true tech company has helped surge them past the label of “automaker” or “sustainable energy company.” Tesla is bigger than that, and when investors realize it, their portfolios will benefit.
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I use this newsletter to share my thoughts on what is going on in the Tesla world. If you want to talk to me directly, you can email me or reach me on Twitter. I don’t bite, be sure to reach out!
Update: Revisions made to third subsection at 9:45 EST.
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.
SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch
SpaceX’s Starship just got filmed by its own cargo
