Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) can rebound with 10 turnaround ideas, according to a new note from Wedbush analyst Dan Ives.
Tesla reported Earnings for Q4 and Full Year 2023 on Wednesday, and after what was widely considered to be a weak conference call, the stock dropped over 12 percent on Thursday.
Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush who has been routinely bullish on the stock, was one of the most vocal personalities on Wall Street yesterday as varying ideas surrounding the narrative of the Earnings Call circulated.
Ives called the call a “train wreck,” and talked about the lack of information Tesla reported during Earnings. There was no indication of what investors should expect in terms of margins or outlook in production.
Instead, Tesla stated it expected a “notable” drop in growth rate in 2024 as it gears up for its next-generation platform, which it plans to launch in the second half of 2025.
“This was 101 how to not to do a conference call,” Ives commented on Thursday morning. Wedbush removed Tesla stock from its “Best Ideas List” as well.
Tesla Can Rebound with These 10 Things: Wedbush
However, Ives is back with a note on Friday, which he shared with investors. According to the analyst, there are ten ways Tesla can turn around its stock:
- Announce a $10 Billion Share Buyback With Roughly $30 Billion of Cash on hand. Walk the walk, not just talk the talk and show confidence to investors
- Create an “X Holding” Structure That Will Include AI Initiatives (Dojo, Optimus, FSD) to give Musk More Control and could get him to ~25% voting level
- Stop the price cuts now and maintain margin leverage over other auto players
- Hold an AI Day before the summer timeframe so investors can better understand the goals for Dojo, Optimus, FSD
- Get outside capital for X/Twitter with assurances of no more Musk stock sales
- New comp package with the proxy to lock in Musk as CEO Through 2030, along with settling Delaware legal issue holding things up
- Hittable production/delivery timeline for Model 2 and sub $30k vehicle in 2025
- With Zach (former CFO) gone, conference calls have been horror shows; return to formal guidance and goalposts and make messaging changes on calls
- Do an aggressive AI acquisition spree and bring in outside capital to build out the AI component of Tesla…~$30 Billion of cash to fund deals
- Give long-term targets around AI revenue to the Tesla ecosystem. We believe Tesla could be the biggest AI company in the world around FSD, autonomous, Dojo, Optimus, robotaxis…give this key AI framework to the Street/investors
Several of the ideas Ives lists would clarify some skepticism investors may hold after the Earnings Call.
One of the more notable things to recognize on the list is the price cut narrative, which investors continue to focus on. While they are great for consumers, they put pressure on Tesla’s profits, which is why it has continued to be so strong for years.
Additionally, offering CEO Elon Musk a new comp package could alleviate pressure on the stock from his comments last week, where he said he would be “uncomfortable” moving Tesla into more development of AI without greater control.
RELATED:
Ives reduced his price target on Tesla from $350 to $315 but still holds an ‘Outperform’ rating on the stock.
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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
— 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.
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.
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.
SpaceX wants to catch Starship for launch 14, Elon Musk says
Tesla to open source Model S and Model X designs and software
