Investor's Corner
Tesla (TSLA) gets optimistic outlook from Wall St ahead of Q3 2018 earnings report
Tesla shares (NASDAQ:TSLA) are holding their gains as the company heads towards its third-quarter earnings call. Following a 12.72% rise on Tuesday amidst the company’s earlier-than-expected earnings announcement and a vocal short-seller’s change of heart, Tesla stock was up 2.51% on Wednesday’s opening bell, breaching the $300 barrier and trading at $301.52 per share.
With the electric car maker invoking a sense of confidence with its upcoming earnings call, several Wall Street analysts have adopted an optimistic outlook on the company. JMP Securities analyst Joseph Osha, for one, gave Tesla an “Outperform” rating and a $350 price target, citing the accumulated “expertise” that the company has exhibited in electric vehicle development and manufacturing.
Baird analyst Ben Kallo has also given Tesla an “Outperform” rating, stating that the company’s positive cash flow could prove sufficient to drive TSLA shares higher. With regards to the upcoming earnings call, Kallo noted that management might provide additional details on how the company intends to increase its production capabilities over the next few quarters.
New Street Research’s Pierre Ferragu has given TSLA stock a “Buy” rating, stating that he expects major free cash flow beat in the third quarter, and continued positive free cash flow in Q4 and beyond. Ferragu noted that Tesla might still raise equity down the line to strengthen its balance sheet, but the company would likely do it only in good market conditions and at the right price.
James Albertine of Consumer Edge further noted that Tesla’s fundamentals had seen a notable improvement in the third quarter, thanks to the ramp of higher-margin Model 3 that sold for around $50,000 to $55,000. The Wall Street analyst has an “Equalweight” rating on Tesla ahead of the company’s Q3 2018 earnings call.
Even Brian Johnson of Barclays, who has an “Underweight” rating on TSLA stock, notes that a sharp increase in Tesla’s deliveries and production have set up a “bear trap.” Johnson further stated that Tesla could have boosted its cash balance by about $800 million in the quarter, bringing the company’s balance to around $3.5 billion.
Tesla shares have exhibited an immense amount of volatility in the past couple of months, partly due to the actions of Elon Musk. During August, for example, Musk posted a tweet stating that he was considering taking Tesla private at $420 per share, and that he had “funding secured.” The fallout of Musk’s “funding secured” tweet included an eventual lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission, who alleged that the CEO misled investors with his Twitter announcement. Musk and the SEC would later reach a settlement, but the damage to Tesla stock would be notable.
Despite the noise surrounding the company and its CEO, though, the fundamentals of Tesla have been exhibiting signs of improvement. When the company released its vehicle production and deliveries report, for one, Tesla revealed that in the third quarter, it had manufactured a total of 80,142 electric cars including 53,239 Model 3, and delivered a total of 83,500 vehicles, comprised of 55,840 Model 3, 14,470 Model S, and 13,190 Model X. VIN registrations for the Model 3 seem to be picking up this October, and a new variant of the electric sedan, the Mid Range Model 3 RWD, was unveiled earlier this month as well.
Overall, this upcoming Q3 2018 earnings call could be historic for the electric car maker. With Tesla out of “production hell,” the company might be on the cusp of entering an era where it is making money. In Elon Musk’s words earlier this year, it’s high time that Tesla starts showing some profit for all its hard work.
Tesla’s Q3 Update letter would be posted on Tesla’s Investor Relations website after markets close today. Tesla would start its Q3 earnings call at 3:30 pm Pacific Time (6:30 pm Eastern Time).
As of writing, Tesla shares are trading -1.02% at $291.14 per share.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
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
