Investor's Corner
Top 10 questions Tesla (TSLA) investors want to know from the Q2 2022 earnings call
Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) is holding its second-quarter earnings call after markets close today, July 20, 2022. As in previous quarters, Tesla investors have voted for the top questions that they want the company’s executives to answer at the upcoming Q2 2022 earnings call.
As noted by Say, the questions that Tesla investors have submitted for the second quarter earnings call represent inquiries from both retail and institutional investors.
Following are the Top 10 Questions from Retail Tesla investors:
- How do you feel the progress of FSD is going, and does Andrej Karpathy leaving have any significant impact on any timelines/potential progress?
- How is the 4680 ramp going, and is Giga Texas producing cells yet?
- Can you speak w/some level of precision on the 4680 ramp, expected vs. actual yield at this point in time? Same for expected daily output vs. actual, and when does output start meeting plan?
- Will there be early access for Tesla long-term investors to have early access to SpaceX as an investment opportunity?
- How does $TSLA plan to handle all the misinformation, attacks, and fake news against Tesla and Elon Musk? We have been dealing with this and it affects the stock.
- How do you plan on executing your strategies to create massive scale? Any ETA on Master Plan Part 3?
- Would you consider buying back shares if we can maintain profitability?
- What are the biggest 4680 headwinds? And what do you think 4680 production output will be by the end of 2022?
- Any update with Tesla HVAC that can be shared?
- Is Tesla still planning a software development kit and app store for third-party developers to make and sell Tesla apps?
And the following are the questions from Tesla institutional investors.
- Chinese EV manufacturers seem to be doing a better job than their western competitors (excluding Tesla) at innovating in software and design. How can Tesla make sure the company is staying ahead of those manufacturers, both within and without China?
- When will Tesla have a unified vector space for both the static and moving object network? Will this be v11 or a later version? If the latter, can you explain what makes it a difficult problem in layman’s terms?
- Elon recently tweeted about lowering prices “once inflation cools down.” Can you elaborate on what you mean by cooling down and how aggressively the company will lower prices? More broadly, how do you think about auto pricing longer-term?
- You made the right economic call before most on inflation when you diversified into bitcoin. It has since shown it’s not much of a hedge in the real-world test the last few months. How do you think about it as an asset over the LT, and what do you need to see to change your view?
- With regards to the tamp of production in Austin and Berlin, how is the situation with regards to the supply of semiconductors, battery cells, and other components? How about cost inflation impacting profitability of these and other plants?
- What’s the source of Energy for Tesla Berlin? Would the plant would be considered a priority for the German government in case of Gas / Energy rationing?
- Assuming technical hurdles are achieved, what is Tesla’s plan for autonomy/robotaxi? Do you expect to first deploy into repetitive routes like Vegas Loop/airport shuttles? or launch fleets in urban areas? What is assessment of political willpower for each?
- What sort of demand has tesla seen for Optimus? How would you characterize this demand in terms of units? Re: economics, a hardware fee with SaaS element seems to make sense but can you guide on dollar amounts the market may be willing to pay per unit + exp. margins (at scale)?
- At what revenue level will Tesla have to grow its Energy Generation and Storage business to reach profitability, and when might that be achieved? Will you need new battery or solar technology advancements?
- How would you rate the EV industry’s progress in achieving sustainable transport, and what are the 3 most likely countries Tesla will need new Gigafactories to achieve sustainable transport?
Disclaimer: I am long TSLA.
Investor's Corner
Tesla crushes Wall Street expectations, beats delivery estimates by over 15 percent
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) beat Wall Street expectations of 406,000 vehicles delivered in Q2 by reporting 480,126 deliveries for the three months ending in June.
Tesla reported it delivered 467,762 Model 3 and Model Y units, while 12,364 Model S, Model X, and Cybertrucks switched hands during the quarter. The Model S and Model X were officially sunset this past quarter and will no longer be part of the company’s Production & Delivery reports moving forward.
🚨 BREAKING: Tesla delivered 480,126 vehicles in Q2, ANNIHILATING Wall Street expectations of 406,000. Production was reported at 451,758.
Deliveries:
Model 3/Y: 467,762
Other Models: 12,364Production:
Model 3/Y: 442,936
Other Models: 8,822 https://t.co/TTHwQAsKt8 pic.twitter.com/7qI4Zj6FE5— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 2, 2026
The quarter is a pleasant surprise and a good rebound from Q1, when Tesla slightly missed the Wall Street consensus of 365,645 cars by reporting 358,023 deliveries for the first three motnhs of the year.
Energy storage deployments also provided some strength in Tesla’s delivery report, hitting 13.5 GWh for Q2. This is a particular division of Tesla’s business that has been overwhelmingly robust over the past few years, truly being a strong point of the company’s overall model.
For the year, Tesla analysts still predict deliveries to trend in the 1.69 million unit region, a modest 3 to 5 percent increase from the 1.64 million cars the company delivered last year. Tesla will likely return to more sequential and noticeable year-over-year growth as the Cybercab project starts to ramp up considerably in the next few years.
Tesla has some other potential catalysts to spur vehicle deliveries, too. Not only is it expecting Cybercab to truly start making a change in the next few years, but other vehicles could be entering the company’s lineup.
Tesla sends production Cybercab with no steering wheel, pedals to on-road testing
The slightly longer Model Y L has been a highly speculated release candidate in the U.S. It has already done incredibly well in China, and U.S. buyers have been wanting slightly more interior space than the Model Y. Now that the Model X is gone, it is more needed than ever.
Q2 highlights a pretty stable automotive division within Tesla, and no true concerns arise from these figures, especially considering it managed to beat expectations convincingly.
Investor's Corner
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
Tesla short seller Michael Burry, the subject of the film “The Big Short,” where he was portrayed by Steve Carell, has revealed he has opened a new bet against the stock.
In a new update to his Substack newsletter in a post titled “Trading Post June 30, 2026,” Burry revealed a new set of bets against Tesla, Caterpillar, NVIDIA, Applied Materials Inc., and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.
In regard to Tesla, Burry wrote:
“And finally I shorted Tesla at 416.22. Happy it jumped back to this level.”
This means Burry likely opened his new short position after the company’s recent rally on Wall Street, which saw Tesla shares sink in mid-May, only to recover to well over the $400 mark. Currently, shares trade at around $427.
The company saw a big Tuesday as shares climbed considerably, over 10 percent. The size of the Tesla short was not provided, nor did Burry give any information on the position’s structure, the number of shares, dollar value, or whether options were used in the short.
The Tesla and SpaceX merger everyone is talking about is quietly building
Over the years, Burry has been one of the more vocal critics of Tesla, calling its share price “media inflated,” and saying it was “ridiculously overvalued” as recently as December.
The company has largely transitioned away from being known as an automotive company and instead is much more widely regarded as an AI play, mostly due to its Full Self-Driving efforts, Optimus robot development, and data collection related to both.
This has not pulled those skeptics away from being vocal about their distaste for how Tesla is valued, but there’s no denying that the company is a global force in many things, including sustainable energy, automotive, and AI.
Investor's Corner
SpaceX gets initial stock coverage from Tesla’s biggest bull
Wedbush Securities is initiating stock coverage on SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), marking the first comments on the company since it went public several weeks ago. Wedbush and its analyst handling coverage, Dan Ives, are widely bullish on fellow Musk company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).
Ives wrote his first note initiating coverage of SpaceX shares on Wednesday with a $190 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating. The firm believes the company is well positioned off of its IPO because of its wide array of projects, including AI compute power and infrastructure, connectivity projects, and launches.
“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity,” Ives wrote, “Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel and increasing deal flow for its Colossus clusters.”
Elon Musk called it Epic: The full story of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 12
Wedbush leans heavily on Starlink, which they say is the “profitability driver given the strength of its recurring revenue base of ~12 million subscribers as of June 5th.” Ives believes Starlink is still in the “early innings” of penetrating the global telecommunications and broadband market, as it only holds less than a 1 percent share. However, this number is sure to increase over time.
It also highlights the importance of Starship, which it says is an “essential layer” of SpaceX’s overall success. SpaceX developing and displaying the ability to reuse rockets is a major cost and reliability advantage “as it reduces the necessary hardware launch costs while generating a feedback loop for future flights to improve their launch flight rate without accelerating capex spend.”
Finally, SpaceX’s recent AI/Compute projects are also very elementary, Ives writes. It is worth mentioning Wedbush said its $190 price target is derived from a valuation forecast that sees the company yielding roughly $2.48 trillion of implied enterprise value.
There are also some factors that Wedbush did not take into account with its initial coverage. The firm wrote in the note:
“We note that there is optional value coming from Starship’s accelerating scale towards sub-$200/kg unit economics, orbital data centers, and enterprise AI monetization as these factors could drive meaningful upside but these face major hurdles, so we do not take that into account with our valuation.”
SpaceX shares are down just over 2 percent today, trading at around $167 at the time of publication.