Investor's Corner
All eyes on Tesla 2016 financial results and news of Model 3 tomorrow
Tesla is scheduled to report its fourth-quarter and full year financial results after market close on Wednesday. Following the update letter, to be posted onto Tesla’s Investor Relations site, CEO Elon Musk and Tesla management will hold a live Q&A session with analysts beginning at 2:30 pm Pacific Time.
Year-Over-Year Growth
While profitability and earnings per share are not expected to have fully flipped to the positive as a result of massive capital spend taking place at both the Fremont, Calif. factory and Tesla’s Gigafactory facility in Nevada, we can expect Musk to give pause during the earnings call and provide insight on updates being made to support Tesla’s upcoming Model 3 production.
Baird analyst Ben Kallo put it simply, “That’s where all eyes are now”.
Tesla stock hit record highs over the last few weeks as investor confidence in Tesla’s ability to deliver Model 3 on time continued to grow. The company’s stock price has soared 50% since December.
On January 3rd, Tesla reported that it had produced 24,882 vehicles for the fourth-quarter and 83,922 vehicles for the full year. This represented an increase of 64% from 2015. However, the company missed its quarterly delivery target by nearly 3,000 vehicles, citing “short-term production challenges starting at the end of October and lasting through early December from the transition to new Autopilot hardware.”
These numbers are impressive considering where Tesla started, but pale in comparison to where the company will want to be over the next year when the company expects to deliver nearly a half million vehicles annually.
Profitability and Earnings per share
Tesla has historically struggled with profitability and earnings per share due to what has been a continuous stream of capital intensive projects, while acquiring a new major business unit almost every year for the last four years.
Analyst opinions coming out of MarketWatch peg Tesla at an adjusted fourth-quarter loss of 51 cents per share. This is slightly better than fourth-quarter 2015 which came in at an 87 cent loss. Estimize has the most optimistic outlook for Tesla saying that the electric car company will lose only 3 cents per share. Overall, analysts from large institutions all seem to agree that Tesla will report a negative EPS.
Business Unit Updates
The big news for the week is that Tesla will prepare its Fremont factory for Model 3 pilot production. Full production of the Model 3 isn’t expected until after July but nonetheless, the company will likely reveal its laser-focused intent on delivering first units come late year .
Tesla Energy has also come into its own in the last few weeks after completing the world’s largest grid-scale battery installation project consisting of a 20MW / 80MWh Powerpack system installed for Southern California Edison.
Beyond Model 3, announcements for the Model Y which is expected to be a smaller SUV / CUV version of the Model 3, a Tesla pickup truck, and the Tesla Semi project are all expected to make public debuts this year.
We’ll be reporting highlights from Tesla’s earnings call Wednesday afternoon Pacific Time.
Investor's Corner
Lucid denies rumors of bankruptcy after over 40% stock drop
Electric vehicle maker Lucid Group has denied rumors of an imminent bankruptcy after a report from this morning sent the stock on a dramatic drop on Wall Street, seeing losses of more than 40 percent during trading hours.
Lucid’s Director of Communications, Nick Twork, responded to the report from Eletric-Vehicles.com, which stated the company’s restructuring advisor, AlixPartners, was asked to review two decisions: taking Lucid shares private or filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The report also claims AlixPartners told the Lucid board to “concentrate on Gravity production while improving its quality, and to temporarily hold back the Lucid Air, the sedan that has defined the company since its launch.”
Twork said:
$LCID The rumors are completely false. The company has sufficient liquidity to carry its operations well into next year, as recently published in its last quarterly filings, and it has not formed any special Board committee to explore the scenarios reported today. Our focus is…
— Nick Twork (@ntwork) July 14, 2026
Shares rebounded after the response to the report, halving its losses as the trading day neared 3 p.m. Eastern.
Lucid has struggled to get its sales off the ground and into more respectable numbers, but the company is in its early years, when things are hard to begin with. It is also backed by several notable investors, including the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), which has nearly limitless money and likely would not ditch an investment of this size so soon.
Lucid shares were down just 14 percent at the time of publication, a far cry from the 55 percent its losses topped out at during the day.
Investor's Corner
Tesla gets price target upgrade on heels of crazy successful auto quarter
Tesla received a price target upgrade just on the heels of what was a crazy successful quarter for its automotive business, as the company reported a delivery beat of over 15 percent for Q2.
Jefferies analysts are upping Tesla’s price target (NASDAQ: TSLA) to $400 from $375, while maintaining their “Hold” rating on shares, and the strong automotive deliveries from Q2 is a big reason. However, there are some other catalysts that Jefferies believes position Tesla for a strong position in the second half of the year.
Strong Deliveries
Tesla reported 480,000 deliveries for Q2, while Wall Street was between 395,000 and 405,000, as an overall consensus. It was an incredibly strong quarter from a delivery perspective, and Tesla sold well more than it produced during the three months.
Tesla crushes Wall Street expectations, beats delivery estimates by over 15 percent
While vehicle deliveries are not necessarily looked at in the light that they used to be, Tesla still maintains a lot of advantages for keeping deliveries strong. With the loss of the $7,500 EV Tax Credit last year, Tesla still maintains a strong demand case for its EVs.
Robotaxi Performance
Tesla has been operating Robotaxi for over a year now, as it launched in Austin in mid-2025. That program has expanded to Houston and Dallas, the San Francisco Bay Area, and, most recently, Miami, Florida, the suite’s first appearance in the Sunshine State.
While the Robotaxi suite is still in its early phases and Tesla is working through things like fleet size and wait times, the company has been able to undercut the pricing of its competitors and has a great safety record.
Merger Speculation with Tesla and SpaceX
This is perhaps the biggest topic that many are speaking about with Tesla and SpaceX, and it is the one thing that seems to be on the mind of every investor.
Jefferies warns that growing talk of a Tesla-SpaceX merger could cause Tesla stock to trade more like a SpaceX proxy, which may disconnect it from underlying automotive fundamentals. SpaceX has a lot going for it, especially its compute deals that have been widely publicized as of late.
Profitability in New Projects Could Take Some Time
Tesla has a few long-term ventures in the pipeline, most notably the Optimus project and Robotaxi, which is launched but will take several years to expand to a meaningful level that resonates with everyday people.
This is something that investors need to be careful of. Tesla’s projects could take some time to round out, so Jefferies advises that these may carry initial losses, rather than immediate profit. Seasoned Tesla investors have echoed something like this for a long time; they knew going in it would not be an open-and-shut strategy. It was going to take time.
These new projects are no different.
Investor's Corner
NASA taps SpaceX to launch the telescope that could unlock new worlds
NASA’s Roman Space Telescope heads to orbit this August aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy with massive scientific ambitions.
SpaceX is set to play a central role in one of NASA’s most anticipated science missions in years. The company’s Falcon Heavy rocket, currently the most powerful operational launch vehicle in the world, will carry the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into orbit on August 30 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Roman is now in final preparations inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, where on June 26 technicians used a crane to lift the observatory into a specialized stand for fueling and pre-launch testing.
Roman is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy, whose career helped shape how the agency approaches space science.
NASA chose SpaceX Falcon Heavy because of Roman’s needs to reach a specific orbit far from Earth, well beyond where a standard Falcon 9 can deliver it. The Falcon Heavy, which first flew in 2018, has since become NASA’s go-to option for missions that need serious muscle without the cost and complexity of older launch systems.
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Roman will carry a field of view at least 100 times wider than the Hubble Space Telescope, meaning it can photograph enormous swaths of the universe in a single shot rather than the narrow slices Hubble captures. That difference in scale is significant. While Hubble reshaped our understanding of the cosmos over 30 years, Roman is built to work faster and wider, surveying hundreds of millions of galaxies at once.
One of Roman’s most compelling capabilities is its potential to discover and photograph planets orbiting stars outside our solar system, and with enough precision to directly image planets that would otherwise be lost. That means scientists could study the atmosphere and surface characteristics of distant worlds rather than simply confirming they exist. Combined with Roman’s sweeping field of view, the telescope could detect thousands of exoplanets, and some of those planets may be in habitable zones where liquid water could exist. No telescope currently in operation has this level of power and capability. That capability alone could change what we know about other worlds, and perhaps finally answer the question: are we the only intelligent lifeforms in existence?
What Roman actually finds once it reaches orbit is an open question, and that is exactly what makes this launch worth watching.