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All eyes on Tesla 2016 financial results and news of Model 3 tomorrow

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Investor's Corner

Tesla crushes Wall Street expectations, beats delivery estimates by over 15 percent

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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Investor's Corner

Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’

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Credit: MarcoRP | X

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.”

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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.

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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.

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Investor's Corner

SpaceX gets initial stock coverage from Tesla’s biggest bull

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SpaceX Starship V3 flight 12
SpaceX Starship V3 flight 12 (Credit: SpaceX)

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

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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:

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“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.

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