Elon Musk was no longer a trillionaire by the time markets closed on Wednesday. Plunging shares in Tesla and SpaceX dragged the tech magnate down to billionaire status. As of 4pm ET, Forbes listed Musk’s net worth as $970.2bn.
Musk reached trillionaire status on 12 June after SpaceX’s historic initial public offering. The rocket, satellite and AI company’s debut on the stock market made Musk the first person with a net worth of more than $1tn. His fortune continued to hover around that gigantic figure in the weeks following the initial public offering (IPO).
A global stock selloff this week led to sharp declines for major tech stocks and dealt a blow to Musk’s wealth, however, as investor concerns that the Federal Reserve will potentially raise interest rates and looming fears of an AI bubble rattled the market.
Companies whose values were heavily linked to the AI boom, including Google’s parent, Alphabet, and chipmakers such as Samsung, were hit especially hard.
The SpaceX IPO, the largest in history, immediately vaulted Musk’s wealth while also tying it to the company’s stock price. SpaceX raised $75bn from its record-breaking IPO and its stocks increased by 19%, from its initial price of $135 per share, within 24 hours of going public. On Wednesday, SpaceX’s stocks were listed at $154.35.
Most of Musk’s wealth is tied up in stock and equity, and is not cash he can quickly spend. Still, his fortune is unprecedented, not just for its size but the speed at which it grew.
Market fluctuations mean it is possible that Musk could regain his trillionaire status in the near future if either Tesla or SpaceX shares rebound.
Although no longer a trillionaire, Musk is easily still the world’s richest person. The next wealthiest billionaire is the Google co-founder Larry Page, whose net worth is about $284bn, according to Forbes.
Musk made more money than Page’s entire fortune this year alone, increasing his net worth by $338bn since January.
Accounting for markets being closed on Friday, June 19, in observance of the Juneteenth holiday, Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 0.97%) has just five trading days under its belt, but that's enough time for an array of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to have gotten involved with the stock.
Just five days after the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history, 28 ETFs feature Elon Musk's reusable rockets company among their top 15 holdings. The leader of that pack is the Baron First Principles ETF (RONB +0.47%), which, as of June 17, had a 31.2% weight to SpaceX, or more than double the allocation to the fund's second-largest holding.
This ETF has a substantial stake in SpaceX stock. Image source: Getty Images.
The $238.5 million Baron ETF debuted last December, and SpaceX is obviously a new stock, so the jury is still out on whether this is one of the best ETFs that hold SpaceX, performance-wise. Still, with that hefty weight to the hottest name in space equities, the fund is useful for investors who want exposure without an all-in commitment. If there's a rub, it's an annual fee of 1%, or $100 on a $10,000 investment. That's very high compared to many ETFs.
History and housekeeping It's unusual for a single stock to command nearly a third of an ETF's portfolio, so it's worth examining how and why SpaceX looms so large in the Baron fund. For starters, it must be noted that this is an actively managed fund, so the managers can make large, concentrated bets if they see fit. Conversely, the passive broad-market ETFs that add the satellite stock will wait for SpaceX's market cap to rise before the shares command larger percentages of their portfolios.
History also helps explain why this ETF holds such a sizable stake in SpaceX. Ron Baron, the founder of the firm, is a friend of Musk's and has long put his money (and clients' money) where his mouth is. The money manager first invested in SpaceX in 2017, when the company was valued at just $22 billion, and subsequently participated in 27 capital raises. Baron Capital threw another $1 billion at the stock on IPO Day.
The Baron First Principles ETF isn't the firm's only ETF with SpaceX exposure. Another pair of the firm's actively managed ETFs is among the top nine ETF holders of the space stock.
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Baron himself is overtly bullish on SpaceX. He sees the company's market value rising to $20 trillion and beyond a decade out, implying exponential appreciation from the current level of $2.2 trillion. If that prediction is anywhere close to accurate, investors who deploy this ETF stand to benefit.
Don't forget the Tesla angle Leading up to and immediately following the SpaceX IPO, there's been plenty of chatter about that company potentially acquiring Tesla (TSLA 1.61%). There are no guarantees that the transaction will occur, but more than 40% Kalshi traders are betting it could be announced in March, April, or May of 2027.
Speculation about a SpaceX/Tesla marriage is relevant to discussing the Baron ETF because Musk's electric vehicle company is the fund's second-largest holding, accounting for almost 12% of the portfolio.
Interestingly, Baron's affinity for Musk-backed companies started with Tesla, as he invested in the company in 2014 and 2016. While Baron reduced client holdings in Tesla, it's estimated 40% of personal net worth is tied to that stock.
Putting it all together, this ETF is a highly concentrated bet on two Musk stocks. Most ETFs don't assign 40%-plus of their weights to just two companies so investors seeking a diverse roster may want to take a pass on the Baron ETF. On the other hand, risk-tolerant market participants that want to double-dip with Musk's two public companies without owning either outright may want to give this fund a closer look.
Shares of Tesla Inc. NASDAQ: TSLA are down about 15% from the May high and are starting to take a shape that investors won't want to see. The broader narrative around the company has been getting more interesting by the month, from the Wall Street hype around the company’s full self-driving (FSD) and robotaxi projects to the increasingly serious conversation about a Tesla and SpaceX NASDAQ: SPCX merger.
Tesla Today
$373.56 -8.05 (-2.11%)
As of 03:17 PM Eastern
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52-Week Range$288.77▼
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However, this week has brought a much less welcome development, and it's the kind of headline that could easily further darken sentiment in the short term. It was announced on Monday, June 22, that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened a fresh probe into Tesla after one of its Model 3 vehicles crashed into a residential home in Texas, causing a fatality.
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The fact that this is simply the latest in a long line of regulatory investigations into Tesla will be concerning for investors, and it’s the last thing the stock needed. The main question is how much weight to put on it.
What the Probe Is Actually AboutThe NHTSA's investigation centers on a fatal crash in Katy, Texas, where a Tesla Model 3 struck a residential home and caused a fatality. The agency has opened what it calls a special crash investigation, the same type of inquiry it has used dozens of times over the past decade to look into Tesla incidents involving its driver-assistance technology.
The early commentary from Tesla itself is interesting. CEO Elon Musk publicly suggested that the high-speed nature of the crash didn't fit Tesla's typical FSD profile, which is designed to operate at much lower speeds on neighborhood streets.
There is, of course, the possibility that the driver had manually overridden the system at the time of the crash. Still, regardless of what actually happened, the optics are not good. These things take time to resolve, and until they are, those headlines are the kind that spook investors, big and small alike.
Why This Stings, Even If It Shouldn'tThe NHTSA has been ramping up its scrutiny of Tesla's FSD in recent months, and the broader regulatory backdrop hasn't been getting easier. This ongoing pattern of regulatory investigations has been a slow drip of negative sentiment, clearly wearing on the stock.
The real kicker for investors is the timing of this latest probe. Tesla had been trying to put together a fresh uptrend after a difficult start to the year, and the broader bull case around AI, robotics, and the SpaceX merger thesis had been steadily attracting fresh interest.
However, the stock is currently 15% off its May high and in danger of forming a clear downtrend. The frustrating reality for long-term bulls is that the underlying business story hasn't actually changed. Stocks like Tesla, however, trade on narrative as much as on numbers, which makes them particularly vulnerable to this kind of situation.
Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) Price Chart for Wednesday, June, 24, 2026
The Bigger Picture Still HoldsThat said, those of us with a long enough time horizon need to keep this firmly in perspective. As we highlighted recently, the most important conversation around Tesla right now isn't about Model 3 safety records. It's about whether the company is on the verge of one of the most consequential corporate combinations in history. Wedbush's Dan Ives recently put the odds of a Tesla-and-SpaceX merger within the next year at 80%, and SpaceX's recent IPO has turned that conversation from theoretical to very real.
In that context, a single NHTSA probe, even one that grabs headlines, doesn't materially alter the long-term story. FSD remains a key pillar of Tesla's valuation, but the broader thesis now spans robotaxis, Optimus, energy storage, and the prospect of integration with SpaceX's AI and satellite ecosystem. Investors with conviction in the bigger picture are unlikely to be shaken loose by a single regulatory headline, however tragic or serious it may sound on the surface.
It’s Easier to Remain BullishSure, the short-term picture is a little uncomfortable, and there's a chance things get worse before they get better, especially given how weak the stock has been trading in recent weeks. The lack of a clear catalyst isn’t helping, and the company’s next earnings report isn’t due for another month.
But for investors who believe in where Tesla is ultimately headed, this kind of pullback is more likely to look like a bit of noise than not. The stock has been here before, and every previous regulatory wobble has eventually given way to the bigger story that’s constantly evolving within Tesla. Until then, patience remains the price of admission, and for those willing to pay it, the potential reward keeps growing.
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People visit a Tesla service center and gallery in Austin, Texas, U.S., June 21, 2025. REUTERS/Joel Angel Juarez/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
SummaryCompaniesModel 3 driver used Autopilot before crash, lawsuit saysSeventy-six-year-old grandmother pinned in her home, later diedNHTSA has probed dozens of Tesla crashes linked to driver assistanceTesla unavailable for comment, has said driver drove fastJune 24 (Reuters) - Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab has been sued by the family of a 76-year-old Texas grandmother killed last week when a driver using his Model 3's automated driving assistance system crashed into her suburban Houston home, the family's lawyers said.
According to a complaint filed on Tuesday, Elon Musk's electric vehicle maker should be liable for the wrongful death of Martha Avila, reflecting its gross negligence and failure to warn that its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems were defective.
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Avila's daughter, Jennifer Barbour, and her husband, Justin Barbour, said the Model 3's driver, Michael Butler, told law enforcement he engaged Autopilot before plowing through the front wall of Avila's home in Katy, Texas, on June 19, pinning her.
She died later at a nearby hospital, the complaint said. Justin Barbour said he was also injured.
The lawsuit filed in a Harris County, Texas, state court seeks more than $1 million in damages, and punitive damages reflecting Tesla's alleged "reckless disregard for a substantial risk of severe bodily injury."
Tesla and Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Musk, the world's richest person, posted on X on Monday night: "FSD drives slowly through neighborhood streets and this was a high speed crash!"
Ashok Elluswamy, vice president of AI software at Tesla, posted separately on X that "the driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100% of the accel pedal in this residential area."
DOZENS OF TESLA PROBESThe National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been investigating the crash.
It has since 2016 opened nearly 50 special investigations of Tesla crashes believed to involve advanced driver assistance systems. About two dozen deaths were reported.
In March, the NHTSA escalated its probe into 3.2 million Teslas equipped with Full Self-Driving, on concern the system may fail to detect or warn drivers in poor visibility.
And in 2023, Tesla recalled about 2 million vehicles, nearly all of its electric vehicles on U.S. roads, to better ensure that drivers pay attention when using Autopilot.
Tesla has said Autopilot enables vehicles to steer, accelerate and brake within their lanes, while Full Self-Driving lets vehicles obey traffic signals and change lanes.
The automaker has also said both technologies require "fully attentive" drivers whose hands are on the wheel.
Butler is also a defendant in the Barbours' lawsuit. It is unclear whether he has a lawyer. Efforts to reach him were not immediately successful.
The Barbours' lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for additional comment.
Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab
At $381.61, Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA | TSLA Price Prediction) looks vulnerable, with a credible path toward the $190 historical manufacturing support zone as tech multiples compress and global EV pricing grinds margins lower. The stock just slid 5.79% in a single session, and the bid under the chart looks thinner by the week.
Tesla remains the world’s most recognized EV maker, but the business spans energy storage, FSD subscriptions, robotaxis, and Optimus. That optionality supports a $1.52 trillion market cap on $1.09 of trailing EPS. The auto core fights BYD and Chinese OEMs on price, and recent margin recovery leaned on one-time warranty and tariff benefits.
Why Bulls Still See a Floor Here Q1 2026 EPS came in at $0.41 versus a $0.36 estimate, automotive gross margin expanded to 21.1% from 16.2% YoY, and free cash flow jumped 117.47% year over year to $1.44 billion. Cash sits at $44.74 billion against minimal debt.
FSD subscriptions hit 1.28 million, up 51% YoY, and Services revenue grew 42% YoY to $3.75 billion. Cybercab, Semi, Megapack 3, and Optimus all target volume production in 2026. The analyst consensus target of $420.55 implies upside, and 23 buy ratings outnumber sells more than three to one.
Why the Bear Case Is Tightening Valuation is the core problem. Trailing P/E sits at 371 and forward P/E at 204, on a 3.95% net margin business whose full-year 2025 deliveries fell 9% and whose automotive revenue dropped 11% in Q4 2025. Regulatory credit revenue collapsed from $890 million in Q2 2024 to $380 million in Q1 2026.
Q1 2026 margin gains were partly warranty and tariff one-timers, energy revenue turned negative at -12% YoY, and inventory days climbed to 27 from 22. Insider activity is net selling across 49 recent transactions, and Polymarket assigns a 70% probability TSLA touches $375 in June.
Why Some Investors Want to Wait There is a case for waiting. The balance sheet is fortress-grade, energy storage gross profit hit a record $1.1 billion in Q4 2025, and FSD’s recurring revenue is among the cleanest software stories in autos. Investors waiting for Robotaxi expansion or an AI5 chip milestone could be rewarded if execution lands.
The next two reports will clarify the setup. A delivery report below the 450,000 to 475,000 consensus band, another energy decline, or sub-20% automotive gross margin would tip decisively bearish. A clean Cybercab ramp would do the opposite.
What the Tape Is Showing Shares trade at $381.61, down 15.14% year to date while the S&P 500 is up 7.58%. That is a 22-point relative gap in six months. One-month performance is -10.42%, and the stock sits below both the 50-day ($403.68) and 200-day ($417.32) moving averages.
The consensus analyst target of $420.55 across 47 covering analysts (23 Buy, 17 Hold, 7 Sell) implies roughly 10% upside. Prediction markets see it differently, pricing $375 at 70% and $345 at 16.5% probability for June.
Why the Bearish Case Wins at This Price At $381.61, the risk/reward skews bearish. The setup combines a 204x forward multiple with a low-single-digit margin auto business losing pricing power, a collapsing regulatory credit tailwind, and an energy segment that stopped growing. Tech multiple compression alone could halve the P/E; a return toward auto-peer multiples would imply far more.
The path to $190 runs through three catalysts over the next 12 months: a Q2 or Q3 delivery miss, a margin reset once warranty and tariff benefits roll off, and a Robotaxi or Optimus timeline slip that prediction markets already assign 2.8% and 1.3% near-term probabilities. Each chips away at the AI optionality holding the multiple up.
What invalidates the thesis: a clean Cybercab ramp, durable 22%-plus automotive gross margins without one-time aid, and FSD monetization scaling beyond 1.28 million subscribers into a true platform business. Absent that, the stock is priced for a future the operating numbers are not yet underwriting.
Tesla trading at a Magnificent Seven multiple on a margin-compressed automaker’s earnings is the cleanest setup for downside in large-cap tech right now.
HomeIndustriesSunrun, a provider of home battery storage, is working with Tesla to meet the energy needs of AI data centersPublished: June 24, 2026 at 2:28 p.m. ET
Shares of Sunrun, the home solar-panel and battery-storage provider, are surging as investors consider the company’s ability to play a more substantial role in the expensive artificial-intelligence buildout.
Sunrun RUN on Wednesday said it would work with Elon Musk’s Tesla TSLA and the energy-management platform Renew Home to deliver more than 16 gigawatts of flexible energy capacity to hyperscalers and utilities.
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The two companies obviously have a lot in common, and it goes beyond having Elon Musk as their CEO. The reality is that they are both stocks valued and bought today, not for their current earnings, but for what they could become in the future.
However, there are key differences between the investment profiles of Tesla (TSLA 0.62%) and Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 0.04%), better known as SpaceX, that make them suitable for different types of investors and also challenge the notion that folding Tesla into SpaceX is a good idea.
Image source: Getty Images.
Three key differences between Tesla and SpaceX The major factors to consider are as follows:
Tesla's projects (electric vehicles, robotaxis, and Optimus robots) embody artificial intelligence (AI). At the same time, SpaceX is largely dependent on end demand for AI, not least for its xAI business and its orbital data center ambitions. The scaling of Tesla's long-term recurring income drivers, namely robotaxis and Optimus are, despite the delays and previously over-optimistic assumptions articulated by Musk, much closer to near-term fruition than SpaceX's. The two companies have vastly different medium-term capital expenditure requirements and cash flow profiles, with SpaceX requiring significantly more investment. Putting these points together, it's clear that, while both are growth stocks and priced as such, Tesla is less risky than SpaceX and has a shorter time horizon before it starts scaling earnings and cash flow. That's not to argue that Tesla is necessarily the better stock, but rather to point out that they will suit different types of investors.
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Capital expenditure requirements and cash flow The chart below shows the Wall Street consensus on capital spending. It implies that SpaceX will put more into capital expenditures than it generates in revenue in 2026 and will still be at a whopping 40% of revenue in 2030.
Meanwhile, Tesla's relative capital spending is expected to decline as revenue grows and its phase of significant investment in securing its supply chain moderates. Tesla is investing heavily right now to build a lithium refinery and a lithium battery production plant, and is beginning to produce the Cybercab, Semi, and Optimus.
Data source: S&P Global Market Intelligence. Wall Street consensus. Chart by the author.
Tesla's catalysts are near-term Investors can be forgiven for growing restless given the timing of Tesla's key initiatives (robotaxis/Cybercab and Optimus); the reality is that they are much closer to fruition than orbital data centers.
For example, Tesla is taking a very cautious approach to ramping the robotaxi rollout. On the last earnings call, Musk made it clear that "it wouldn't be right for us to go to like very large scale unsupervised FSD when we know that there are software improvements in the pipeline that would improve safety." Those improvements are likely to come with v15 of its full self-driving (FSD) software due in late 2026 or early 2027.
Image source: Tesla.
That's when investors can start to expect a significant and "very large scale" rollout. Still, it's a lot closer than SpaceX's orbital data centers. SpaceX expects to deploy them in 2028, but as clearly stated in the initial public offering (IPO) registration filing, "the timeline for certain of our initiatives involving unproven or new innovations, including our goal of deploying 100 gigawatts of annual compute power to orbit ... may be difficult or impossible to determine."
A different kind of AI company As previously discussed in more detail, Tesla's solutions embody AI, making it one of the most exciting ways to play on the growth of AI capability. While SpaceX also benefits from these trends, it's much more dependent on the growth in AI applications. If demand slows, it could "result in existing terrestrial data centers sufficiently meeting such demand, thereby reducing the need for our orbital AI compute infrastructure," according to SpaceX filings.
Which stock is better? Ultimately, the decision boils down to your risk profile, level of confidence in the growth of AI applications, and willingness to wait for each company's growth catalysts to come to fruition.
Those differences in investment profiles also make a potential merger somewhat problematic, as Tesla investors will be swapping the likelihood of a ramp in recurring cash flows from robotaxis and Optimus for the prospect of those cash flows being reinvested to support long-term growth in SpaceX's existing businesses. That might not suit most Tesla investors unless the acquisition price is a significant premium.
Sunrun (NASDAQ:RUN) stock is up 26% to $16.17 in midday trading Wednesday after the residential solar leader unveiled a sweeping virtual power plant (VPP) partnership with Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA | TSLA Price Prediction) and Renew Home. The intraday move tracks toward one of Sunrun’s biggest single-session gains in months.
The deal aims to deliver more than 16 gigawatts (GW) of flexible energy capacity to hyperscalers and utilities. That’s a direct play on the surge in electricity demand from data centers and artificial intelligence workloads.
Tesla is the named partner here, not a big stock mover on the news. The partnership is highly impactful to small-cap Sunrun but largely immaterial to Tesla shares at the company’s roughly $1.44 trillion market value.
A 16-Gigawatt Distributed Power Plant Aimed at AI The coalition is aggregating dispatchable capacity from hundreds of thousands of home battery systems operated by Sunrun and Tesla, plus flexible peak capacity from more than 8 million smart thermostats and devices managed by Renew Home. The companies describe it as the country’s largest distributed power plant, deployable in “months, not years” with no new hardware, interconnection, water, or land required from offtakers.
In Virginia’s Data Center Alley, the partners already have more than 300 megawatts (MW) available for immediate deployment, expected to grow to at least 500 MW by 2030. Capacity for hyperscalers will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, and the group committed capacity to PJM’s proposed Reliability Backstop Process, which they say could immediately unlock over a gigawatt.
Sunrun CEO Mary Powell framed the stakes bluntly, declaring, “The grid of the 1800s cannot power the innovation of 2026.” Tesla’s Colby Hastings asserted that the answer “is already in place” in the batteries, thermostats, and electric vehicles inside millions of American homes.
AI Power Demand Sets the Stage The timing matters here. A Goldman Sachs Commodities Research study cited by the partners projects U.S. data center power demand to climb to 41 GW in 2026 and 66 GW in 2027. Sunrun is positioning itself as a fast-to-deploy answer to that load curve.
A Brattle Group analysis referenced in the release also estimates that better grid utilization could reduce U.S. electricity bills by $110 billion to $170 billion over the next decade. For Sunrun, that pitch reframes residential solar as utility-style infrastructure rather than a one-off hardware sale.
The macro backdrop is supportive. The Department of Energy projects data centers will account for up to 12% of U.S. electrical demand by 2028, a tailwind Sunrun and Tesla have both flagged in recent earnings commentary.
Breakthrough or Hype Cycle? The bull case is sizable. Sunrun could tap a recurring revenue stream tied to AI-driven power demand, built on what management has called the largest residential battery fleet in the country. Sunrun’s Q1 2026 results showed momentum already, with revenue of $722 million, up 43% year over year and a record 73% storage attachment rate.
The bear case is just as real, though. This is a framework or capacity-as-a-solution structure, not firm signed hyperscaler revenue contracts, and execution depends on customer enrollment, utility programs, and regulatory approvals. Sunrun stock also remains volatile and is still down 11% year-to-date.
Retail sentiment on Sunrun stock has turned visibly bullish, and some traders are floating short-squeeze speculation around the name. That chatter is worth flagging, though no firm short-interest data supports a squeeze thesis today.
What Investors Can Watch Next Near term, investors can watch for whether Sunrun stock holds these gains into the close and whether sell-side analysts respond with revised targets. The current consensus price target on Sunrun shares sits at $19.11, with 3 Strong Buy and 9 Buy ratings against 10 Holds.
The bigger tell will be conversion. Watch for whether the Virginia capacity, the PJM Reliability Backstop allocation, and any named hyperscaler offtake agreements firm up in the months ahead. That’s the line separating an infrastructure breakthrough from a transient AI hype cycle.
For now, Sunrun has reframed its story from struggling solar installer to potential distributed-grid operator. Tesla and Renew Home give the pitch genuine scale, but the contracts still have to follow. Investors comfortable with the volatility could keep position sizes measured until firm hyperscaler revenue materializes.
But while deliveries will likely dominate headlines around July 2, another metric may deserve more attention.
Tesla’s energy business is growing fast—and it could be becoming a much bigger part of the investment story.
• Tesla shares are showing limited movement. Where is TSLA stock headed?
Deliveries Still MatterThere is a good reason investors pay close attention to deliveries. Vehicle deliveries offer one of the earliest signals about Tesla’s sales performance and provide important clues about future revenue and profitability. The metric has become one of the most closely watched data points on Wall Street, often moving the stock before quarterly earnings are even released.
As a result, much of the market’s attention remains fixed on whether Tesla can reverse recent delivery weakness. But focusing exclusively on vehicle volumes may overlook a business segment that has quietly become one of Tesla’s fastest-growing operations.
The Energy Story Keeps Getting BiggerTesla’s Energy Generation and Storage segment has emerged as a significant growth engine for the company. The division includes products such as Megapack utility-scale battery systems and Powerwall residential energy storage solutions.
Demand has surged as utilities, corporations and governments invest heavily in grid modernization, renewable energy integration and backup power infrastructure. Unlike the automotive business, which continues to face pricing pressure and intense competition, Tesla’s energy segment has delivered strong growth and improving profitability.
The scale of the opportunity is becoming difficult to ignore.
Today, it is one of the company’s fastest-growing divisions.
While investors continue to debate vehicle deliveries, pricing pressure and EV competition, Tesla’s energy business is benefiting from a different set of tailwinds. Utilities are investing in battery storage, data centers are consuming more electricity, and power grids around the world are being upgraded to accommodate growing energy demand.
Those trends have helped turn products like Megapack from a niche offering into a major source of revenue growth. The company’s Megapack factory in California has been operating at scale, while a second Megafactory in Shanghai is expected to further expand production capacity.
Why Investors May Need To Pay AttentionFor years, Tesla’s valuation has been tied largely to expectations surrounding vehicle sales. That may be changing.
While automotive revenue remains the company’s largest business, energy storage is becoming a more meaningful contributor to overall growth. The segment is also benefiting from powerful long-term trends, including rising electricity demand, AI-driven data center expansion and increased investment in grid infrastructure. Those trends could provide Tesla with another avenue for growth beyond vehicle deliveries.
That’s why investors watching Tesla’s next delivery report may want to look beyond the headline number. Deliveries will tell investors how Tesla’s car business is performing.
But energy revenue may offer an increasingly important glimpse into where the company’s next phase of growth could come from. If Reuters’ estimate proves accurate, Tesla’s energy business would be approaching the size of a Fortune 500 company on its own.
Photo Courtesy: Kittyfly on Shutterstock.com
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The National Transportation Safety Board has opened an investigation into a crash that happened over the weekend in Texas, in which a driver slammed into a home in Katy, Texas, killing a resident.
The family of that victim, 76-year-old Martha Avila, have also filed a lawsuit against the driver, Michael Butler, and Tesla, alleging negligence.
The NTSB joins the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in investigating the crash. While Butler allegedly told local authorities that he was using Tesla’s Autopilot feature before the crash, the company has since said it has data showing that Butler’s accelerator pedal was pressed to the floor. This “overrode” what was more likely the Full Self-Driving software on his car, pushing his speed to 73 miles per hour before he hit the house, according to Tesla.
Tesla has not provided more proof beyond those statements, though. The NTSB and NHTSA investigations will likely require the company to turn over logs created by the car’s onboard computers that will ultimately reveal how exactly the crash happened.
Tesla (TSLA, Financials) is under another federal safety review after a Model 3 crashed into a home in Katy, Texas, killing 76-year-old Martha Avila.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a special crash investigation into the incident.
Tesla pushed back on the idea that its self-driving system caused the crash. Elon Musk said on X that the incident “makes no sense,” arguing that FSD drives slowly on neighborhood streets.
Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's Autopilot head, said the driver manually overrode the system by pressing the accelerator all the way down. He said the car reached 73 mph and the pedal was still pressed after impact.
The case comes after another recent Tesla crash into a home in California that injured six people.
For investors, the concern is familiar. Tesla is trying to build more value around FSD and future robotaxis, but each new safety review keeps regulatory risk in the spotlight.
Tesla TSLA and BYD BYDDF expanded their presence in the European auto market in May as consumer demand for electric vehicles helped lift overall new-car registrations across the region.
The European Union recorded 955,013 new passenger vehicle registrations during the month, an increase of 3.2% from a year earlier. Growth moderated from April's pace, but the market remained on an upward trajectory. France and Italy delivered the strongest gains among the bloc's largest markets, while Germany posted a modest increase.
Tesla posted May sales of 21,767 vehicles in the EU, raising its market share to 2.3% from 0.9% a year ago. BYD also continued to gain momentum, with its share of registrations reaching 2.7%, compared with 1.1% in the prior-year period.
The broader shift toward electrified transportation remained evident. Battery-electric vehicles represented one-fifth of all new registrations in the EU, up from 15.3% a year earlier. Hybrid-electric models accounted for the largest portion of the market, while the combined share of petrol and diesel vehicles continued to decline.
During the first five months of 2026, EU new-car registrations increased 4.0%, supported by continued growth in electric and hybrid vehicle adoption.
Tesla shares fell sharply on Tuesday after US regulators opened an investigation into a fatal crash in Texas involving one of the company's vehicles, adding fresh scrutiny to the automaker's driver-assistance technology.
The stock dropped about 5% in early trading as investors weighed the implications of the investigation against an already challenging backdrop for technology stocks.
The broader market also came under pressure. The S&P 500 fell 1%, while the Nasdaq Composite declined 1.5% as a technology selloff intensified. The Dow Jones Industrial Average traded around the flatline.
Technology stocks outside the semiconductor sector showed more resilience, with companies, including Microsoft and Amazon, advancing alongside defensive names such as Walmart, Procter & Gamble, and Johnson & Johnson.
The immediate catalyst for Tesla's decline appeared to be an announcement from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration late Monday that it had opened a special crash investigation into a fatal accident involving a Tesla Model 3.
The crash occurred in Katy, Texas, near Houston, where a Tesla vehicle struck a home, killing 76-year-old Martha Avila.
According to Harris County authorities, the driver, Michael Butler, told investigators he had been using Tesla's partially automated driving systems when the vehicle left its lane and crashed into the residence.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it would examine the incident as part of a special investigation.
Tesla executives publicly disputed aspects of the driver's account following the crash.
Chief Executive Elon Musk questioned whether Tesla's Full Self-Driving system could have been responsible for the accident.
"This crash makes no sense," Musk wrote on X.
"FSD drives slowly through neighborhood streets and this was a high speed crash!" he added.
Tesla Vice President of Autopilot and AI Ashok Elluswamy also commented on the incident.
"In this case, the driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100% of the accel pedal in this residential area," Elluswamy wrote in a response on X.
"They reached a speed of 73 mph during the crash, and had the accelerator pressed even after the crash."
The competing accounts remain under investigation and have not been independently verified.
Tesla's owner manuals state that Full Self-Driving (Supervised) requires drivers to remain attentive, monitor the road, and be prepared to take control of the vehicle at any time.
Deliveries outlook remains constructiveDespite the regulatory overhang, Wall Street analysts remain focused on Tesla's upcoming second-quarter delivery results.
UBS reiterated its Neutral rating on Tesla and maintained a $364 price target.
The firm raised its second-quarter delivery forecast to 405,000 vehicles from a previous estimate of 380,000 units.
That projection would represent a 5% increase from a year earlier and a 13% increase from the first quarter.
UBS noted that the estimate sits slightly above the Visible Alpha consensus forecast of 402,000 deliveries.
The bank said buyside expectations currently range from 400,000 to 420,000 vehicles, placing its forecast toward the lower end of investor expectations while acknowledging the potential for upside if Tesla finishes the quarter strongly.
Beyond vehicle deliveries, UBS also expects continued strength in Tesla's energy business.
The firm forecasts energy storage deployments of 13.4 gigawatt-hours during the quarter, representing growth of 40% year-over-year and 53% sequentially.
For investors, Tuesday's decline highlighted the tension between Tesla's improving near-term operating outlook and the ongoing regulatory and legal scrutiny surrounding its driver-assistance technologies, which remain central to the company's long-term autonomous driving ambitions.
Tesla (TSLA +0.22%) stock tumbled 6%.1 through 3:15 p.m. ET Tuesday, one week before Tesla is expected to report its Q2 deliveries number -- and just hours after Swiss megabanker UBS announced it's sticking with only a "neutral" rating on Tesla shares ahead of the report.
Image source: Tesla.
What UBS thinks about Tesla A "neutral" rating implies that this analyst is giving Tesla a kind of shrug and a pass on its current valuation. But as StreetInsider.com reports, UBS analyst Joseph Spak thinks Tesla's stock price could decline after deliveries are reported. His price target for the stock, $364, is 10% below Tesla's Monday closing price.
(So maybe Spak should really be advising investors to sell Tesla.)
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What should investors do with Tesla now? Why isn't Spak telling investors to sell? For one thing, the analyst is raising estimates for Q2 deliveries from 380,000 electric cars sold to 405,000, representing 5% year-over-year growth.
Problem is, even 405,000 units -- if this is the right number -- could still miss consensus forecasts for the quarter, which Spak estimates range from 400,000 to 420,000 (so 410,000 at the midpoint). This sets up a scenario in which Tesla might do better than Spak expected, but still worse than what most people hoped for in Q2. And this is a scenario that could, in fact, cause Tesla's stock price to decline.
All this said, there's still one scenario in which holding Tesla stock might make sense. Spak points out that the company's Energy Generation and Storage business could report up to 40% sales growth in Q2 -- eight times better than Automotive.
Whatever happens with car deliveries next month, considering that Tesla's been earning twice as much on Energy sales as it has on Automotive lately, this could end up making Tesla a winner on earnings day.
Rich Smith has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Tesla. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
With SpaceX (SPCX) now settling in its second full week on public markets, @morningstar's Seth Goldstein turns his attention to Tesla (TSLA) and its struggling EV business. He sees deliveries improving as the Mag 7 company hits the gas on robotaxi production.
The "Magnificent Seven" are some of the largest tech-focused companies by market cap: Nvidia, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta Platforms (META 0.18%), and Tesla (TSLA +0.22%).
But Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 0.03%) is making the case for why the Magnificent Seven as a category may be outdated.
Although in its brief period on the public market, SpaceX briefly surpassed Microsoft and Amazon in market cap, the stock has since fallen by 31% from its intraday high. It closed at $154.60 per share on June 22 -- up just 3% from its opening trading price of $150.
Even so, its market cap of about $2 trillion clears Tesla at $1.5 trillion, and Meta Platforms at $1.4 trillion. SpaceX is now the seventh-most-valuable company in the world, behind Nvidia, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Taiwan Semiconductor. But is the company sending shock waves across the market a better buy than Tesla or Meta Platforms?
Image source: Getty Images.
The case for SpaceX over Tesla Tesla's profitability has taken a massive hit in recent years as sales growth in its electric vehicle and energy storage businesses has slowed. The company is no longer tethering its long-term growth to the passenger electric vehicle market. Tesla's $25 billion capital expenditure plan for this year is centered on its humanoid robots (Optimus), fully autonomous robotaxis (Cybercabs), the Tesla Semi, and its lithium refining and battery manufacturing infrastructure.
Meanwhile, SpaceX has a dominant share of the commercial space launch industry: It has been responsible for launching over 80% of the mass that the world has put into orbit each year since 2023.
SpaceX is also a major player in artificial intelligence, particularly after its merger with xAI earlier this year. That position will only expand with its $60 billion acquisition of Anysphere -- the maker of the AI coding tool Cursor -- which it announced last week. AI will likely be the main driver of SpaceX's near- to medium-term revenue growth. Analysts at Morgan Stanley forecast that SpaceX's revenue will hit $330 billion in 2030, and anticipate 57% of that will come from AI.
SpaceX has a bold plan to build a massive Gigasat factory in Bastrop, Texas, to produce AI data center satellites at high volume. About 100 miles away, SpaceX, Tesla, and Intel (INTC 0.64%) are collaborating on Terafab, which is expected to be the world's largest semiconductor fabrication plant. Terafab's goal is for its annual production capacity to eventually teach 1 terawatt (1,000 GW) of AI compute capacity -- although the project is still in the early stages, it is expensive, and it faces no shortage of supply chain challenges.
CEO Elon Musk has asserted that the ability to scale up an orbital constellation of AI data centers is mostly limited by a lack of AI computing hardware. This is why building Terafab is so critical to SpaceX's orbital data center plan.
If Tesla were still generating consistently high-margin free cash flow and had significantly more cash and cash equivalents on its balance sheet than debt, it would have a clear advantage over SpaceX. But with both companies spending full throttle in pursuit of big ideas, the better buy between them will really come down to which one's ideas will pay off enough to justify its high valuation.
Tesla's Cybercabs will face no shortage of competition from the autonomous ride-share offerings of Alphabet-owned Waymo and other self-driving vehicle companies. And its Optimus robots will have to compete with the designs of numerous established robotics companies like Boston Dynamics. By contrast, no rival comes close to being a true peer with SpaceX in the areas where it is pursuing its bold plans.
So if I had to choose between these two growth stocks, I would buy SpaceX over Tesla. But the best course of action for retail investors now may be to keep SpaceX on their watch lists until it shows measurable progress in large-scale manufacturing of AI satellites and compute, outlines the costs of launching these satellites (which will have many times the mass of its Starlink satellites), and addresses the light pollution consequences of keeping these AI satellites in sun-synchronous orbits, among other issues.
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One of the best values on the market Like SpaceX and Tesla, Meta is on a spending spree. Only in Meta's case, Wall Street doesn't like it. The Facebook parent has been the second-worst-performing Magnificent Seven stock year to date, ahead of only Microsoft.
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Meta recently raised its 2026 capex budget to a range of $125 billion to $145 billion. The top of that range is roughly double the $72 billion it spent in 2025. With capex growing faster than revenue, Meta's profitability and margins will further compress, which may concern some investors, especially considering that Meta's spending is mainly on AI data centers for its internal use rather than to lease to external customers.
This is a fundamentally different approach than the strategies of hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet -- which are cloud providers with clear blueprints for monetizing their AI infrastructure investments. So investors will want to see how Meta can deliver a clear return on investment from its AI spending, such as through increased advertising revenue or higher levels of engagement on Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp.
Meta has yet to prove that its AI investments are worth the price. What's more, Meta has a history of pouring money into projects that don't have a clear path to profitability. After all, Facebook changed its name to Meta Platforms in 2021 because it thought the metaverse would be the next big thing. The company's Reality Labs segment is responsible for its research and development in the metaverse, augmented and virtual reality, and it makes products like the Meta Quest virtual reality headset. Between 2021 and 2025, Reality Labs reported a net operating loss of $77 billion.
Even with Meta's arguably excessive spending and the poor track record of its Reality Labs unit, it's still a better buy than SpaceX or Tesla right now. Meta is simply too cheap to ignore, sporting a forward price-to-earnings ratio of just 17.9.
TSLA PE Ratio (Forward) data by YCharts.
For context, the S&P 500 (^GSPC +0.33%) has a forward P/E of 22.5.
SpaceX and Tesla could outperform Meta over the ultra-long term, but their bold bets could also backfire. In contrast, Meta doesn't need to actively spend on AI to be a cash cow.
Shares of Tesla Inc NASDAQ: TSLA are trading around $410 this week, holding on to most of the gains they’ve logged since hitting a multi-month low in late April. The broader bull case has been well documented, from full self-driving and robotaxis to Optimus and the longer-term robotics ambition.
Tesla Today
$382.60 +0.99 (+0.26%)
As of 10:25 AM Eastern
This is a fair market value price provided by Massive. Learn more.
52-Week Range$288.77▼
$498.83P/E Ratio349.45
Price Target$405.06
But in recent weeks, a new and potentially more significant narrative has been quietly building in the background. That narrative is the growing consensus that Tesla and SpaceX are heading toward a merger, and the latter’s blockbuster IPO last week has brought it into even sharper focus. SpaceX has gone officially public, and the timing has triggered a fresh round of commentary from Wall Street's most vocal Tesla bulls.
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While Tesla’s retail investors have been busy debating robotaxi rollouts, the conversation among serious institutional voices has shifted.
The SpaceX IPO Changes EverythingLast Friday, SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq in what's considered the biggest IPO in history. It was oversubscribed fourfold; retail investor demand alone topped $100 billion, and firms like BlackRock were looking to invest at least $5 billion themselves.
But beyond the headlines, the IPO has fundamentally changed the conversation around Tesla in a way that hasn't quite sunk in yet. Up until last week, the prospect of a Tesla-SpaceX merger was a fascinating theoretical exercise built on speculation and Musk's track record.
However, now there's a publicly traded counterparty with a real market valuation, a real share structure, and a real set of public shareholders. The merger thesis has gone from being hypothetically interesting to a tangible scenario that the market can actually start pricing in.
Why Ives Thinks It's ComingThat brings us to the comments from Wedbush's Dan Ives, one of Wall Street's most consistently bullish voices on Tesla. Speaking to Bloomberg ahead of the SpaceX listing last week, Ives put the odds of a Tesla-SpaceX merger within the next year at 80% and framed it as the logical next step in a broader strategy that Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of both companies, has been quietly executing for years.
His reasoning is worth exploring properly. Ives sees the merger not as a corporate vanity project, but as part of a deeper play around AI and data. In his words, the eventual combination is about consolidating "the broader plan, specifically when it comes to AI data and all under that Musk ecosystem associated from a control perspective."
He went further, arguing that SpaceX itself should be viewed less as a traditional space company and more as a "data AI play" with the potential to host data centers in space within three or four years.
That reframing matters because it directly challenges the way many investors currently think about both companies. If Ives is right, then everything from full self-driving to robotaxis to Starlink will eventually form part of a single, integrated AI and data empire that's far more valuable as one entity than as two.
Musk Has Done This BeforeWhat gives the merger thesis genuine credibility isn't just Ives's commentary; it's the pattern that comes before it. Earlier this year, Tesla invested in Musk's xAI, which had acquired X (formerly Twitter). SpaceX has since acquired xAI, meaning Tesla shareholders already have a substantial indirect link to SpaceX sitting on their balance sheet, without a formal merger having even taken place.
That's not a coincidence; it's an intentional and methodical chain of transactions. Each step has brought Tesla and SpaceX closer together operationally and financially, quietly laying the foundations for something much larger.
Add in the joint Terafab semiconductor fabrication facility currently under development, which will manufacture chips for both companies, and the picture of two organizations being deliberately stitched together becomes hard to ignore. Now that SpaceX is publicly listed, the final structural barrier to a formal combination has effectively been removed.
A Long Shot Worth WatchingAll that being said, the risks are real, and there are still plenty of reasons to be cautious. Both companies are trading at stretched multiples in their own right, and merging them introduces meaningful execution risk.
Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) Price Chart for Wednesday, June, 24, 2026
Prediction markets, which have become increasingly recognized for their forecasting accuracy, are still placing the odds of a merger before May 2027 at around 50%, well below Ives's call. There's also the not-so-small matter of the legal scrutiny and shareholder battles that any deal of this scale would inevitably attract.
Still, the direction of travel feels clearer than it did even a month ago. Musk has a long track record of eventually delivering on ideas that initially seemed implausible, and the SpaceX IPO might have just handed him the final piece of the puzzle.
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On June 22, Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 0.03%) had its worst session as a public company -- falling 16.4% to close at $154.60 per share. That puts SpaceX down 31.5% from its intraday high of $225.64 per share.
Here are four reasons why SpaceX should merge with Tesla (TSLA 0.27%), and why it would make the growth stock more appealing for long-term investors.
Image source: Getty Images.
1. Simplification If you've tuned into recent presentations by SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, you've probably noticed that at times it's difficult to distinguish which efforts fall under SpaceX versus Tesla.
While Tesla has been a public company for longer, SpaceX has been the one slowly gobbling up Musk's other efforts. In 2025, xAI bought social media platform X. Then, earlier this year, SpaceX bought xAI. But the bulk of Musk's robotics, energy storage, and autonomous vehicle ideas are under Tesla.
Merging Tesla with SpaceX would bring all these ideas (and creativity) under one umbrella.
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2. Terafab collaboration In March, Elon Musk gave a presentation on a collaborative effort between Tesla, xAI, and SpaceX (Intel joined in April) to build the world's largest chip plant called Terafab. In the presentation, Musk discussed why Tesla, xAI, and SpaceX are builders and have already accomplished once impossible feats. Again, this is yet another nod that "we" refers to the collective efforts of Musk-led companies.
SpaceX is designing its AI compute satellites to operate on Nvidia graphics processing units and has a reference design for Alphabet's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). But AI compute capacity will be a limiting factor in scaling AI satellite production. xAI built the world's first gigawatt-scale AI training cluster, and SpaceX believes it is the only company capable of building orbital AI compute at scale. But that will depend on compute availability and SpaceX's ability to launch heavy payloads. Similarly, Tesla's autonomous driving technology and Optimus robots are incredibly compute-intensive.
Bringing at least a portion of the chip supply in-house rather than relying on external suppliers is in the interest of SpaceX and Tesla. Putting Terafab under one entity instead of separate companies could speed up its construction and simplify its financing. Musk expects Terafab to be around 100 million square feet, which is 10 times the size of Tesla's Giga Texas factory. One terawatt of compute output per year is double the current U.S. annual consumption. So if successful, Terafab could ensure that SpaceX and Tesla can pursue their long-term goals without relying on the chip industry to increase production.
3. xAI is a key input for Tesla's growth xAI and its Grok large language models (LLMs) are already integrated with Tesla's self-driving technology and energy storage platforms. In March, Musk posted on X about a collaboration between Tesla and xAI called Macrohard or Digital Optimus. Digital Optimus will run on Tesla's AI4 chip and use Grok LLMs. If successful, Optimus could transform digital workflows rather than being solely a robotics solution for automating repetitive physical tasks.
So, while SpaceX's acquisition of xAI makes a ton of sense for SpaceX scaling AI data centers, Tesla is also heavily dependent on xAI. Merging SpaceX and Tesla would give xAI a straightforward path to support both companies, rather than having Tesla serve as both a partner and a customer.
4. Energy storage in space SpaceX's boldest idea is to build constellations of AI compute satellites in space. In theory, these orbital data centers would harness the power of free, predictable solar energy at radiation levels higher than those at Earth's surface.
In its Form S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, SpaceX said it could launch millions of AI satellites in sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). SSO means orbiting Earth's poles so that satellites pass over locations at the same local time each day. For example, a point along the equator every 100 minutes. This route provides predictability, but it can also cause significant light pollution when satellites pass over dark skies at night. Most current Starlink satellites don't use SSO.
Tesla could theoretically help SpaceX meet the power-hungry needs of orbital AI data centers without operating in a route that would be invasive to nighttime sky viewing for the naked eye and astronomers. SpaceX AI satellites equipped with Tesla energy storage technology could allow them to avoid SSO and spend more time in Earth's shadow at night, reducing light pollution and interference with observatories. However, energy storage systems would likely add weight to payloads, not to mention battery life issues.
Still, SpaceX and Tesla would likely benefit from collaborating on hardware systems and energy storage for AI compute satellites.
Merger updates could be coming soon While investors solely interested in SpaceX's vision, rather than Tesla's, and vice versa, may balk at a potential merger, it ultimately makes the most sense for both companies.
The reasons extend far beyond focusing Musk's attention on one company. SpaceX and Tesla are collaborating on Terafab, and Tesla's energy storage solutions could prove valuable for SpaceX. SpaceX-owned xAI is deeply ingrained in Tesla's autonomous vehicle and humanoid robot efforts.
Investors should pay close attention to SpaceX's upcoming earnings call to see if Musk discusses a potential merger and what it could mean for SpaceX and Tesla investors.
Elon Musk is no longer a trillionaire after sharp declines in SpaceX and Tesla shares wiped out more than $150 billion from his fortune and dragged his net worth below the $1 trillion mark.
According to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index, Musk's wealth stood at $957 billion on Wednesday, down from the historic milestone he crossed earlier this month after SpaceX's blockbuster initial public offering propelled him into the trillionaire club.
The reversal comes amid a broad selloff in technology stocks and growing investor concerns over the sustainability of massive spending on artificial intelligence and ambitious long-term projects.
SpaceX had become the centrepiece of Musk's fortune after its June 12 market debut.
The rocket company was briefly valued at nearly $3 trillion as retail investors flocked to the stock, attracted by Musk's vision of building space-based data centres and eventually establishing a human presence on Mars.
However, the rally has cooled rapidly.
SpaceX shares plunged 16% on Monday and ended the session on Tuesday at $156, only modestly above their opening trading price of $150 and well below the record high of $225 reached just a week ago.
The IPO itself was priced at $135 a share, meaning early investors remain in profit despite the recent declines.
The weakness has cut SpaceX's market capitalisation from a peak of around $2.99 trillion to just over $2 trillion, erasing almost $1 trillion in value in little more than a week.
Monday's decline alone erased more than $152 billion from Musk's net worth, according to Forbes estimates.
The decline has coincided with increasing scrutiny of SpaceX's valuation and its long-term business plans.
Ahead of its public listing, the company's regulatory filings revealed that it posted a loss of $4.9 billion in 2025.
Its artificial intelligence segment also incurred capital expenditures of $12.7 billion, underscoring the enormous financial commitments required to pursue its expansion plans.
Some investors have begun questioning whether the company's moonshot projects can justify its valuation.
The upcoming expiry of the lockup period, when early investors and insiders are permitted to sell their shares, is also emerging as a key test for the stock.
Danni Hewson, head of financial analysis at AJ Bell, said the recent volatility was not unusual for newly listed companies.
"SpaceX might have seemed charmed after its record-breaking IPO and subsequent rally, but it's come down to earth with a bump over the past couple of days, with shares at one point falling below the opening price on its market debut."
She noted that newly public companies often experience periods of volatility as investors reassess valuations and decide whether to lock in gains.
"Post-IPO stocks often enter a period of volatility as the market gets to grips with the new entrant, some investors rush to cash out, and others assess at what price they are willing to jump in."
"For a stock like SpaceX, a lot of decision-making might have been emotional and based on the anticipation of huge leaps forward in space exploration and utilisation, but investing should be something treated with clear eyes and patience, even when such huge numbers are involved."
Despite the recent decline, SpaceX remains by far Musk's most valuable asset.
According to Bloomberg data, his SpaceX holdings are worth about $744 billion and account for nearly 80% of his total net worth.
Musk's fortune has also been hit by weakness in Tesla shares.
The electric vehicle maker fell 5.8% on Monday as technology stocks broadly sold off amid concerns over elevated valuations and heavy spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
His stake in TSLA is currently valued at approximately $158 billion.
Like all market fortunes, Musk's wealth remains closely tied to the performance of his companies and could rebound if SpaceX shares recover.
Despite dropping below the $1 trillion threshold, Musk remains comfortably the world's richest person.
Bloomberg estimates that his lead over the second-richest individual, Google co-founder Larry Page, is roughly $660 billion, a gap larger than the entire fortunes of several of the world's wealthiest individuals combined.
Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 0.03%) is finally public. Tesla (TSLA +0.22%) stock has been public for 16 years. Both companies were set up and are CEO'd by Elon Musk, but SpaceX is clearly the newer, shinier toy today -- and a lot of investors are probably wondering whether the time has come to put Tesla on a shelf and take out SpaceX to play with instead.
And so the question today: Should you ditch Tesla stock in favor of SpaceX?
Image source: The Motley Fool.
SpaceX and Tesla: the similarities Broadly speaking, both SpaceX and Tesla are "tech stocks." Both companies were established in their current forms by tech wunderkind and world-first trillionaire Elon Musk, who leads both companies as CEO.
SpaceX spends a lot of time working on space (as one might expect) and the corollary industry of satellite communications. As its prospectus makes clear, however, SpaceX sees its greatest future revenue opportunity in artificial intelligence. Out of the company's entire $28.5 trillion "total addressable market" (TAM), says Elon Musk, $26.5 trillion will come from building AI infrastructure, providing AI services, and selling AI subscriptions.
Tesla is a little different.
From its origins as an electric car company, Tesla has branched out into at least two tangentially related fields. First, in solar power and energy storage through its 2016 acquisition of SolarCity, and more recently, in robotics with the unveiling of Optimus in 2022.
Of these three fields, Energy Generation and Storage is currently Tesla's most profitable business, with a 30% gross profit margin, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. But electric cars offer the greatest promise through subscriptions for autonomous driving software, sales of self-driving cars, and/or transportation-as-a-service. In public statements, Musk has predicted that robotic vehicles could drive Tesla's market capitalization to $5 trillion or more -- while a market for 1 billion robots per year could turn Tesla into a $25 trillion company!
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SpaceX and Tesla: the differences Broadly speaking, perhaps the biggest similarity that SpaceX and Tesla share (well, aside from their CEO) is that they're both valued very much on future prospects -- or what investors hope their future prospects might be -- AI riches in the case of SpaceX, and self-driving cars and humanoid robots at Tesla.
What's perhaps most curious, though, is that while both SpaceX and Tesla are priced based on pie-in-the-sky prospects that are incredibly difficult to value, the two stocks are priced very differently today.
The more mature company by far, Tesla today boasts just under $98 billion in annual sales, has been profitable since 2019, and earns an operating profit margin of 4.9% today. Tesla is self-funding, generating positive free cash flow of $7 billion annually, and it boasts enormous cash reserves to fund future growth -- nearly $30 billion more cash than debt on the balance sheet.
Contrast all this with SpaceX. Only five years younger than Tesla, SpaceX is still trying to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up. (Rockets? Satellites? AI satellites launched by rockets?) SpaceX generated just $19.3 billion in revenue over the past year (one-fifth of Tesla's haul), and lost nearly half that amount -- $8.7 billion. Thanks to a recent successful IPO, it's got more cash than Tesla does -- more than $100 billion -- but also more than $30 billion in debt. And SpaceX needs the cash cushion, because it's burning nearly $20 billion per year.
And yet, at $1.5 trillion in market capitalization, Tesla stock currently costs 25% less than SpaceX, which has a $2 trillion market cap!
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What this means for investors I'm the last person to argue that Tesla stock is a buy at 367 times trailing earnings. That said, it's pretty clear that SpaceX stock is even more overvalued than Tesla. For that matter, if, like most investors, you're valuing both stocks on their future prospects, Tesla's pie-in-the-sky projections are no less ambitious than SpaceX's.
That's two good reasons not to ditch Tesla stock in favor of SpaceX.
Now here's a third: According to the SpaceX IPO Prospectus, SpaceX already shares "engineering resources, intellectual property, and infrastructure across Tesla and SpaceX," and plans to "deepen [its] strategic collaboration with Tesla."
To me, this sounds like Elon Musk is contemplating merging SpaceX -- which has already merged with X and xAI -- with Tesla as well. In such a transaction, the richer SpaceX stock would almost certainly be used to buy the cheaper Tesla stock.
Indeed, that may be the strongest argument yet for not selling Tesla stock: SpaceX just might want to buy Tesla.
HomeInvestingStocksYour Digital SelfYour Digital SelfUber is quietly writing $500 million checks to lock in robotaxis as Waymo threatens to leave it behindPublished: June 24, 2026 at 7:50 a.m. ET
If you own Tesla stock, much of what you are paying for above the value of a carmaker is a bet on autonomy and artificial intelligence that has barely reached the income statement: full self-driving software, the Optimus robot and a robotaxi network.
The robotaxi is the nearest-term and most testable piece of that bet, and this spring it amounted to about 20 driverless Tesla Model Y vehicles in Austin, Dallas and Houston. Value the car business the way investors price any other automaker, and it accounts for only a fraction of the stock; the rest is the market’s bid on that future, a premium no ordinary carmaker could carry. What is new is that the bet is finally testable against operating data rather than projections.
SAN FRANCISCO, June 24, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sunrun (Nasdaq: RUN), Renew Home, and Tesla (Nasdaq: TSLA), today announced an agreement to deliver more than 16 gigawatts1 of flexible energy capacity to hyperscalers and utilities. The agreement establishes a framework for three of the largest players in home energy to aggregate millions of existing demand side and energy exporting devices in states across the country into local, turnkey solutions that require no additional hardware, software, interconnection, water, or land usage for offtaking parties.
Deployable in months, not years, this capacity-as-a-solution framework creates headroom on the existing grid by freeing up transmission capacity, easing congestion on distribution infrastructure, and extending the duration and depth of available capacity, all while helping American households lower energy bills, earn rewards, and power through outages.
Together, the companies would form the largest distributed power plant in the country — capable of injecting net new electrons onto the grid from home batteries paired with solar generation while simultaneously shifting household load during peak demand hours. The combined 16-gigawatt resource draws dispatchable capacity from hundreds of thousands of home battery systems operated by Sunrun and Tesla, alongside flexible peak capacity from more than 8 million smart thermostats and devices managed by Renew Home.
“The grid of the 1800s cannot power the innovation of 2026,” said Sunrun CEO Mary Powell. “Americans deserve innovation that does not create unnecessary energy costs. When data centers are asked to throttle down operations during the most expensive and stressful hours of the day, we can activate our distributed power plants to help provide them the power they need while also protecting American families from footing the bill for costly new infrastructure.”
An Untapped Opportunity Requires a Bold Solution
In Virginia — the heart of Data Center Alley — the companies already have more than 300 megawatts of capacity readily available for immediate deployment. By 2030, that figure is expected to grow to at least 500 megawatts, rivaling some of the largest generation facilities in the state, as installations of home batteries and smart thermostats ramp.
The companies are capable of building multiple gigawatts of additional capacity across the country. Given the unprecedented race for power, hyperscalers interested in securing these local energy resources are encouraged to engage immediately, as available capacity will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
Together, the companies have also committed to provide capacity to PJM’s proposed Reliability Backstop Process. If accepted, PJM would immediately unlock over a gigawatt of capacity today, with more deployable in the years ahead for peak shaving, locational grid relief, and fast-responding ancillary services.
“Renew Home convened this strategic coalition because we believe hyperscalers are motivated to drive down costs through this transition and that this group of residential-focused energy companies can help them accomplish that goal,” said Ben Brown, Chief Executive Officer at Renew Home.
Speed to Power Through Distributed Resources
As electricity demand increases and tech leaders align with the Presidential Ratepayer Protection Pledge, the need for a technology neutral energy strategy to support cost-effective economic growth is critical.
Hyperscalers are racing to bring AI compute online while interconnection queues lengthen and energy costs increase. The grid is sized for peak hours that occur only a fraction of the year, leaving expensive infrastructure underutilized most of the time, a cost ultimately borne by every ratepayer.
New analysis from The Brattle Group finds that better utilization of the existing power grid could reduce U.S. electricity bills by $110 billion to $170 billion over the next decade and accelerate data center interconnection by several years. Sunrun, Renew Home, and Tesla designed this framework to capture exactly that dual benefit: hyperscalers come online faster, and costs go down for everyone.
“The stakes are clear. America’s grid faces mounting pressure from data centers, electrification, and manufacturing growth that no single infrastructure solution can solve fast enough,” said Colby Hastings, Senior Director of Residential Energy at Tesla. “Sunrun, Renew Home, and Tesla believe that a huge piece of the answer is already in place — in the batteries, thermostats, and electric vehicles inside millions of American homes, waiting to be put to work.”
A Win-Win-Win For Customers, Communities, and Economic Development
Residential customers, data centers, and utilities can all benefit from the improved scale, speed, and cost effectiveness this framework activates. Key aspects include:
Better grid utilization, lower rates for everyone: When customers choose to shift how they use energy during peak periods, it allows grid operators to focus on more cost-effective infrastructure — and that means lower energy costs for all ratepayers, not just owners of distributed energy resources.Innovative customer offers and experiences: Sunrun, Renew Home, and Tesla are building new customer offerings and AI-driven tools to lower the cost of solar-plus-storage systems and expand access to reliable home energy and more ways to participate in grid programs.Savings and rewards for households that have enabled these devices: The companies will unlock new ways to help households manage their energy costs and earn rewards for participating in grid-supporting programs.Latent existing capacity: Gigawatts of capacity and customer savings sit on the sidelines today in the form of idle home batteries, HVAC systems, and EVs. The three companies, in partnership with data centers and utilities, can unlock this latent capacity immediately.Speed to new capacity: Distributed capacity through residential installations is the fastest way to meet immediate system needs without expensive new poles and wires or additional land usage. This agreement between three of the largest players in home energy can create a structure to stand behind commitments on development timelines.National coverage: Meeting the needs of hyperscalers requires scale across several key geographic areas. Sunrun, Renew Home, and Tesla have the largest combined residential energy footprint in the country, with deployable capacity and utility relationships in most major electricity markets.Joint market development: Data center and utility procurement teams are stretched thin. This new joint capacity delivery framework can give them a single, trusted source for gigawatts of flexible capacity by cutting through the complexity of managing multiple resource developers and accelerating the path from need to deployment.
For more information about working with Sunrun, Renew Home and Tesla for flexible capacity and household savings, visit www.vppcapacity.com.
About Sunrun
Sunrun Inc. (Nasdaq: RUN) is America’s largest provider of home battery storage, solar, and home-to-grid power plants. As the pioneer of home energy systems offered through a no-upfront-cost subscription model, Sunrun empowers customers nationwide with greater energy control, security, and independence. Sunrun supports the grid by providing on-demand dispatchable power that helps prevent blackouts and lowers energy costs. Learn more at www.sunrun.com.
About Renew Home
Renew Home brings households and energy providers together to help households save energy and earn rewards while offering energy providers cost-effective, reliable grid capacity at scale. With its home energy management platform, Renew Home empowers millions of households to save and shift their energy use to times when it's cleaner, less expensive or better for the grid. Renew Home VPP is building the country’s largest virtual power plant solution for energy providers, with more than 6 million connected households. Renew Home is a Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP) company. Learn more at www.renewhome.com.
About Tesla
Tesla Energy Operations, Inc. is the sustainable energy division of Tesla, Inc. that develops, manufactures, sells and installs photovoltaic solar energy generation systems, battery energy storage products and other related products and services to residential, commercial and industrial customers.
Media Contacts
Wyatt Semanek
Sr. Director, Corporate Communications [email protected]
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements regarding Sunrun’s, Renew Home’s, and Tesla’s framework to pursue distributed energy resource opportunities; the potential availability, timing, scale, dispatchability, and benefits of aggregated capacity; potential participation in PJM’s proposed Reliability Backstop Process and other utility or market programs; potential opportunities with utilities, hyperscalers, data centers, and other large energy customers; anticipated customer participation, customer benefits, grid benefits, cost savings, and ratepayer impacts; potential deployment timelines; and potential new customer offerings, software capabilities, and AI-driven tools.
Forward-looking statements are based on current expectations, estimates, assumptions, and beliefs, and may be identified by words such as “expect,” “anticipate,” “intend,” “plan,” “believe,” “target,” “estimate,” “may,” “will,” “could,” “potential,” “designed to,” “seek,” “pursue,” and similar expressions. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied, including customer enrollment and authorization; device availability, performance, interoperability, and dispatch accuracy; utility program design and participation; PJM and other market rules, acceptance, implementation, and settlement processes; regulatory approvals and changes in regulatory frameworks; interconnection, telemetry, data access, cybersecurity, and privacy requirements; the ability of the parties to integrate operational capabilities while maintaining appropriate information controls; supply chain availability and costs; macroeconomic conditions; changes in utility rate structures, net metering policies, incentive programs, and tax rules; partner performance; market demand from utilities, hyperscalers, data centers, and other customers; and other risks described in Sunrun’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this press release. Sunrun undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by law.
1 Battery Storage MW calculation is based on the installed battery rated capacity. HVAC MW calculation is based on the 1-hour peak load shift potential from connected smart HVAC systems and thermostats across Renew Home’s HVAC partners.
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/c86e0633-6933-4ed6-b257-920ccc2a54ae
Sunrun, Renew Home, and Tesla Team Up to Deliver Gigawatts of Fast, Flexible Power Together, the companies offer 16.8 GW of flexible capacity across the nation's largest data center m...
Sunrun shares are powering higher. What’s behind RUN gains? The AgreementUnder the framework, Sunrun, Renew Home, and Tesla will aggregate millions of existing home energy devices—including home battery systems, smart thermostats, and electric vehicles—into local, turnkey power solutions for data centers and utilities.
The combined 16-gigawatt resource draws dispatchable capacity from hundreds of thousands of home battery systems operated by Sunrun and Tesla, alongside flexible peak capacity from more than 8 million smart thermostats and devices managed by Renew Home. The framework requires no additional hardware, software, interconnection, water, or land usage—and is deployable in months, not years.
In Virginia, the companies already have more than 300 megawatts of capacity available for immediate deployment, expected to grow to at least 500 megawatts by 2030. The companies have also committed to provide capacity to PJM’s proposed Reliability Backstop Process, which if accepted would unlock over a gigawatt of capacity immediately.
“The grid of the 1800s cannot power the innovation of 2026,” said Mary Powell, CEO of Sunrun. “When data centers are asked to throttle down operations during the most expensive and stressful hours of the day, we can activate our distributed power plants to help provide them the power they need while also protecting American families from footing the bill for costly new infrastructure.”
Sunrun Shares ClimbRUN Price Action: At the time of publication, Sunrun shares are trading 19.28% higher at $15.28, according to data from Benzinga Pro.
Image via Shutterstock
This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs
The family of a woman killed when a Tesla crashed into her home, allegedly while in self-driving mode, is suing Elon Musk's company and the driver.
Jennifer Barbour, the daughter of the 76-year-old victim, Martha Avila, filed the lawsuit alongside her husband.
It alleges a "design defect" in Teslas and negligence against both Tesla and the driver, Michael Butler.
According to the lawsuit, the victim was standing in the front room of her brick home at around 8pm on Friday when the car smashed into it, causing her to be "pinned in the wreckage".
She was airlifted to a local hospital where she was pronounced dead, according to the Harris County Sheriff's Office.
Image: Pic: Harris County Constable Precinct 5 The driver said he was using the car's self-driving system when it crashed, according to the sheriff's office, which said he was cooperative and didn't show any signs of intoxication.
Although Tesla did not immediately reply to a request for comment from Sky's partner newsroom, NBC, Elon Musk did respond to a news story about the crash on Monday night.
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Referring to the vehicle's full self-driving mode, he wrote on X: "FSD drives slowly through neighborhood streets, and this was a high-speed crash!"
Ashok Elluswamy, vice president of AI software at Tesla, defended the vehicle's systems.
"In this case, the driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100% of the accel pedal in this residential area," he wrote on X on Monday.
"They reached a speed of 73 mph during the crash, and had the accelerator pressed even after the crash."
Image: Pic: Harris County Constable Precinct 5 NBC has seen a copy of the lawsuit, which alleges that the Tesla was in "Autopilot" mode and that the system has "a history of known danger".
It cites a 2023 Washington Post analysis of government data that "identified at least 17 fatal incidents linked to Tesla's Autopilot".
"The actions and inactions of Defendant Butler were done with reckless disregard for a substantial risk of severe bodily injury," the lawsuit alleges.
Although no criminal charges have been filed, the crash is under investigation, according to the sheriff's office, with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration also launching a special investigation.
The Barbour family thanked first responders in a statement released by their lawyers.
"Your quick response, professionalism, and kindness have been a significant reason that we have been able to deal with this unimaginable situation," they said.
"Thank you for all that you do to help families like ours during the hardest moments of our lives."
The lawsuit seeks more than $1m (£760,100) in damages.
Key Takeaways Tesla shares fell after a fatal Model 3 crash triggered a special investigation by U.S. safety regulators.TSLA inked a deal with NatPower to deploy 25 GWh of battery storage projects across Italy and the U.K.Overseas delivery trends are improving and FSD gains approvals in five European countries. Tesla (TSLA - Free Report) shares fell more than 5% yesterday after U.S. safety regulators opened a special investigation into a fatal crash involving a Model 3 in Texas. The driver claims Tesla’s partially automated driving system was engaged when the vehicle veered out of its lane and crashed into a home, killing a 76-year-old woman. CEO Elon Musk has disputed the implication that Full Self-Driving (FSD) was at fault, noting that the system is designed to operate cautiously on neighborhood streets and describing the incident as a high-speed crash.
The latest probe arrives at a sensitive time for Tesla. Musk has spent the past year repositioning TSLA’s investment story around autonomous driving, robotaxis and FSD. Tesla is now not being valued just as an automaker, but as a future leader in autonomous mobility. As a result, an accident linked to driver-assistance systems has the potential to raise fresh questions about the company's long-term vision.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
The investigation is in its early stages, and regulators have not reached any conclusion. Yet the market's reaction suggests growing concerns about Tesla's autonomous-driving ambitions. The bigger question is whether investors are focusing too much on a single incident while overlooking improving delivery trends, continued strength in the energy business, and steady progress toward broader FSD adoption. While Tesla stock is definitely not an obvious buy today, isn’t selling the stock also a bit premature now?
The Overlooked Strength of Tesla's Energy BusinessWhile the latest safety investigation grabbed headlines, investors may have overlooked a significant positive development for Tesla's energy business. The company signed a multiyear agreement with NatPower to deploy 25 GWh of battery storage projects across Italy and the U.K. The first phase is expected to carry a construction value of $4 billion to $5 billion, with Tesla supplying its Megapack battery systems, engineering services and Autobidder software platform. NatPower ultimately aims to expand the partnership beyond 100 GWh of storage capacity, creating a potential revenue opportunity exceeding $15 billion over the next two decades.
Tesla's energy segment has emerged as one of the company's most resilient businesses. Tesla deployed a record 46.7 GWh of energy storage in 2025, up 50% year over year, and expects deployments to increase again in 2026. To support rising demand, the company is expanding production capacity through a new Megapack factory near Houston and plans to launch its next-generation Megapack 3 system later this year.
The business is also highly profitable. Tesla's energy division generated a gross margin of 39.5% in the last quarter, making it the company's highest-margin segment. While competition and policy risks remain, the energy business continues to provide Tesla with a valuable growth engine.
Overseas Strength Brightens TSLA’s Q2 Delivery OutlookThe company's delivery outlook is improving. Demand trends have strengthened across several key international markets. In China, Tesla's retail sales rose 22.5% year over year in May, ending a two-month decline. Europe was even more encouraging, with France reporting its best May on record and registrations soaring more than 655%. Strong gains were also seen in Norway, Spain, Denmark, Portugal and Sweden. Despite softer U.S. demand, robust international performance is helping offset the weakness.
Reflecting this trend, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for Tesla's second-quarter deliveries is pegged at roughly 397,500 vehicles, up both sequentially and year over year.
TSLA’s FSD Expansion ContinuesMusk expects unsupervised FSD to be “widespread” in the United States by 2026-end. Apart from the United States, Tesla's FSD (Supervised) ambitions are gaining momentum in Europe. The Netherlands became the first European country to grant provisional approval for FSD in April, followed by Lithuania and Estonia. More recently, Denmark and Belgium also cleared the technology, bringing the total number of approving EU countries to five.
Tesla is now pursuing broader EU-wide approval. While some hurdles remain—most notably concerns from Sweden regarding speed-limit compliance—regulatory momentum is clearly moving in Tesla's favor. Finland could also approve the system before an EU-wide decision is expected later this year, further expanding Tesla's footprint.
Tesla also launched FSD in China last month. It comes at a time when competition in autonomous driving technology is heating up rapidly with XPeng (XPEV - Free Report) , BYD Co Ltd (BYDDY - Free Report) and Geely Automobile (GELHY - Free Report) aggressively investing in next-generation smart-driving systems.
Why Long-Term TSLA Investors Should Stay PutTesla is clearly not a buy. The company faces real challenges, including shifting robotaxi timelines, uncertainty around Optimus commercialization and management's warning that free cash flow could turn negative as it ramps up spending on AI and autonomous-driving initiatives.
The stock has declined 15% year to date. And its valuation still leaves little room for error.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
The bears are getting louder, but the market may be underestimating Tesla's strengths. The energy business continues to grow rapidly, delivery trends are showing signs of improvement, and FSD is gaining regulatory traction in key markets. Most importantly, Tesla still possesses a powerful brand, industry-leading technology capabilities, and multiple long-term growth platforms.
With Wall Street expecting revenue and earnings growth to resume in 2026 and 2027, existing investors should retain the stock. The stock currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
On the June 12 episode of The Ramsey Show, a debt-free single woman with a roughly $250,000 net worth called in asking whether to buy 10 to 100 shares of SpaceX at about $162 each because a friend told her the stock was “going to skyrocket.” Dave Ramsey’s answer doubled as a personal finance lesson for anyone tempted by a hot single-stock tip: “I am not investing in SpaceX. I’m not buying single stock in that company. As much as I’m rooting for it, I could just keep doing what I’m doing, invest in mutual funds and stay boring.”
One housekeeping note before the math: SpaceX is not listed on a U.S. exchange, so most retail investors cannot simply buy shares the way the caller described. The closest public-market proxy is Elon Musk’s other company, Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA | TSLA Price Prediction), which recently made a $2 billion equity investment in SpaceX and is building a chip fab at Gigafactory Texas with SpaceX.
The verdict: Ramsey is right, and the math is the reason Ramsey’s position is correct for the caller, and the case rests on opportunity cost. He framed it plainly: the claim behind any single-stock bet is that it will so badly beat the broad market that locking up the money is worth the risk. He reminded the caller that the U.S. market has roughly doubled every seven years, meaning a $5,000 index purchase has historically tended to become about $10,000 over that span without anyone touching it.
Real numbers back up the “boring” path. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) is up 23% over the past year, 75% over five years, and 257% over ten years. It does that work for a 0.09% expense ratio, holding 500 companies across eleven sectors. The fund’s top ten names, including NVIDIA at 8% and Tesla at 2%, already capture the AI and electrification story most retail investors are chasing.
If you want more growth tilt, the Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ:QQQ) returned 35% over the past year and 568% over ten years. Co-host George Kamel’s point lands here: a good growth-stock mutual fund will absorb SpaceX over time once it goes public, so patient investors get a piece anyway without taking single-stock risk today.
The variable that actually decides this: your play-money cushion What actually changes the answer is how big the bet is relative to everything else — not age or income, but cushion size. Ramsey ran his “kitchen table test”: imagine putting the $5,000 on the table and watching it burn. Would you still be okay? She said yes, and Ramsey allowed it “could be a fun ride for you.” Kamel drew the line at the cushion size: he wouldn’t stop someone with a $1 million-plus net worth and 20 years of mutual fund investing from playing with $5,000, but told this caller “I think you’re still building.”
Both hosts capped speculative single-stock positions at 5% to 10% of a total portfolio. On $250,000, that ceiling is roughly $12,500 to $25,000 total across every speculative bet combined, not per stock. A $5,000 SpaceX position would fit inside that band, but only if no other lottery tickets are already in the account. Ramsey also referenced the Dogecoin run-up around Elon Musk’s SNL appearance as the cautionary version of this story.
The Tesla example shows why concentration is dangerous even when the company succeeds. Tesla trades at 402 times earnings and 245 times free cash flow, with a 4% net margin and 5% return on equity. The stock is down 10% year to date even after a 27% one-year gain. Single names move like that. Index funds rarely do.
What to actually do this week Add up every speculative position you already own (crypto, single stocks, options) and divide by your total invested assets. If that number is above 10%, do not add SpaceX, Tesla, or any other single name until the ratio comes down. Run Ramsey’s kitchen table test on the exact dollar figure you are considering. If burning it would force you to change your retirement date, the bet is too big. Compare the expected hold period against a plain index alternative. $5,000 doubling to roughly $10,000 in seven years in an S&P 500 fund is the hurdle any single stock has to beat after taxes. If SpaceX eventually IPOs, check whether your existing growth fund already holds it before buying separately. As Kamel noted, the fund will likely do that work for you. The boring portfolio is boring because it works. A speculative single stock is allowed to be in the picture only after the boring part is doing the heavy lifting.
Goldman Sachs has maintained its $375 Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) stock price target and reiterated a ‘Neutral' rating on the electric vehicle maker despite raising its second-quarter 2026 vehicle delivery forecast.
I’m going to put the verdict at the top. Our Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA | TSLA Price Prediction) work points to a stock trading right at fair value heading into the back half of 2026. The 24/7 Wall St. price target for Tesla is $417.62, against a current price of $420.55.
That implies -0.7% downside over the next 12 months. Our recommendation is hold, with a 90% confidence level, meaning we view this as one of our higher-conviction neutral calls.
24/7 Wall St. Price Target Summary Metric Value Current Price $420.55 24/7 Wall St. Price Target $417.62 Upside/Downside -0.7% Recommendation HOLD Confidence Level 90% How Tesla Got Back to $420 Tesla is up 26.39% over the past year but down 8.58% year to date after a January peak near $475. Shares are now 16% off the 52-week high of $498.83 and well above the $288.77 52-week low.
The fundamental story improved sharply in Q1 2026. Tesla posted non-GAAP EPS of $0.41 against a $0.3592 estimate, with revenue of $22.387 billion growing 15.78% year over year. Automotive gross margin rebuilt to 21.1% from 16.2%, and FSD active subscriptions hit 1.28 million, up 51%. R
eddit chatter, however, has fixated on SpaceX IPO speculation rather than the core auto business, with sentiment swinging from 90 (very bullish) on June 9 to 57 (neutral) by June 16.
The Case for $480+ Bulls have a clean story. Q2 2026 deliveries are tracking the 425,000-475,000 band that Polymarket prices at 67.1% combined probability. Cybercab, Tesla Semi, and Megapack 3 all hit volume production this year, and Gen 3 Optimus was unveiled in Q1. Free cash flow of $1.444 billion in Q1, up 117.47% YoY, plus $44.743 billion in cash, funds the entire AI roadmap without dilution.
Prediction markets see $435 as the modal June touch (41.3%) and assign a 55% probability to closing above $450 by month-end. Our bull-case 12-month scenario lands at $481.77, a 14.56% return, if FSD wins China approval and Robotaxi expands cleanly into seven new cities.
Goldman Sachs has a neutral rating on Tesla shares with a $375 price target.
What Could Go Wrong The bear case starts with valuation. Tesla trades at a trailing P/E of 369 and a forward multiple of 196. Q4 2025 revenue fell 3.14% YoY, full-year operating income dropped 38.45%, and net income fell 46.79%. Operating expenses jumped 37% in Q1 on AI R&D and CEO award stock-based comp, and energy storage revenue slipped 12%. Insiders are net sellers across 46 recent transactions.
Bulls would counter that the 2025 weakness reflects a pre-launch lull before Cybercab, Semi, and Optimus arrive. Fair point. But our bear scenario still maps to $362.58, a -13.78% return, if FSD approvals slip and the auto multiple compresses.
Tesla Price Prediction 2026-2030 I’m sticking with hold. The 24/7 Wall St. price target of $417.62 at 90% confidence says Tesla is fairly priced for what we can underwrite today.
The setup turns more constructive if Q2 deliveries come in above 475,000 or if China grants FSD approval. The thesis weakens if operating margin stays stuck below 5% and inventory days keep drifting higher from the current 27.
Looking further ahead, here is where our model projects Tesla could trade, assuming current growth trajectories and base-case execution hold.
Year 24/7 Wall St. Price Target 2026 $421.53 2030 $472.51 These projections assume Tesla executes on Cybercab, Optimus, and Robotaxi scaling without margin disruption. Significant upside could come from a successful xAI integration or global FSD approvals, while a delayed Optimus ramp or sustained tariff pressure would skew us toward the bear scenario.
Two U.S. senators are asking the nation's traffic safety regulator to examine Tesla's self-published crash statistics for its “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) driver-assistance system, following a Reuters investigation last month that found the EV maker was exaggerating its safety claims.
Shares of Tesla (TSLA 1.55%) reached their all-time intraday peak of $498.83 on Dec. 22, 2025, giving it a market cap of around $1.67 trillion.
On June 12, Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX +4.83%), more widely known as SpaceX, held its initial public offering and closed the session with a market cap of $2.11 trillion.
Here's why SpaceX is soaring, and which growth stock is the better buy now.
Image source: Getty Images.
Private investors hold the majority of SpaceX's value SpaceX raised $75 billion by selling 555.6 million shares at a price per share of $135. The float, which is the shares available for public trading, is less than 5% of the shares outstanding, meaning the vast majority of SpaceX is still owned by insiders who were awarded shares as compensation or institutions that bought in during pre-IPO funding rounds. The float should increase gradually as SpaceX is allowing those insiders to sell some shares well before the usual 180-day lockup period ends.
With so much demand for shares and a relatively small available supply, SpaceX's valuation could continue to run up, at least in the short term. But those market dynamics could also inflate it with a lot of hot air, which could compress once the float makes up the majority of outstanding shares. Even with Elon Musk still owning around 19% of Tesla as of April, Tesla's float is now about 75% of the shares outstanding.
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Tesla and SpaceX have sky-high valuations A few years ago, Tesla was raking in free cash flow at margins that led the auto industry. But the electric vehicle (EV) market has since taken a hit. Consumer adoption of the technology has been slower than expected, and President Donald Trump's "big beautiful bill" removed the tax incentives that made EVs more affordable, putting another headwind on demand. Tesla's first-quarter deliveries were up just 6.3% year over year, while its energy storage product deployments fell 15.4%.
Aggressive investments in its efforts to build a robotaxi network, enhance its self-driving software, and develop marketable humanoid robots (Optimus), among other endeavors, are driving surging capital expenditures that are taking a sledgehammer to Tesla's profitability. The current consensus estimates among analysts is that it will earn just $2.06 per share in 2026, and $2.50 per share in 2027 on sales of $118.45 billion. That gives it a staggering forward price-to-earnings ratio of 162.4. For context, Tesla's all-time high annual EPS was $4.30 in 2023.
SpaceX's valuation is even more lofty. In 2025, its revenue increased by 33.2% to $18.67 billion, and net income went from $791 million in 2024 to a $4.94 billion net loss in 2025. With its market cap topping $2.5 trillion as of the close of trading Monday, that gives it a price-to-sales ratio of about 134 relative to its 2025 revenue.
When Tesla's earnings were soaring, it would have been the obvious choice over SpaceX for investors interested in companies offering proven profitability. But now, Tesla and SpaceX are both carrying values that depend far more on their anticipated growth potential than on what they are delivering today. So the answer to the question of which is the better buy may come down to which end markets you're more excited about.
Undeniable potential Tesla's robotaxi network could end up being more valuable than its passenger vehicle business -- especially as legacy automakers and pure-play EV competitors continue to release more advanced models. Utility-scale energy storage is another massive growth market as the tech sector looks for ways to alleviate the artificial intelligence energy bottleneck. And while Tesla has talked extensively about using its Optimus robots in residential settings, the bigger opportunity may be in factory operations.
SpaceX's main revenue driver is its Starlink network of low-Earth-orbit satellites that provide broadband connectivity and wireless internet to commercial, governmental, and residential customers. SpaceX also works with government agencies and commercial customers to launch payloads into space using its reusable Falcon 9 booster.
It also owns xAI, the maker of the Grok large language models, and social media platform X. AI could be a key driver of SpaceX's near-term growth, including through the deployment of data centers in space as early as 2028.
SpaceX's Earth ambitions are bold, but they pale in comparison to the company's stated mission: "To build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars."
A merger could be on the way Investors may not need to choose between SpaceX and Tesla for long. I fully expect the companies to at least attempt to merge as soon as next year.
The current regulatory environment in the U.S. is extremely business-friendly, so if there were ever a time to propose such a megamerger, it would be now. What's more, both SpaceX and Tesla could benefit if CEO Musk were putting all of his efforts into one combined company rather than splitting his focus.
Tesla and xAI already collaborate on Tesla's Full Self-Driving technology, and xAI's Grok is integrated into Tesla vehicles and Optimus robots. Meanwhile, xAI buys energy storage systems from Tesla, and the companies are collaborating on a chip manufacturing initiative called Terafab.
To top it all off, Tesla was an early investor in xAI, which SpaceX merged with earlier this year. So the longer-term plan all along seems to have been to eventually unite all of Musk's companies under one umbrella.
The combined market cap of SpaceX and Tesla as of the close of trading Monday was about $4 trillion -- behind Nvidia, Alphabet, and Apple for the fourth-most-valuable company in the world.
SpaceX has a big advantage over Tesla in that it has few real competitors, whereas Tesla faces mounting competition from other EV makers, automakers incorporating self-driving features into their vehicles, and pure-play autonomous vehicle rivals like Alphabet-owned Waymo.
However, even with more competition, Tesla has a much clearer path to consistent profitability if the adoption of its autonomous vehicles and robots grows. SpaceX, by contrast, still needs to prove it can expand without relying on the capital markets to raise money.
Tesla stock TSLA moved lower on Tuesday even as analysts grew more optimistic about the company's near-term vehicle deliveries.
Shares of the electric vehicle maker fell about 2% in early trading to $402.39, while the broader market was rallying, with the S&P 500 higher by roughly 1.6%.
The decline came as SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket and artificial intelligence company, continued its post-IPO surge.
SpaceX shares rose about 8% to $208.39, giving the company a market value of approximately $2.8 trillion.
By comparison, Tesla's market capitalization stood near $1.3 trillion.
Despite the stock's decline, Goldman Sachs expressed increased confidence in Tesla's second-quarter vehicle deliveries.
The bank reiterated its Neutral rating and maintained a $375 price target while raising its second-quarter 2026 delivery forecast to 420,000 vehicles from 405,000 previously.
That forecast now sits above the Visible Alpha consensus estimate of 400,000 vehicles.
Goldman Sachs analyst Mark Delaney said monthly and weekly sales data across key regions, including the United States, Europe, and China, suggest Tesla's second-quarter deliveries are tracking ahead of market expectations.
"We believe that Tesla’s 2Q26 vehicle deliveries are likely tracking ahead of consensus," Delaney wrote.
According to Goldman Sachs, Europe has been one of Tesla's strongest-performing regions during the quarter.
The firm said European registration data through May showed year-over-year growth of roughly 85% to 90%, while countries reporting June daily data indicated a strong start to the month, with deliveries rising about 20%.
Goldman Sachs noted that part of the increase reflects favorable comparisons against weak results in the prior year period.
Tesla's European deliveries declined 29% year over year during the second quarter of 2025, creating a relatively low comparison base.
Elsewhere, the bank said Chinese sales data from the China Passenger Car Association points to high single-digit year-over-year growth through May.
Other Asia-Pacific markets have also reported encouraging results. South Korea and Australia have both delivered strong sales performance on both a year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter basis through May.
In the United States, however, deliveries remain weaker. According to Motor Intelligence data cited by Goldman Sachs, US deliveries through May were tracking down by the mid-teens percentage range compared with a year earlier.
Growth remains a key questionImproving delivery trends would be welcome news for Tesla after two consecutive years of declining electric vehicle sales.
Wall Street currently expects Tesla to deliver approximately 1.7 million vehicles in 2026, up from roughly 1.6 million in 2025.
However, analysts caution that growth is far from guaranteed.
Tesla faces difficult comparisons later in the year after delivering a record 497,000 vehicles during the third quarter of last year.
Those results were boosted by consumers rushing to purchase vehicles before the expiration of the federal $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit.
The removal of that incentive has weighed on broader industry demand, although Tesla's sales have generally held up better than many competitors.
Investors remain focused on AIWhile vehicle deliveries remain important, many investors are increasingly valuing Tesla based on its artificial intelligence ambitions rather than its automotive business alone.
Tesla launched its AI-trained robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, about a year ago and has since expanded operations into a few more cities.
Investors continue to watch closely for signs of broader robotaxi deployment, believing that a larger autonomous-driving network could unlock a significant new revenue stream for the company.
Another closely watched catalyst is Optimus, Tesla's humanoid robot program.
Investors are anticipating the unveiling of the third-generation Optimus robot, which could arrive later this summer.
The Netherlands' transportation minister on Tuesday denied the country's influential RDW authority had relied on statistics submitted by Tesla as the basis of its approval of the company's "Full Self Driving (supervised)" software for use on Dutch roads.
The public debut of SpaceX NASDAQ: SPCX is officially in the books, and the sheer velocity of the price action caught even seasoned institutional desks off guard.
Priced at $135 just days ago, SpaceX quickly re-rated, recently pushing past $225 on intraday volume exceeding 200 million shares. This aggressive accumulation briefly sent it beyond the $2.5 trillion market capitalization threshold, cementing SpaceX as one of the most valuable businesses on the planet.
SpaceX (SPCX) Price Chart for Wednesday, June, 17, 2026
The euphoria surrounding the commercialization of low-Earth orbit is palpable, and the broader space economy represents a generational growth frontier. But separating the structural business from the current trading action is an essential survival skill. Behind the headline-grabbing valuation, a potent mix of engineered float scarcity, speculative derivatives trading, and immediate dilution is manufacturing a localized market anomaly.
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When SpaceX trades at roughly 20x projected 2027 sales and posts an annual net loss of $4.94 billion, the valuation multiple demands flawless operational execution. Right now, the underlying data suggests the downside risk for SpaceX is increasingly asymmetric.
Ignition Sequence: Retail Fuel and Float ScarcitySpaceX Today
$201.80 +9.30 (+4.83%)
As of 06/16/2026 04:00 PM Eastern
52-Week Range$149.34▼
$225.64Price Target$161.25
To understand the current price action, you have to look beneath the underlying shares and examine the derivatives market.
The June 16 start of options trading acted as an accelerant to an already constrained float.
Over 600,000 contracts exchanged hands within the initial trading hours, and those trades were heavily skewed toward out-of-the-money weekly calls.
This type of retail-driven options frenzy triggers a mechanical market reaction known as a gamma squeeze. When retail traders buy massive blocks of call options, the market makers on the other side of those trades are forced to buy SpaceX stock to hedge their directional risk. Because early SpaceX employees and insiders are tightly restricted by post-IPO lock-up agreements, the available public float is acutely constrained.
When massive buying demand collides with a severe shortage of available shares, the price of SpaceX can completely disconnect from actual business fundamentals. This kind of rally is driven more by market mechanics than by near-term fundamentals. Because this momentum relies on a temporary supply shortage rather than true business growth, the current upward trend is incredibly fragile.
Paper Rockets: Acquiring Cursor With Inflated SharesAdding to the complexity is SpaceX's aggressive movement into major acquisitions. SpaceX recently disclosed a $60 billion all-stock acquisition of artificial intelligence (AI) coding startup Cursor's parent company, Anysphere.
When corporate boards execute massive acquisitions using purely stock rather than cash, they send a subtle but critical signal to the market. Leveraging a $2.5 trillion market capitalization to absorb a pre-revenue AI software architecture is a brilliant strategic maneuver from SpaceX executives, but it introduces immediate friction for retail shareholders.
The Cursor transaction could dilute the existing shareholder base by about 2-3% just days after the initial public offering. Expanding the outstanding share count while navigating a severe cash-burn cycle creates a structural headwind. Commercializing heavy-lift launch vehicles and expanding global Starlink satellite internet coverage requires immense capital. Diluting the SpaceX equity base to fund tangential AI ambitions introduces execution drag to an aerospace sector manufacturer already priced for perfection.
Gravitational Pull: The Tesla Consolidation RumorTesla Today
$404.66 -6.49 (-1.58%)
As of 06/16/2026 04:00 PM Eastern
52-Week Range$288.77▼
$498.83P/E Ratio371.25
Price Target$404.37
Retail excitement is receiving additional thrust from unconfirmed rumors of a corporate consolidation between SpaceX and Tesla NASDAQ: TSLA.
Speculation that Tesla will merge with SpaceX is actively inflating the premium that traders are willing to pay for SpaceX stock.
Some Wall Street analysts have even assigned an 80% probability to a Tesla-SpaceX combination within the next 12 months.
A theoretical conglomerate that consolidates artificial intelligence, robotics, terrestrial electric vehicles, and aerospace divisions into a single $3.5 trillion entity makes for excellent headlines. However, a megamerger of this scale introduces massive antitrust friction. Regulators will likely scrutinize the monopolistic implications of merging the dominant domestic EV infrastructure provider with the primary orbital launch company.
Treating Tesla consolidation rumors as an immediate bullish catalyst ignores the harsh realities of regulatory oversight. If the Tesla rumors fail to materialize into definitive corporate action, the speculative premium currently embedded in SpaceX will evaporate.
Escape Velocity: The Satellite ReboundThe gravitational pull of the historic SpaceX IPO had a predictable secondary effect on the broader market. It drained liquidity from the rest of the orbital sector. Portfolio managers and retail traders aggressively liquidated positions in smaller space infrastructure companies to reallocate capital toward the headline SpaceX event.
This capital rotation triggered sharp selloffs across the board. The Procure Space ETF NASDAQ: UFO dropped 7%, while highly specialized mid-cap operators faced sudden double-digit declines.
Some investors recognize that this sector dilution represents a mispricing of risk. The temporary liquidity drain is not a reflection of deteriorating fundamentals in the broader aerospace market, but rather a mechanical side effect of portfolio rebalancing. This temporary capital flight creates highly attractive entry points for pure-play satellite operators.
AST SpaceMobile NASDAQ: ASTS experienced a rapid 20% drawdown during the immediate SpaceX IPO frenzy but is already staging a rebound. AST SpaceMobile has a significant commercial catalyst with the deployment of three advanced BlueBird satellites, scheduled for a June 17 launch.
Similarly, established launch providers like Rocket Lab NASDAQ: RKLB offer operational consistency, growing backlogs, and proven payload delivery without carrying the astronomical forward multiple of SpaceX.
AST SpaceMobile and Rocket Lab stand to benefit from the exact same macro tailwinds, specifically the rapid reduction in orbital launch costs and the commercialization of space, but offer a vastly superior risk-to-reward profile for fresh capital.
Impact Warning: The Impending Q2 Lock-Up ExpirationThe speculative premium currently holding up the SpaceX valuation faces a definitive expiration date. The Q2 earnings report will trigger the first major insider lock-up expiration, releasing an initial 20% tranche of restricted SpaceX shares into the open market.
This event will begin to ease the float scarcity that is currently driving the gamma squeeze. Institutional short sellers are already aggressively positioning for this liquidity cliff, driving up borrowing rates on the limited SpaceX float.
When a sudden influx of fresh supply collides with a market lacking institutional buyers willing to step in at 20x forward sales, the resulting mean reversion is often violent. Investors heavily allocated to SpaceX may want to strictly evaluate risk parameters as the lock-up expiration approaches.
Those seeking to capitalize on the legitimate secular growth of the space economy might find more durable value by rotating into the heavily discounted satellite and launch infrastructure operators that were temporarily left behind in the SpaceX IPO frenzy.
Should You Invest $1,000 in SpaceX Right Now?Before you consider SpaceX, you'll want to hear this.
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While SpaceX currently has a Buy rating among analysts, top-rated analysts believe these five stocks are better buys.
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Tesla (TSLA 1.55%) and Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX +4.83%), or SpaceX, CEO Elon Musk recently addressed ASML (ASML 4.53%) employees during a fireside chat with ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet at the European company's technology conference. It's an important development, as it further validates Musk's intent with the Terafab initiative and ASML's role in facilitating it.
Terafab and ASML As a reminder, ASML is the only company in the world that makes extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines that chip manufacturers use to make artificial intelligence (AI) chips and others. It's an indispensable technology for AI chipmakers, and Terafab will be included in the future.
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The Terafab initiative brings together SpaceX and Tesla in a joint venture to build a massive semiconductor manufacturing complex aimed at resolving both companies' potential supply chain bottlenecks and providing chips for Optimus (Tesla) and, in the future, Tesla electric vehicles alongside AI chips for SpaceX's data centers, including orbital data centers.
The spending commitment for Terafab is huge, with a proposed initial investment of $55 billion that could ramp to $119 billion over time. That kind of investment offers significant potential for ASML, and Musk's address to its employees further underscores that.
What it means to investors For Tesla and SpaceX investors, it's clear that Terafab is a major part of Musk's vision for both companies. The bulls will note that it helps secure both companies' supply chains, although it's arguably much more important for SpaceX, as it's the cornerstone of its AI strategy.
Image source: ASML.
That said, Tesla investors are entitled to ask just how much their company will invest in Terafab. And if a potential merger between Tesla and SpaceX takes place, will the earnings and cash flow from robotaxis and Optimus be used to support SpaceX's growth ambitions, even though they might be better returned to Tesla investors as a stand-alone company?
For ASML investors, it's further confirmation of long-term demand for its equipment, which needs to be factored into their valuation assumptions.
Lee Samaha has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends ASML and Tesla. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
RIVN stock is moving. See the chart and price action here. Mind RoboticsMind Robotics was launched in late 2025 as a spin-out from the EV maker — growing from an internal initiative called “Project Synapse.”
In less than six months, the company had raised over $1 billion across three rounds: a $115 million seed led by Eclipse, a $500 million Series A co-led by Accel and Andreessen Horowitz and a $400 million follow-on led by Kleiner Perkins.
The latest round valued Mind Robotics at $3.4 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Mind’s first product is expected within a year, and Rivian will be the startup’s first customer, using its Normal, Illinois assembly plant as a live deployment environment for AI-powered humanoid robots.
The structure is a deliberate departure from Tesla Inc.‘s (NASDAQ:TSLA) approach.
Elon Musk is developing Optimus inside Tesla — mass production began in January 2026, with 50,000 units targeted by year-end.
Scaringe is keeping the two companies legally separate, with Rivian feeding production data to Mind for AI model training while retaining equity upside.
“We realized it was such a big opportunity that deserved to be its own company,” Scaringe said at Rivian’s R2 launch event in Park City last week, according to CNBC.
He sees a multitrillion-dollar total addressable market for industrial labor and believes the window is closing fast.
“The rate at which this is moving is far faster — like an order of magnitude faster — than the average person in society understands,” he said.
The CompetitorsThe humanoid robotics race is crowded.
Figure AI is already deploying robots commercially at BMW, while Tesla’s Gen 3 Optimus is in 24/7 factory use at Fremont.
Mind has yet to ship a product. But Scaringe’s pitch to investors rests on a thesis: most robotics startups are engineering for human biomechanics when the real manufacturing value lives in dexterous, reasoning-capable hands.
Scaringe isn’t predicting an overnight robot takeover. He says the simplest, most repetitive tasks go to machines first — with complex, judgment-heavy work staying human for years.
The labor shortage in automotive manufacturing, he argues, makes that transition less a threat than a necessity.
The first Mind robot is coming soon. Whether it can keep pace with Optimus is the $3.4 billion question.
This image was generated using artificial intelligence via ChatGPT.
This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs
Although its roots are in its electric vehicle (EV) business, Tesla (TSLA 1.55%) aspires to greater heights, and sees artificial intelligence (AI) as part of its path to reach them. The company's AI journey began in earnest back in 2015 when it introduced an early version of its self-driving software, then called Autopilot.
Fast-forward to 2026, and the company's AI endeavors have just reached another pivotal milestone. CEO Elon Musk recently announced that the company's latest in-house semiconductor chip, dubbed AI5, had achieved tape-out. This is the point at which a chip's design is complete and it's ready for manufacturing.
It also marks a major step toward fulfilling Tesla's AI ambitions. Here's why the AI5 chip could be a key development in Tesla's evolution into an AI titan.
Image source: Tesla.
Tesla's AI brain The AI5's tape-out positions the company to become a prominent provider of physical AI, in which artificial intelligence software can engage with the physical world by serving as the brain for machinery. Musk described completing the chip design as "arguably the No. 1 most critical thing to get done," which is why he personally oversaw the project.
The chip marks a dramatic step up from its AI4 predecessor. Musk stated that the new chip will deliver 40 times better performance over the prior model AI4. The substantial difference was made possible by a redesign that resolved challenges in hardware and software integration. Now, Tesla will be able to train more powerful AI models for its autonomous Cybercab ride-hailing service and Optimus robots.
The AI5 is powerful enough to enable on-board real-time inference, giving the local AI the ability to use data to make decisions in real-world situations. That capacity to perform inference without an internet connection is essential for self-driving cars, which have to navigate constantly changing road conditions, and for Tesla's planned Optimus robots, which will have to dynamically adapt to their environments.
The AI5 will also improve power management, and Musk called it "the best performance per dollar for AI." This could reduce Tesla's costs while delivering the computing capabilities required for physical artificial intelligence.
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AI5 and Musk's businesses Another factor in AI5's importance is its role in Tesla's collaboration with Musk's other company, Space Exploration Technologies, better known as SpaceX. The two businesses are co-developing a massive semiconductor factory called Terafab. With the chip serving as the hardware foundation for self-driving and robotics, and Terafab as the facility that produces it, the pair form a symbiotic loop.
This combination will reduce Tesla's reliance on outside manufacturers and make the company a vertically integrated AI operation. Currently, it is working with both Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor to manufacture the AI5.
With the new chip and Terafab, Tesla is putting the pieces in place to transition from a company that is primarily a carmaker into an AI powerhouse. Automotive competitors are taking a page from Tesla's playbook to evolve their offerings. Ford Motor Company and General Motors are working to deliver autonomous vehicle capabilities by 2028.
Even so, neither possesses the vertical integration that Tesla is achieving through its AI technology. By pivoting resolutely into artificial intelligence with the AI5, Tesla should strengthen its lead over its automotive rivals for years to come.
Robert Izquierdo has positions in Ford Motor Company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, and Tesla. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and Tesla. The Motley Fool recommends General Motors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Tesla (TSLA - Free Report) closed the most recent trading day at $404.66, moving -1.58% from the previous trading session. The stock trailed the S&P 500, which registered a daily loss of 0.57%. On the other hand, the Dow registered a gain of 0.64%, and the technology-centric Nasdaq decreased by 1.15%.
Shares of the electric car maker witnessed a gain of 0.28% over the previous month, beating the performance of the Auto-Tires-Trucks sector with its loss of 0.94%, and underperforming the S&P 500's gain of 2.14%.
Market participants will be closely following the financial results of Tesla in its upcoming release. On that day, Tesla is projected to report earnings of $0.45 per share, which would represent year-over-year growth of 12.5%. At the same time, our most recent consensus estimate is projecting a revenue of $24.32 billion, reflecting a 8.09% rise from the equivalent quarter last year.
For the entire fiscal year, the Zacks Consensus Estimates are projecting earnings of $1.99 per share and a revenue of $100.93 billion, representing changes of +19.88% and +6.43%, respectively, from the prior year.
It is also important to note the recent changes to analyst estimates for Tesla. Such recent modifications usually signify the changing landscape of near-term business trends. As a result, we can interpret positive estimate revisions as a good sign for the business outlook.
Empirical research indicates that these revisions in estimates have a direct correlation with impending stock price performance. To benefit from this, we have developed the Zacks Rank, a proprietary model which takes these estimate changes into account and provides an actionable rating system.
The Zacks Rank system, which varies between #1 (Strong Buy) and #5 (Strong Sell), carries an impressive track record of exceeding expectations, confirmed by external audits, with stocks at #1 delivering an average annual return of +25% since 1988. Within the past 30 days, our consensus EPS projection has moved 1.27% lower. At present, Tesla boasts a Zacks Rank of #4 (Sell).
Investors should also note Tesla's current valuation metrics, including its Forward P/E ratio of 206.48. This indicates a premium in contrast to its industry's Forward P/E of 19.68.
It is also worth noting that TSLA currently has a PEG ratio of 9.81. The PEG ratio is akin to the commonly utilized P/E ratio, but this measure also incorporates the company's anticipated earnings growth rate. The Automotive - Domestic was holding an average PEG ratio of 0.95 at yesterday's closing price.
The Automotive - Domestic industry is part of the Auto-Tires-Trucks sector. This industry currently has a Zacks Industry Rank of 170, which puts it in the bottom 31% of all 250+ industries.
The Zacks Industry Rank gauges the strength of our industry groups by measuring the average Zacks Rank of the individual stocks within the groups. Our research shows that the top 50% rated industries outperform the bottom half by a factor of 2 to 1.
Make sure to utilize Zacks.com to follow all of these stock-moving metrics, and more, in the coming trading sessions.
China's juggernaut electric vehicle (EV) maker, BYD (BYDDY 2.92%), has taken the world by storm over the past few years. Considering the automaker only stopped producing internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles in 2022, switching its entire product lineup to EVs and plug-in hybrids, overtaking Tesla (TSLA 1.55%) in EV sales for the full-year 2025 was impressive. Now BYD is taking it a step further and outdoing Tesla in another aspect, one that was critically important to the latter's initial surge.
What's going on with BYD and Tesla? One of the most valuable developments for the broader U.S. EV industry was Tesla's expanding Supercharger network. It was crucial as it helped reduce range anxiety, which was one of the biggest barriers to mainstream EV adoption. Building a reliable, expanding, and, maybe most importantly, fast-charging system quickly enabled early adopters to jump on board. It turned long-range EV travel into reality.
Image source: Tesla.
BYD is trying to take it a step further for its own expansion, and in some ways, the Chinese EV maker's charging network is making its rivals' networks appear slow. BYD has deployed 5,700 Flash Charging stations in China in just a few months and has also opened its first overseas charging stations in Europe. BYD isn't resting on its laurels either and is targeting 20,000 stations in China by the end of this year.
These charging stations can deliver up to 1,500 kW of power, roughly 3 times the output of Tesla's latest V4 Superchargers. BYD's partnership with Sinopec, China's largest fuel retail network boasting over 30,000 stations, could accelerate the network rollout even further. Electrek ran the numbers, and it won't take long for BYD to surpass Tesla's network: "If both companies continue at their current growth rates -- Tesla at roughly 18% annual growth, BYD at the pace implied by its 2026 targets -- BYD's network (measured in stall-equivalents) could surpass Tesla's globally between 2029 and 2030 -- in just roughly 4 years."
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What it all means for BYD There are a couple of factors for investors to consider as BYD's charging infrastructure expands. First, while BYD's network could rapidly catch Tesla's reach and numbers, that's not the only advantage the latter currently has. That's because Tesla has gained over a decade of valuable route planning data, proven 99% uptime reliability, and boasts the NACS standard that has essentially converted other automakers' vehicles into Tesla Supercharger network customers.
Secondly, while it's fun to compare the development progress of the two important networks, it's fair to note that tariffs and trade policy currently prevent BYD from competing in the U.S. market, thus giving Tesla's network control of the region. That said, in China specifically, BYD is on pace to match or surpass Tesla's local charging network within the next year to year and a half. Tesla has roughly 3,000 stations across the Asia-Pacific region.
Tesla's Supercharger network was instrumental in the broader EV revolution in the markets it competes in, and remains an advantage for the EV maker. BYD is replicating this advantage overseas, and it should only boost the EV maker's growing sales momentum globally. BYD remains a top automotive stock, and it doesn't appear to be slowing down in just about any metric.
For more than two decades, putting a number on a Tesla-SpaceX merger was guesswork because only one of the two companies traded publicly. That changed on June 12, when SpaceX (SPCX +19.79%) completed the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history at a valuation near $1.8 trillion. With a public price finally attached to the rocket company, long-running speculation that Elon Musk will fold his two trillion-dollar businesses into one resurfaced.
The figures involved are enormous. Electric-car maker Tesla (TSLA +0.98%) carries a market capitalization of about $1.5 trillion as of this writing, while SpaceX rose above a $2 trillion market value in its first session. Put the two together, and you get a company worth more than $3 trillion -- enough to rank among the four most valuable in the world.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives recently put the odds of such a tie-up within a year at about 80%.
So what would a combination actually mean for the people who own Tesla today?
Here's a closer look.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
The case for a combination The argument for merging starts with the extent of overlap between the two companies. Musk increasingly pitches Tesla as an artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics company -- think self-driving software and the Optimus humanoid robot -- even though most of its revenue still comes from selling cars. SpaceX brings satellite internet through Starlink and launch capacity, and its February acquisition of Musk's AI start-up xAI added the Grok chatbot.
Ives frames a tie-up as Musk's clearest path to controlling more of the AI ecosystem under one roof.
A path to a merger seems plausible. Tesla invested $2 billion in xAI in January. When SpaceX absorbed xAI a month later, that stake converted into nearly 19 million SpaceX shares, worth about $2.6 billion at the IPO price. And the two are also jointly building a chip-making plant in Austin, known as Terafab, meant to supply processors for Tesla's robots and SpaceX's satellites alike.
Additionally, a merger between the two companies could help settle the case once and for all that Tesla is more than just a car company. Rather than Tesla shareholders owning a car company trying to become an AI company, they would hold a slice of an operation spanning electric vehicles, robotics, rockets, satellite internet, and AI.
The bull case is essentially that the market would stop valuing Tesla mainly on its car sales and start treating it as one pillar of a multitrillion-dollar Musk empire.
Why it may not play out the way bulls hope But SpaceX's own leadership sounds far more measured than the headline odds.
"Right now I'm focused on keeping the lights on here," said SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell in a CNBC interview on the day of the IPO. She allowed that the two businesses share long-term goals but stopped well short of calling a merger imminent.
The betting markets offer a more conservative view, too. As of this writing, prediction platforms put the near-term odds of a deal well below Ives's 80% -- in the range of 25% to 40% for a combination this year.
Additionally, there's the issue of who would set the terms for such a merger. Musk holds more than 80% of the voting power at SpaceX through a dual-class share structure, yet he owns only about a fifth of Tesla. That gap matters. A merger would be a related-party transaction with Musk on both sides of the table, and any deal would almost certainly be built largely around the company he controls outright.
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Then there's price. Tesla shares trade at about 370 times earnings as of this writing, a valuation that already assumes the company will succeed in autonomy and robotics on its own. And a merger likely wouldn't help. It would add SpaceX's own unproven, money-losing space and AI ambitions to an already expensive stock.
So where does this leave Tesla investors? I think the honest answer is that a merger is a real possibility, but not a sure thing -- and that the more important question isn't whether it happens but on whose terms. Because Musk controls SpaceX and only a minority of Tesla, any combination would likely look less like a merger of equals and more like SpaceX absorbing Tesla.
Whatever the case, investors should make their investment decisions today based on each company's underlying fundamentals relative to the price they are paying, not because of merger prospects. Because one thing is certain: It's unclear what a merger or acquisition could look like, and under what terms it would happen.
Tesla TSLA stock is in focus on Monday after famed investor Anthony Pompliano publicly urged billionaire Elon Musk to merge the EV maker with SpaceX.
And while the idea of a multi-trillion-dollar AI and aerospace empire sounds like the ultimate sci-fi bull case, such a merger carries massive structural, operational, and financial risks.
At the time of writing, Tesla shares are down more than 6% versus the start of this year (2026).
Tesla shareholders have spent years waiting for the company to mature into a “profitable” auto and energy business that consistently generates billions in free cash flow.
SpaceX – by contrast – operates on an entirely different scale of capital intensity; building rockets (Starship) and continuous deployment of low-Earth-orbit satellite constellation (Starlink) require a staggering sum of uninterrupted capital.
Merging the entities would mean TSLA’s stable automotive and energy storage margins will act as a piggy bank to fund SpaceX’s long-term, yet-to-be monetized deep-space ambitions.
For fundamental investors, using a successful commercial car and battery business to finance Mars colonization may not be a long-term story they’re eager to underwrite.
Tesla shareholders also face massive “dilution” if SpaceX uses its enormous market cap to absorb the EV maker.
Here’s the math: you hand over your TSLA shares and receive newly issued SPCS shares in return; while Tesla isn’t printing any new shares, you’re being diluted by a lower-quality corporate margin profile.
You are swapping a name that operates on established, commercial automotive and energy storage cash flows for a tech-heavy mega-conglomerate that posted a $4.28 billion net loss in Q1 primarily due to hardware R&D.
Plus, Wall Street might just slap the combined entity with a heavy conglomerate discount, eroding the ultimate value of your new shares.
Tesla is a regulated, publicly traded company where institutional investors can exert influence over the board, but SpaceX’s dual-class share structure represents a very different governance model.
Elon Musk holds an estimated 85% of the voting power in SpaceX.
If Tesla is merged or absorbed into a combined entity dominated by SpaceX’s super-voting Class A stock, Tesla investors would see their corporate governance and voting rights effectively neutralized.
Note that several large institutional asset managers (like Vanguard or Blackrock) have strict ESG and corporate governance mandates.
A sudden shift to a structure with zero checks and balances could spark a mass institutional sell-off of TSLA stock.
Tesla and SpaceX operate in completely different geopolitical spheres, and smashing them together creates a compliance nightmare that could paralyze both businesses.
Feature Tesla SpaceX Primary Global Partner China (Gigafactory Shanghai is vital to Tesla's global supply chain and margins). United States (Acts as a critical US government, NASA, and military defense contractor). Regulatory Oversight Standard international trade, automotive safety, and consumer regulations. Strict ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) and national security oversight. Crossover exposure would inevitably invite intense scrutiny from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) and Washington defense officials.
If US regulators fear that sensitive aerospace or satellite tech could be compromised due to Tesla’s heavy corporate footprint in China, they could impose crippling operational firewall mandates.
For Tesla shares, this adds further to the broader argument against a SpaceX merger.
The long-awaited SpaceX (SPCX +19.79%) IPO has arrived to much fanfare, with shares of the rocket company jumping nearly 20% in its first day of trading on Friday and the rally continuing on Monday. But now with that in the books, investors may be turning their attention to another highly probable event: a potential merger involving SpaceX and Tesla (TSLA +0.98%). Both companies are run by Elon Musk, they work on overlapping projects, and there's a lot of room for potential synergies if they combine.
Rumors of a possible SpaceX-Tesla merger have been growing in recent weeks. And here's why, particularly for Tesla, there may be motivation to get it done sooner rather than later.
Image source: Getty Images.
Tesla's growth story may not be as appealing anymore Although Tesla generates the majority of its revenue from automobiles and is technically an electric vehicle (EV) stock, it trades at an oversized earnings multiple because investors are bullish on its vision beyond just EVs. Robots and opportunities in artificial intelligence (AI) have been captivating investors in recent years, with the growth story persuading them to look past where the business is today and instead focus on the long-term vision.
However, that vision may not be as alluring anymore now that SpaceX stock is available. Between space, AI, and communications, there may be more compelling opportunities for investors with SpaceX than with Tesla. Tesla's stock is down around 9% this year and may suddenly not be as exciting a growth stock to own. While robotics is an intriguing and attractive growth opportunity, it may not be enough to convince investors to buy Tesla's stock, especially with its core EV business coming under pressure from growing competition.
The risk is that, in the near future, the U.S. market may see more affordable EVs enter the market, which could further strain its margins and growth prospects. And if its financials worsen in the process, the stock may head for an even greater decline. That downside risk could provide an added motivation for the company to merge with SpaceX soon, so that they can pool their resources and not compete with one another for investors' dollars.
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A merger could happen soon There have been reports that a merger between SpaceX and Tesla could occur as early as next year. And between Tesla's competitive position potentially eroding and SpaceX needing plenty of cash to fund its growth ambitions, a merger between the two companies may indeed make a lot of sense, especially given that the two businesses are working on Terafab, a giant chip factory, and other initiatives together.
While a merger is not guaranteed, it seems highly likely to happen. The good news is that if you want exposure to both of these stocks, you may only need to own one of them, as it may only be a matter of time before a merger takes place.
The SpaceX IPO is now behind us, but we may not be done with big news from Elon Musk. Traders on prediction market Kalshi are pricing a 49% chance that Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX +16.00%) will merge with electric vehicle maker Tesla (TSLA +0.90%) before May 1, 2027.
As both companies are headed by Musk and rely heavily on artificial intelligence, there’s long been speculation that the two companies could eventually merge. CNBC reported on May 27 that Tesla and SpaceX were already considering a merger, and Musk himself has reportedly raised the issue.
Speculation heated up even more as SpaceX had its record-breaking IPO on June 12, with Wedbush analyst Dan Ives estimating there was an 80% chance the companies would merge, and SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell acknowledging that a merger “might make Elon’s life a little easier, actually.”
“There’s no question that there’s synergies between Tesla and SpaceX in our futures, definitely,” Shotwell told CNBC. “There’s a convergence of a kind of what we’re all trying to accomplish in the future.”
There are natural elements that make SpaceX and Tesla a potential match. In addition to both being Musk's brainchildren, Tesla and SpaceX rely heavily on artificial intelligence. A merger enables them to more easily benefit from training models, share talent, and consolidate resources. Ross Gerber, a longtime Tesla investor, said a merger of Tesla and SpaceX would fulfill a Musk ambition to create an AI-driven conglomerate.
So, it seems plausible that such a merger will happen one day. But would it happen within a year, as Kalshi traders are betting? Here are three issues that would factor into such a deal.
Tesla and SpaceX have vastly different markets -- and one mission in commonTesla is an EV company -- and the electric vehicle industry is highly competitive. That means investors are watching Tesla’s production and delivery numbers every month and pushing for Tesla to maintain a profit margin that keeps the stock appealing. Last year, those margins took a significant hit as Tesla discounted its vehicles amid rising competition and the expiration of a federal tax credit. Tesla stock struggled throughout most of 2025 and underperformed the S&P 500.
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SpaceX, meanwhile, is a government contractor with its rocket-launching business, which to date has carried out more than 660 missions, including trips to the International Space Station. Then there’s Starlink, which is SpaceX’s most profitable business to date. Starlink provides internet and mobile connectivity to hard-to-reach and rural areas via a network of satellites. Neither faces the competitive pressure that Tesla faces in its EV business.
But SpaceX is getting most of its attention for xAI -- a standalone company also owned by Musk that was folded into SpaceX earlier this year. xAI operates Grok, the large language model, and X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Musk uses xAI to integrate AI throughout his companies, including Tesla.
It’s the latter business that works most smoothly in a Tesla merger.
Valuation could be difficultAt this writing, SpaceX is actually the more valuable company, with a market cap of around $2.2 trillion. Tesla’s market cap is $1.5 trillion -- ranking them both in the top echelon of publicly traded companies.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
But Tesla turns a profit and SpaceX does not. In 2025, Tesla reported revenues of $94.82 billion and net income of $5.8 billion. And those profits continued into the first quarter, when Tesla recorded $22.38 billion in revenue and $1.45 billion in net income.
SpaceX had $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025, which was up from $14 billion in 2024. But it also recorded a net loss of $4.9 billion for the year. Its Starlink segment was successful, bringing in $11.4 billion in revenue and $4.4 billion in operating income. But the rocket-launching business lost $657 million for the year, and xAI lost $6.4 billion.
On top of that, SpaceX will continue to spend a massive amount of money to build out its AI ambitions. Goldman Sachs projects that SpaceX will have a negative free cash flow of $105 billion in 2029.
So, how would you value SpaceX stock in a merger? Shares are currently trading at a trailing price-to-sales ratio of more than 110, compared to Tesla’s 14.6.
Musk’s compensation would need to be addressedAt Tesla, Musk famously received a huge compensation package at the last shareholder meeting. It could be worth as much as $1 trillion should Musk reach valuation and operational targets, such as 20 million vehicle deliveries, 10 million active full self-driving subscriptions, 1 million Optimus robots, and 1 million commercially deployed robotaxis.
Musk has an even greater say in SpaceX, where he owns 42% of the equity and about 82% of the voting power. And the successful SpaceX IPO made Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
A merger may impact Musk’s compensation at Tesla, as well as the rights of Tesla shareholders. Like the other issues, this isn’t an insurmountable obstacle, but it would likely need to be addressed before a merger happens. And it explains why Kalshi traders are likely seeing the merger before May 1, 2027, as more of a coin flip than an inevitability.
To say that considerable hoopla surrounded the SpaceX IPO last Friday is a major understatement. The newly public rockets and satellites company reportedly minted hundreds of millionaires among its staffers while vaulting CEO Elon Musk into the $1 trillion personal wealth club where he resides alone.
Interesting factoids to be sure, but they don’t imply that investors should ignore Musk’s other company. Of course, that’s Tesla, Inc. (TSLA). While SpaceX is garnering all the hype, some experts believe there are ample catalysts for Tesla and that could bode well for traders looking to make use of the Direxion Daily TSLA Bull 2X Shares (TSLL).
See more: Put the Tesla Pedal to the Metal With These ETFs
The leveraged ETF attempts to deliver 200% of the daily performance of Tesla shares. Like other geared ETFs, TSLL is prone to event-driven movements and Tesla is a prime example of a company that can deliver the headlines that make leveraged ETFs useful. Those can include the company’s robotaxi efforts.
“In the robotaxi business, Tesla can offer a driverless ride-hailing service. This can allow Tesla to offer a price that is just 50% to 75% per trip of the price of a traditional human-driven ride-hailing service,” noted Morningstar’s Seth Goldstein. “We expect the absence of a human driver to make Tesla and its autonomous peers, such as Waymo, able to run their ride-hailing businesses at a lower cost versus peers.”
More Reasons TSLL Can Tempt Traders that actively follow Tesla have myriad other reasons to give TSLL a look, including any potential updates from the electric vehicle manufacturer on its full self-driving (FSD) progress. Related headlines have previously moved the stock.
“We view autonomous driving, including FSD and robotaxi, as a key pillar for Tesla going forward. We forecast autonomous driving will grow from well below 5% of Tesla’s revenue to 25% of companywide sales over the next decade,” added Goldstein.
In considering short-term use of TSLL, active traders should study up on the possible benefits that Tesla can accrue by way of FSD leadership. Put simply, mastering that technology likely enables Tesla to get more drivers into its vehicles while charging them the premium prices that they’re willing to pay.
“Tesla will face increasing competition in the coming years. Automakers will electrify their fleets and plan to offer more autonomous driving software,” concluded Goldstein. “However, as new models are introduced, Tesla’s technological advantage and the strength of its brand will remain intact, which will allow the company to continue to charge a premium price for its EVs.”
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