Tesla stock was down early Tuesday, while SpaceX stock soared. Elon Musk’s rocket and AI company hasovertakenhis electric vehicles and AI company.
Perhaps Tesla’s car business can give the stock a boost.
Shares of the EV maker fell 1.6% to $404.66 on Tuesday, while the S&P 500 dropped 0.6%. SpaceX shares closed up almost 5% at $201.80 apiece.
The SpaceX gain gives the rocket company a market value of about $2.6 trillion. Tesla’s market value, based on its fully diluted share count, is closer to $1.8 trillion.
SpaceX stock is up almost 50% from its $135 IPO price. Tesla stock hasn’t really suffered. It just hasn’t done much over the past month.
Second-quarter EV deliveries are coming in a few weeks. They might help shares break out of their recent funk. Goldman Sachs analyst Mark Delaney says they are likely to hit 420,000, better than the 409,000 consensus estimate aggregated by FactSet. Tesla delivered about 384,000 cars in the second quarter of 2025.
It would be nice to grow car sales again. Tesla has suffered EV sales declines for the past two years. Wall Street projects 2026 sales volume of 1.7 million vehicles, up from 1.6 million in 2025. Growth isn’t assured, though. Tesla has a tough comparison coming. It sold a record 497,000 vehicles in the third quarter. Sales were boosted by the expiration of the $7,500 federal EV purchase tax credit. The loss of that credit has weighed on industry sales. Tesla’s numbers, however, have held up better.
Goldman rates Tesla shares Hold and has a $375 price target.
A solid second-quarter sales number would be welcome, but what investors want more than that is progress on AI. Tesla launched an AI-trained robo-taxi service about a year ago in Austin, Texas. Now, it operates in four cities. More cars in more cities would boost shares. Investors would also like to see the third generation of Tesla’s humanoid robot, Optimus. That could happen this summer.
AI progress is what it will take for Tesla to catch SpaceX later this year.
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