Investor's Corner
TSLA’s biggest bull is beating Wall St just as hard as Tesla is beating legacy automakers
Last May 2019, ARK Invest founder and CEO Cathie Wood posted a bold call about electric car maker Tesla. Wood was considered as one of Tesla’s most ardent bulls then, holding a $4,000 per share long-term price target on the company. It was an amount that some in Wall Street seemingly refused to take seriously, but in May, Wood doubled down, publishing a new bull case valuation for Tesla, implying that the company could hit a share price of $6,000.
Proving Critics Wrong
Criticism and mockery came quickly. Tesla bears and short-sellers, many of whom were smelling blood in the water then with TSLA’s ~$200 per share price, immediately criticized Wood. Jim Chanos, one of Tesla’s biggest short-sellers who has been pounding the table with the idea that the electric car maker is worth zero, criticized ARK’s forecasts for the company’s gross margins. Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University, flat-out refused to acknowledge Wood’s point, stating that the $1 trillion valuation that ARK was tying to Tesla was “more fairy tale” than reality.
That was May 2019, and Tesla was being battered left and right by analysts posting bearish outlooks on the company. Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas even posted a “bear case” price of $10 per share for Tesla stock, pulling down the electric car maker even further. Yet even then, Wood remained steadfast and unwavering, and ARK continued to buy TSLA shares.
Sixteen months later, Tesla is now trading at about $420 per share — after a five-for-one stock split in August. Instead of following the bearish outlooks of critics from the previous year, Tesla stock had risen tenfold, driven partly by the company’s steady demand for its vehicles and its evident edge against competitors, both from new companies and legacy automakers alike. Tesla is now worth more than five times Ford and General Motors combined, and the company seems poised to reach even newer heights with its energy storage business and battery production plans.
All About Innovation
This has not stopped the critics, of course, with Wood and ARK’s analysts dealing with negativity from groups such as TSLAQ on a consistent basis. Wood, for her part, welcomes the critics. In a statement to Forbes, the ARK founder stated that “It almost makes me feel comfortable, to be honest, because it means if we’re right, then the rewards will be pretty enormous.” Considering ARK’s performance so far, Wood seems to be right on the money. Tesla’s massive rise, for one, has helped propel ARK Invest into one of the fastest-growing and top-performing investment firms in the market, with its flagship ARK Innovation Fund being up 75% in 2020. ARK Innovation Fund has returned an annual average of 36% over the past five years, almost three times that of the S&P 500.
In a way, ARK Invest could be seen as a disruptor on its own, similar to the companies that it so ardently supports. The firm makes its research freely available online for anyone to access, and it also shares the logs for its trades. Even ARK’s workforce is not the run-of-the-mill Wall Street, with Wood preferring to hire young analysts with specialized backgrounds in niche subjects such as molecular biology or computer engineering, as they are likely to be equipped with the necessary skills and background to spot the next trend. This has allowed ARK to take strong positions in numerous emerging technologies, such as autonomous vehicles and DNA sequencing.
ARK’s position in Tesla and the pandemic, which has accelerated the adoption of companies and technologies that are included in the company’s ETF, have helped grow its assets almost threefold this year. Today, ARK holds about $29 billion worth of assets and is valued conservatively by Forbes at about $500 million. “Coronavirus has catapulted our innovative platforms into high gear because they solve problems. Innovation solves problems,” Wood noted. Considering that Wood holds an over-50% ownership of ARK, she currently has a net worth of about $250 million, earning her the No.80 spot in Forbes’ sixth annual list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women.
Betting on Disruption
In a way, ARK’s eventual victory over critics reflects much of Wood’s background. Wood started her career in finance when she apprenticed at Los Angeles fund Capital Group from 1977 to 1980. During her time there, she saw firsthand how interest rates that were approaching 20% adversely affected the market. Wood graduated in 1981 and joined Jennison Associates in New York as an economist. While there, she made an early call that inflation and interest rates had peaked, prompting dismissal from her superiors. As fate would have it, Wood was right.
Wood was eventually moved to Jennison’s equity research division, where she covered the wireless telecom companies in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. She saw firsthand the economic and societal changes that came as mobile phones became ubiquitous. She later moved New York-based AllianceBernstein as chief investment officer for thematic portfolios in 2001, and by the time the 2008 financial crisis hit, Wood figured that a fresh approach was needed for ETFs. In 2012, Wood proposed putting actively managed portfolios of innovative firms inside an ETF structure, but the idea was shunned at AllianceBernstein.
ARK Invest was launched two years later, but the first years of the firm were challenging, with the flagship fund ranking in the bottom quartile of its peer group, as per data from Morningstar. To keep the firm afloat, Wood dug into her savings and sold minority stakes and initiated partnerships with massive firms like Japan’s Nikko Asset Management and the mutual fund firm American Beacon, two companies that now own 39% of ARK. These efforts paid off for Wood, as ARK took off in 2017, thanks to its bets on stocks like Netflix, Salesforce, Illumina, Square, and Athenahealth. Wood also started buying Bitcoin in 2015 at $250 a coin, which the CEO calls an “insurance policy” against inflation.
Overall, Wood’s approach has allowed ARK Invest to thrive in one of the most challenging periods in recent years. The coronavirus pandemic hit hard in March, and the stock market proceeded to plunge. Using her nose for innovative companies, Wood proceeded to focus ARK’s portfolio on fast-growing companies that she believes have the potential to lead the world towards recovery. Together with Tesla, ARK proceeded to load up stocks from education-software company 2U, real estate platform Zillow, and Slack, a workplace messaging platform.
Tesla is a difficult company to value, with Elon Musk describing it more as a collection of startups that are working alongside one another. The company has confounded Wall Street for years, and continues to do so. But if ARK’s performance is anything to go by, Tesla’s valuation and performance may be most accurately analyzed by a firm with an outlook that’s just as disruptive and unique. And this, for Wood, is something that could very well make ARK even more successful in the future.
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
- Profit – $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Elon Musk
Tesla Earnings: financial expectations and what we should to hear about
In terms of discussions, Tesla earnings calls are usually a great time to get some clarification on the company’s outlook for its current and future projects.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) will report its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 this evening after the market closes, and analysts have already put out their expectations from a financial standpoint for the company’s first three months of the year.
Additionally, there will be plenty of things that will be discussed, including the recent expansion of the Robotaxi program, the Roadster unveiling, and Full Self-Driving (Supervised) approvals across the globe.
Financial Expectations
Wall Street consensus expectations put Tesla’s Earnings Per Share (EPS) at $0.36, while revenues are expected to come in around $22.35 billion.
This would compare to an EPS of $0.27 and $19.34 billion compared to Tesla’s Q1 2025. Last quarter, EPS came in at $0.50 on $29.4 billion of revenue.
Tesla beat analyst expectations last quarter, but the next trading day, the stock fell nearly 3.5 percent. We never quite can gauge how the market will respond to Tesla’s earnings; we’ve seen shares rise on a miss and fall on a beat.
It really goes on the news, and investor consensus, it seems.
What to Expect
In terms of discussions, Tesla earnings calls are usually a great time to get some clarification on the company’s outlook for its current and future projects. Right now, the big focus of investors is the Robotaxi program, the Roadster unveiling, and what the outlook for Full Self-Driving’s expansion throughout Europe and the rest of the world looks like.
Robotaxi
Tesla just recently expanded its unsupervised Robotaxi program to Dallas and Houston, joining Austin as the first cities in the U.S. to have access to the company’s ride-hailing suite.
Tesla expands Unsupervised Robotaxi service to two new cities
Some saw this move as a quick effort to turn attention away from a delivery miss and an anticipated miss on earnings. However, we’ve seen Tesla be more than deliberate with its expansion of the Robotaxi suite, so it’s hard to believe the company would make this move if it were not truly ready to do so.
The company is also working to expand its U.S. ride-hailing service outside of Texas and California, and recently filed paperwork to build a Robotaxi-exclusive Supercharger stall.
Expansion is planned for Florida, Nevada, and Arizona at some point this year, with more states to follow.
Roadster Unveiling
The Roadster unveiling was slated for April 1, and then pushed back (once again) to “probably late April,” according to Elon Musk.
It does not appear that the Roadster unveiling will happen within that time frame, at least not to our knowledge. Nobody has received media or press invites for a Roadster unveiling, and given the lofty expectations set for the vehicle by Musk and Co., it seems like something they’d want to show off to the public.
The Roadster has become a truly frustrating project for Tesla and its fans; evidently, there is something that is not up to the expectations Musk and others have. Meanwhile, fans are essentially waiting for something that is six years late.
At this point, also given the company’s focus on autonomy, it almost seems more worth it to just cancel it, remove any and all timelines and expectations, and surprise people with something crazy down the line, maybe in two or three years. There should be no talk of it.
Full Self-Driving Global Expansion
We expect Musk and Co. to shed some details on where it stands with other European government bodies, as it recently was able to roll out FSD (Supervised) to customers in the Netherlands.
Spain is also working with Tesla to assess FSD’s viability as a publicly available option for owners.
With that being said, there should be some additional information for investors as they listen to the call; no talk of it would be a pretty big letdown.
Optimus
There will likely be a date set for the Gen 3 Optimus unveiling, and we’re hopeful Tesla can keep that date set in stone and meet it. Not reaching timelines is a relatively minor issue, but a company can only do this for so long before its fans and investors start to lose trust and disregard any talk about dates.
It seems this is happening already.
Optimus has been pegged as Tesla’s big money maker for the future. The goals and expectations are high, but it is a privilege to have that sort of pressure when investors know the company’s capability.
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