Investor's Corner
Tesla stock (TSLA) holding steady amid signs of Model 3 sustained ramp, vote of confidence from Detroit
Tesla shares (NASDAQ:TSLA) are holding steady following Monday’s steep dive after investors weighed in on the now-deleted wild remarks made by CEO Elon Musk over Twitter. As signs emerge that Model 3 production ramp will remain consistent, bolstered by positive sentiment from Detroit after veteran Sandy Munro concluded that Tesla could exceed a 30% profit margin on its mass-market electric car, investors see these as indicators for potentially more upbeat sentiments to come.
Tesla stock has been a battleground since the company announced that it has hit its target of producing 5,000 Model 3 per week at the end of the second quarter. Amidst reservations from a number of Wall St. analysts who believe that the Model 3’s optimal production pace is unsustainable, the company’s shares took a dive. Tesla stock briefly got a reprieve on July 10, after the company announced its plans of building its third Gigafactory in China. Since then, however, the electric car maker’s stock continued to be volatile, until its notable plunge on Monday, when shares fell over 3.5% amidst controversy resulting from Elon Musk’s controversial and now-deleted statements on Twitter during the weekend. In Monday’s after-hours trading, Tesla shares were at $307.20, a significant drop from Friday’s close of $318.87.
As markets opened on Tuesday, however, Tesla stock began holding, as the backlash from Musk’s incendiary weekend Twitter session appeared to taper off. Behind this weekend’s report of Musk’s donations to the GOP and his Twitter issues, after all, signs are emerging that Tesla’s problems with the Model 3 are ending.
This weekend alone, Tesla started shipping ~100 Model 3 Performance to its showrooms to be utilized as test drive units. This follows the electric car’s successful appearance at the 2018 Goodwood Festival of Speed in England, where it attracted a significant amount of interest from the event’s attendees. Tesla’s VIN registrations have also seen a notable spike since the end of the second quarter, with the company registering more than 19,000 new Model 3 VINs since the beginning of the month. It should be noted that Tesla started manufacturing the Model 3 in mid-2017, and it was only able to hit the 19,000 mark this March.
Apart from signs that the Model 3’s 5,000/week production could actually be sustained, more encouraging news for Tesla came in the form of a new Autoline Network segment featuring Detroit veteran Sandy Munro. Munro, a teardown expert and CEO of Munro & Associates, has been studying the Model 3 for months, and while his initial impressions on the vehicle were predominantly negative, he was eventually won over by Tesla’s battery technology and electronics. According to Munro, Tesla could see more than 30% profit on the Model 3, thanks to the California-based electric car company’s in-house development and optimal utilization of the vehicle’s components.
Munro noted that the Tesla Model 3’s electronics, which he previously compared to a military-grade flight controller, is a “symphony of engineering.” The Detroit veteran also praised Tesla’s 2170 cells for the Model 3, which are 20% larger than the Model S and X’s 18650 cells but carry 50% more power. Perhaps the most notable among Munro’s conclusion, however, was mentioned by Autoline Network in its video’s comments section. According to the network, Munro stated that he expects even the $35,000 Standard Range RWD Model 3 to still make a “double-digit gross profit.”
Munro’s findings are in line with the results outlined by a German teardown company earlier this year, which estimated that the materials used for the Model 3 cost around $18,000 per vehicle. Coupled with Tesla’s pledge to reduce its cobalt use (cobalt is among the most expensive components of its batteries) over the next few years, Tesla’s profit margins for the Model 3 appear to have a lot of potential.
As the dust clears, it seems like Elon Musk’s recent statement in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek will come to pass — Tesla’s production hell with the Model 3 is ending, and the coming year would be very, very encouraging.
As of writing, Tesla shares are trading up 1.34% at $314.12 per share.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
Tesla has scheduled its Earnings Call for Q4 and Full Year 2025 for next Wednesday, January 28, at 5:30 p.m. EST, and investors are already preparing to get some answers from executives regarding a wide variety of topics.
The company accepts several questions from retail investors through the platform Say, which then allows shareholders to vote on the best questions.
Tesla does not answer anything regarding future product releases, but they are willing to shed light on current timelines, progress of certain projects, and other plans.
There are five questions that range over a variety of topics, including SpaceX, Full Self-Driving, Robotaxi, and Optimus, which are currently in the lead to be asked and potentially answered by Elon Musk and other Tesla executives:
- You once said: Loyalty deserves loyalty. Will long-term Tesla shareholders still be prioritized if SpaceX does an IPO?
- Our Take – With a lot of speculation regarding an incoming SpaceX IPO, Tesla investors, especially long-term ones, should be able to benefit from an early opportunity to purchase shares. This has been discussed endlessly over the past year, and we must be getting close to it.
- When is FSD going to be 100% unsupervised?
- Our Take – Musk said today that this is essentially a solved problem, and it could be available in the U.S. by the end of this year.
- What is the current bottleneck to increase Robotaxi deployment & personal use unsupervised FSD? The safety/performance of the most recent models or people to monitor robots, robotaxis, in-car, or remotely? Or something else?
- Our Take – The bottleneck seems to be based on data, which Musk said Tesla needs 10 billion miles of data to achieve unsupervised FSD. Once that happens, regulatory issues will be what hold things up from moving forward.
- Regarding Optimus, could you share the current number of units deployed in Tesla factories and actively performing production tasks? What specific roles or operations are they handling, and how has their integration impacted factory efficiency or output?
- Our Take – Optimus is going to have a larger role in factories moving forward, and later this year, they will have larger responsibilities.
- Can you please tie purchased FSD to our owner accounts vs. locked to the car? This will help us enjoy it in any Tesla we drive/buy and reward us for hanging in so long, some of us since 2017.
- Our Take – This is a good one and should get us some additional information on the FSD transfer plans and Subscription-only model that Tesla will adopt soon.
Tesla will have its Earnings Call on Wednesday, January 28.
Elon Musk
Tesla locks in Elon Musk’s top problem solver as it enters its most ambitious era
The generous equity award was disclosed by the electric vehicle maker in a recent regulatory filing.
Tesla has granted Senior Vice President of Automotive Tom Zhu more than 520,000 stock options, tying a significant portion of his compensation to the company’s long-term performance.
The generous equity award was disclosed by the electric vehicle maker in a recent regulatory filing.
Tesla secures top talent
According to a Form 4 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Tom Zhu received 520,021 stock options with an exercise price of $435.80 per share. Since the award will not fully vest until March 5, 2031, Zhu must remain at Tesla for more than five years to realize the award’s full benefit.
Considering that Tesla shares are currently trading at around the $445 to $450 per share level, Zhu will really only see gains in his equity award if Tesla’s stock price sees a notable rise over the years, as noted in a Sina Finance report.
Still, even at today’s prices, Zhu’s stock award is already worth over $230 million. If Tesla reaches the market cap targets set forth in Elon Musk’s 2025 CEO Performance Award, Zhu would become a billionaire from this equity award alone.
Tesla’s problem solver
Zhu joined Tesla in April 2014 and initially led the company’s Supercharger rollout in China. Later that year, he assumed the leadership of Tesla’s China business, where he played a central role in Tesla’s localization efforts, including expanding retail and service networks, and later, overseeing the development of Gigafactory Shanghai.
Zhu’s efforts helped transform China into one of Tesla’s most important markets and production hubs. In 2023, Tesla promoted Zhu to Senior Vice President of Automotive, placing him among the company’s core global executives and expanding his influence beyond China. He has since garnered a reputation as the company’s problem solver, being tapped by Elon Musk to help ramp Giga Texas’s vehicle production.
With this in mind, Tesla’s recent filing seems to suggest that the company is locking in its top talent as it enters its newest, most ambitious era to date. As could be seen in the targets of Elon Musk’s 2025 pay package, Tesla is now aiming to be the world’s largest company by market cap, and it is aiming to achieve production levels that are unheard of. Zhu’s talents would definitely be of use in this stage of the company’s growth.
Tesla analyst Andrew Percoco of Morgan Stanley teased the company’s dominance in its self-driving initiative, stating that its lead over competitors is “not even close.”
Percoco recently overtook coverage of Tesla stock from Adam Jonas, who had covered the company at Morgan Stanley for years. Percoco is handling Tesla now that Jonas is covering embodied AI stocks and no longer automotive.
His first move after grabbing coverage was to adjust the price target from $410 to $425, as well as the rating from ‘Overweight’ to ‘Equal Weight.’
Percoco’s new note regarding Tesla highlights the company’s extensive lead in self-driving and autonomy projects, something that it has plenty of competition in, but has established its prowess over the past few years.
He writes:
“It’s not even close. Tesla continues to lead in autonomous driving, even as Nvidia rolls out new technology aimed at helping other automakers build driverless systems.”
Percoco’s main point regarding Tesla’s advantage is the company’s ability to collect large amounts of training data through its massive fleet, as millions of cars are driving throughout the world and gathering millions of miles of vehicle behavior on the road.
This is the main point that Percoco makes regarding Tesla’s lead in the entire autonomy sector: data is King, and Tesla has the most of it.
One big story that has hit the news over the past week is that of NVIDIA and its own self-driving suite, called Alpamayo. NVIDIA launched this open-source AI program last week, but it differs from Tesla’s in a significant fashion, especially from a hardware perspective, as it plans to use a combination of LiDAR, Radar, and Vision (Cameras) to operate.
Percoco said that NVIDIA’s announcement does not impact Morgan Stanley’s long-term opinions on Tesla and its strength or prowess in self-driving.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang commends Tesla’s Elon Musk for early belief
And, for what it’s worth, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang even said some remarkable things about Tesla following the launch of Alpamayo:
“I think the Tesla stack is the most advanced autonomous vehicle stack in the world. I’m fairly certain they were already using end-to-end AI. Whether their AI did reasoning or not is somewhat secondary to that first part.”
Percoco reiterated both the $425 price target and the ‘Equal Weight’ rating on Tesla shares.
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