Investor's Corner
Tesla bull Cathie Wood of ARK Invest explains why TSLA inspires even more confidence today
Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA) may have experienced a notable dive as of late, but Cathie Wood of ARK Invest has noted that she and her team remain incredibly optimistic about the electric car maker. Wood noted that ARK Invest is poised to release its updated forecast on TSLA stock in the next couple of weeks. And based on ARK’s observations about the EV maker, Wood noted that she and her team’s TSLA price targets would be considerably higher than before.
During her CNBC segment, the ARK Invest founder explained why she and her team now have more confidence in Tesla despite the arrival of competitors from legacy automakers. Wood explained that Tesla actually performed better than her already-bullish expectations, particularly when the company actually increased its market share in the electric vehicle sector as EVs from rival automakers were released. Wood also highlighted that Tesla’s self-driving strategy is shaping up to be extremely strategic, potentially allowing the electric car maker to take the lion’s share of the autonomous segment.
“We’re about to publish–I’m hoping it’s within a week or two–our new forecasts. Our confidence in Tesla has gone up for a number of reasons. One, it didn’t lose share of the electric vehicle market when all of the traditional luxury brand names started bringing their own electric vehicles to market. Now, we expected (TSLA) will lose share, but our expectation is that its share would go from 17% at the end of 2018 down to 11% as more electric vehicles were coming out. Instead, what happened was its share moved up to more than 20% and roughly 80% in the US market. Eighty percent of electric vehicles. So that’s the first source of confidence. Market share up, not down.
“The second is autonomous. We believe that Elon Musk, who, over the weekend, tweeted out that he would offer or Tesla would offer, FSD (Beta) to anyone who wanted it, saw an incredible burst in demand. So for him to be able to do that suggests to us that he’s going to be able to show us the way to autonomous much faster than most analysts and investors expect. So the probability we have put on Tesla really winning the lion’s share of the autonomous taxi network market in the United States, also has gone up. So you might imagine that price targets have gone up considerably,” Wood noted.
When asked about the possibility of Tesla entering a phase similar to Amazon–which grew rapidly but had its stock pushed down for almost a decade after peaking in 1999–Wood explained that the electric car maker would likely not have the same experience. The ARK Invest founder noted that Amazon’s stock slump actually represented a time when the e-commerce giant was investing all its funds into growing its business, which of course, paid off in the long run. Tesla, according to Wood, seems to have passed this point already, with the company investing aggressively and excelling in four key metrics.
“It is leading the charge, so to speak. So battery technology, costs lower than anyone else’s out there, and will remain lower. Artificial intelligence chip, it designed its own. No one else has designed its own chip. This is analogous to Apple in the day. Cellular companies Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola, didn’t see the future. Apple did, and yet it couldn’t get Qualcomm or Intel to move quickly enough. It had to design its own chip, and of course, now Apple basically accounts for the lion’s share of all the profits from smartphones in the world. We think this is going to happen also with Tesla. Maybe not worldwide because we know China wants its own champion. But that AI chip that Tesla designed, our analyst said, was four years ahead of where NVIDIA was at the time.”
“They have more data collected than any other company by orders of magnitude, not just by any other company but by all other companies out there. Because the largest pool of data with the highest quality is going to win in the AI game. They have the largest pool of data. And finally, until very recently, Tesla was the only automobile manufacturer able to improve the performance of its cars with over-the-air software updates… What they’ve done is extraordinary, and I think this is their market share to lose. I think they’re in a very, very different place. Also, we’re not in the tech and telecom bust. We are 20 years later. All of the seeds for what is happening now were planted back then. Now they’re coming to fruition,” Wood remarked.
Watch Cathie Wood’s recent CNBC segment in the video below.
https://youtu.be/jreyOdXvvcI
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Investor's Corner
Tesla Robotaxi gets a massive upgrade in Nevada
Nevada regulators just approved a massive expansion of Tesla’s robotaxi fleet across the entire county.
Tesla’s robotaxi footprint in Nevada just grew by roughly 500 times in a single regulatory vote.
The Nevada Transportation Authority approved Tesla’s full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit on Thursday, clearing the way for the company to deploy up to 5,000 driverless vehicles across Clark County over the next 12 months. The decision came during a four hour general session meeting that Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt watched live and reported on X, noting the vote replaces the interim order that had limited Tesla to just 10 robotaxis on a narrow stretch of the Las Vegas Strip.
EXCLUSIVE: Tesla has just officially received approval for its full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit in Nevada, clearing the way for Tesla to launch a paid public Robotaxi service in Las Vegas.
This officially allows @Tesla to deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis over the next… pic.twitter.com/DPs5UtUlrE
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 20, 2026
That earlier cap, covered here after it surfaced on August 13, came with restrictions that looked stricter than what Tesla runs in Austin: a 45 mph speed ceiling, no airport pickups, and a geofence confined to the Strip corridor. The new approval extends Tesla’s operating authority to all of Clark County, with room to request an even wider geofence across the state.
Tesla representatives at the meeting said they have no intention of putting 5,000 cars on the road right away. Commercial rides are expected to start within 30 days, pending vehicle inspections, insurance filings, and fare approval, the standard steps every robotaxi operator in Nevada has had to clear.
Tesla’s own Robotaxi account replied to the news with a short line, The golden future is upon us.
The timing lines up with Tesla’s broader robotaxi push this month. The company is preparing to open Cybercab rides to the public in Austin as soon as this month, and it opened a sweepstakes for riders to win a seat at the launch event. Tesla filed its original application for a 5,000 vehicle Nevada fleet back in June, a request regulators trimmed to 10 vehicles when they issued the interim order in July. Thursday’s vote effectively grants the number Tesla asked for from the start.
Zoox, the Amazon owned robotaxi operator, has run in Nevada since 2025 and was capped at 100 vehicles before Thursday’s decision. Tesla’s new ceiling puts it well ahead of that comparison on paper, though the company has said its actual fleet size will depend on how quickly FSD v15 rolls out, the software update executives have called the gateway to scaling unsupervised robotaxi operations nationwide.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.
Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.
The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”
Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”
Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”
Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.
Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.
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Tesla will launch Cybercab on September 3
