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Tesla Robotaxi, Autonomy, and Insurance drive new price target from ARK Invest

Credit: Reddit | u/hairy_quadruped

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ARK Invest has upgraded its price target and outlook for Tesla through 2025, projecting massive gains as the automaker continues to dominate the electric vehicle market. ARK analysts now believe that Tesla’s outlook is even better than before, boosting its price target from $1,400 in 2024 to $3,000 in 2025. The new figures depend on Tesla’s rollout of Robotaxi, a fully-autonomous vehicle, and its expanding insurance initiative.

ARK released a new report on March 19th that outlined the firm’s real-world expectations for Tesla. Already holding the reputation as one of Tesla’s biggest bulls, ARK revised its price target by pushing its forecast forward by one year from 2024 to 2025. Also, ARK became even more bullish by boosting its outlook from $1,400 in 2024 to $3,000 in 2025. ARK wrote:

“Last year, ARK estimated that in 2024 Tesla’s share price would hit $7,000 per share, or $1,400 adjusted for its five for one stock split. Based on our updated research, we now estimate that it could approach $3,000 in 2025.”

Credit: ARK Invest

The key updates ARK made to its model were that it refined the estimates for Tesla’s capital efficiency, the addition of Tesla’s Insurance initiative, which is set to open in more U.S. states shortly, new assumptions for the possible rollout of Robotaxi, and the probability that the automaker successfully achieves fully autonomous capabilities within the next five years.

Production Expansion

ARK’s general outlook on Tesla remains extremely bullish. The firm wrote that it believes the company can expand its production and sales capacities between 5 and 10 million vehicles by 2025. The additional year of growth capability due to the newly-revised price target, along with several other metrics, has ARK projecting massive sales figures within four years. Coming off its biggest year in terms of sales, where Tesla managed to deliver 499,650 cars in 2020, this would roughly project a between 10x and 20x growth in four years. It doesn’t seem far-fetched as Tesla continues to roll out more efficient production methods thanks to manufacturing efficiencies. Additionally, the supplemental production figures from Giga Texas and Giga Berlin also indicate that Tesla will be in prime position to expand its production metrics considerably within the next several years.

Credit: ARK Invest

Currently, Tesla projects each of its three active production facilities to produce approximately 1,050,000 vehicles per year.

Tesla Insurance

Meanwhile, Tesla’s Insurance program has been added to ARK’s new projection. While the in-house insurance initiative is only currently available in California, documents show that Tesla drivers in several other U.S. states are set to have it available to them. Tesla’s “better-than-average” safety profiles, thanks to an increased focus on passenger safety, Tesla has the ability to use real-time data to offer insurance in its vehicles, ARK said. This could increase pricing dynamics and lower customer acquisition costs, thus increasing margins. “In our bull case, ARK estimates that, as robotaxis ramp, Tesla’s insurance revenues will be incorporated into a platform fee. Insurance boosts our price target by roughly $60 in 2025,” Tasha Keeney of ARK also wrote.

Tesla Robotaxi and Fully-Autonomous Vehicles

Tesla’s human-driven and fully-autonomous ride-hailing services also provided a substantial boost to ARK’s general outlook for 2025. “In our bear case example, ride-hail could add an additional $20 billion to Tesla’s operating profit by 2025, increasing our price target by about $500,” Keeney said. The rollout of a fully-autonomous service could be preceded by a human-driven service, providing a highly-profitable recurring revenue stream and limiting the downside of the possible failure of a fully-autonomous service.

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Tesla bull Cathie Wood talks Robotaxis and ARK Invest’s greater conviction in TSLA

The possibility of a fully-autonomous vehicle coming from Tesla is around 50% for 2025, increasing from the 30% projection ARK held for 2024. Tesla’s increased focus on Neural Networks along with a quickly-growing vehicle fleet gives the automaker the possibility to scale an accurate and effective Robotaxi service, opening up the door for additional cash flow. ARK added that:

“If 60% of its vehicles equipped with Autopilot were to serve as robotaxis, Tesla could generate an additional $160 billion in EBITDA in 2025. In our bull case, ride-hail would account for the majority of Tesla’s enterprise value in 2025.”

ARK states that its bearish outlook shows Tesla shares could be worth around $1,500. Meanwhile, its bull case projects $4,000 per share. Interestingly, ARK’s projections do not model Tesla’s energy storage or solar business, nor did it include the recent $1.5 billion bitcoin investment, which has given Tesla significant profitability.

ARK’s full report is available here.

Disclosure: Joey Klender is a TSLA Shareholder.

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Joey has been a journalist covering electric mobility at TESLARATI since August 2019. In his spare time, Joey is playing golf, watching MMA, or cheering on any of his favorite sports teams, including the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, Miami Heat, Washington Capitals, and Penn State Nittany Lions. You can get in touch with joey at joey@teslarati.com. He is also on X @KlenderJoey. If you're looking for great Tesla accessories, check out shop.teslarati.com

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Elon Musk

X changed how everyone gets paid, and this lawsuit shows why

X sued a Bitcoin account network over fake payouts as its creator pay model shifts

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Elon Musk’s X has taken a Bitcoin-focused engagement ring to court, and the case doubles as a receipt for how differently the platform pays creators today. The company filed suit in the High Court of England and Wales against Vivek Kumar Sen and Zamyang Sherpa, alleging the pair ran six accounts, including @Vivek4real_, @Bitcoin_Teddy and @TrendingBitcoin, as one coordinated operation to fake the kind of engagement that used to translate directly into money.

According to the filing, first reported by Gizmodo, the accounts posted near identical “BREAKING” crypto headlines seconds apart, in one case 11 seconds, then had three more handles like, reply to and repost the material to manufacture what X called “a false appearance of genuine, human communication and interaction.” X says the scheme pulled in at least £207,384, about $278,000, and pegs its own investigation and remediation costs at another £75,000. The accounts were suspended August 18. X general counsel James Burnham announced the case on X last weekend, writing that the company “will act forcefully to protect our platform and the earnings of genuine creators.” Musk’s own reaction, posted shortly after, was three words: “Don’t mess with 𝕏.”

The timing lines up with a a recent update to how X pays its creators. The program these accounts allegedly gamed, Creator Revenue Sharing, launched in mid 2023 and paid out based on how much a post got engaged with. Originality was never part of the formula, which is exactly how the platform ended up flooded with recycled clips, copy pasted “BREAKING” posts and replies engineered purely to farm reactions from paying subscribers.

X tried patching the model more than once, including an April cut to aggregator payouts and a March regional weighting change that Musk personally paused hours after it was announced. X retired Creator Revenue Sharing for good on September 7 and opened its replacement, Original Content Rewards, the next day.

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The new math is stricter. Payouts now come only from qualified impressions, meaning unique Home Timeline views from Premium subscribers where at least half the post is visible, and replies no longer count toward eligibility at all. Copied posts, reuploaded media and reposts without meaningful changes are explicitly excluded. Allegra Jacchia, senior product manager for Creators at SpaceXAI, which now runs X’s product and AI work following xAI’s acquisition of the platform, put it bluntly, saying the goal is to reward creators who bring original ideas and perspective, “not those who have become best at gaming the system.”

Read that way, the lawsuit isn’t really about six crypto accounts. It’s X putting a dollar figure on what the old incentive structure cost, then suing to collect it right as the new one goes live. For live updates on how the case and the new rewards program shake out, follow @Teslarati on X.

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Elon Musk

Why automakers keep turning down Elon Musk’s Tesla Full Self-Driving offer

Elon Musk confirms no automaker has ever accepted Tesla’s offer to license Full Self-Driving software.

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Elon Musk gave a brief answer on X Monday that confirmed that Tesla’s standing offer to license Full Self-Driving to other automakers still has zero takers. Sawyer Merritt wrote that “Tesla has for years openly invited other automakers to license FSD. None of them have accepted,” responding to a prediction from Boom Supersonic founder Blake Scholl that Tesla would eventually open FSD the way it opened its Supercharger network to rival brands. Musk’s reply to Merritt was one word: “Exactly.”

It is not the first time Musk has made this point. He said something similar in November, when he called legacy automakers reluctance to adopt FSD “crazy,” and Tesla has floated the offer publicly since at least 2021. Scholl’s prediction touches on something real. Once NACS became the de facto charging standard, adoption from Ford, GM, Rivian and others followed within about a year. FSD licensing was supposed to work the same way once Tesla built enough of a lead that switching made sense for everyone.

The case for licensing now is stronger than it was two years ago. Waymo and Zoox are logging hundreds of thousands of unsupervised autonomous miles, along with Tesla’s own Robotaxi fleet. Every automaker still selling driver assist systems that lag FSD has given the robotaxi conversation to Tesla, Waymo and Zoox by default. Licensing FSD would let a GM or a Ford compete on the same field without spending a decade and billions of dollars building a stack from scratch, the same argument Tesla made when it opened the Supercharger network to bring more EVs onto its chargers.

But FSD is not a connector standard. As one reply to Musk’s post pointed out, licensing FSD is not a software license the way NACS was a plug spec. It requires adopting Tesla’s eight camera layout and its onboard compute architecture, meaning a licensee’s cars would effectively become Tesla hardware wearing someone else’s badge. That is the visible obstacle. The less visible one is data. A licensed FSD stack would report back the same telemetry Tesla collects from its own fleet, giving Tesla a continuous read on how a competitor’s cars are actually driven, where they struggle, and how often drivers intervene. For an automaker trying to build its own autonomy program, or simply trying to keep its build quality and safety record private, handing Tesla that visibility could be a bigger cost than the hardware bill. It is the reason the Supercharger comparison only goes so far. Opening a charging plug cost Tesla very little. Opening FSD would cost a rival something it cannot get back.

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Elon Musk

Tesla eyes supply partners for Optimus mass production

Tesla certified three Chinese suppliers for Optimus mass production, signaling its robot timeline is accelerating.

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Concept rendering of Tesla Optimus in mass production

Tesla’s robotics team traveled to Ningbo, in China’s Zhejiang province, on September 16 and spent the following day auditing component suppliers for Optimus, according to a Bloomberg report cited by RobotAIGeek. The visit moved three manufacturers from provisional status to certified mass production partners: Tuopu Group, which handles actuators and chassis components, Ningbo Joyson Electronic, a sensor supplier, and Zhejiang Sanhua Intelligent Controls, which builds thermal management systems. All three already supply parts to Tesla’s electric vehicles, and the audit reportedly came with fresh orders that supply chain reports put at an initial batch of roughly 5,000 units.

Tuopu, Joyson, and Sanhua built their manufacturing base serving the automotive industry, where tolerances and volume requirements are already close to what a mass produced humanoid robot demands. Sanhua in particular has history here. Teslarati reported last October that the company had received a roughly $685 million order for linear actuators tied to Optimus, a volume industry watchers estimated could cover around 180,000 robots once production ramped.

Supply chain reports tied to this week’s audit put Tesla’s near term production goal at about 1,000 Optimus units a week by late September, rising to 2,000 to 2,500 units a week by the end of the year. That pace would put real weight behind the timeline Tesla has been building toward since May, when it wound down Model S and Model X production at Fremont to convert that floor space into a dedicated Optimus line targeting one million units annually. JPMorgan analysts who toured the factory in August confirmed the conversion took roughly four months, a pace Musk has called unprecedented for a facility that size.

New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point

Fremont is only the first phase. A second, larger Optimus plant is rising at Gigafactory Texas, where drone footage shared by Joe Tegtmeyer last week showed the structural steel nearing completion on the north end of the building. Tesla has said that facility is meant to eventually support production of up to 10 million units a year, though volume output there is not expected before 2027.

Commercial sales of Optimus are still targeted for the second half of 2027, but production is expected to start well before then. JPMorgan analyst Rajat Gupta has said Tesla’s “Optimus Academy” program, which uses early units to collect real world training data inside Tesla’s own facilities, is expected to be running later this year. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ian Ma described the Ningbo audits as “a positive commercialization signal for China’s humanoid supply chain,” noting that sentiment could improve further if the visit leads to confirmed supplier nominations and larger orders. The Solactive China Humanoid Robotics Index rose about 1.4% on the news, though it remains down roughly 30% for the year.

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