Altimeter Capital CEO Bradley Gerstner seems to be seeing an opportunity in Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA), even at a time when there is a lot of negativity surrounding the electric vehicle maker. Part of Gerstner’s optimism lies in Full Self-Driving (FSD) V12, which the CEO noted gave him a “ChatGPT moment” when he experienced it.
Gerstner noted that he recently bought Tesla stock in part due to the company’s leadership, particularly Elon Musk, who has led the electric vehicle maker to become a market leader. As noted in a Seeking Alpha report, Gerstner hinted that Tesla “has the best product engineer CEO on the planet” today, and that makes a lot of difference.
“When everybody else is negative about (companies) like that, that’s where we start getting excited, particularly when they’re run by a founder who is as extraordinary a product leader as Elon Musk,” Gerstner stated. He also stated that Tesla’s approach to autonomous driving truly makes vehicles behave like they are being operated by a human driver.
Brad Gerstner officially drops the mic on why he’s bullish on Tesla FSD live on CNBS and the only thing the newscast can say is “we’ll leave it right there.” $TSLA pic.twitter.com/xVS6ECPGhG
— Teslaconomics (@Teslaconomics) March 28, 2024
“When I took a test drive in it, it was kind of a ChatGPT moment. (Tesla) totally scrapped their prior deterministic models and moved to an imitation learning model that really, for the first time, unlike Waymo — which is still a deterministic model — feels like a human driving the car,” the Altimeter Capital CEO noted.
The American investor and hedge fund manager also proved optimistic about the idea of Tesla’s $199 monthly FSD subscription service. Gerstner noted that this is quite comparable to Apple when the tech behemoth launched its Apple Music streaming service. Such a strategy would likely be difficult to emulate by the electric vehicle maker’s competitors.
“That’s the type of thing that other people can’t easily copy. (Elon Musk) has got 5M robot cars on the road collecting data that is training this imitation model; that makes it demonstrably better and almost impossible for all the traditional OEMs to replicate,” he said.
That being said, the Altimeter Capital CEO did admit that Tesla’s issues in countries like China could be messy, so holding TSLA shares is still not for the faint of heart. “This is not for the faint of heart. You have to size it appropriately. You have to be willing to buy more if the stock goes down,” Gerstner noted.
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