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Tesla (TSLA) Robotaxi’s influence on price targets is already taking effect

(Credit: Tesla)

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Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) received a boosted price target from Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas this morning from $272 to $333. The new, raised outlook is based on Tesla’s Robotaxi fleet, which Jonas believes shows extreme upside potential for the automaker through the next ten years.

Jonas holds a 51% success rate and an average return of 8.8%, according to TipRanks.com.

In a note to investors, Jonas describes a new, more positive outlook for Tesla’s planned ridesharing service, which he believes shows tremendous potential compared to Morgan Stanley’s previous forecasts.

“We believe that the company is in a better position to deploy its ride-hail/transportation as a service business faster and more profitably than our previous forecast,” Jonas writes to investors in a note. “Reductions in the price of the car and battery, improvements in the EV charging infrastructure, insurance costs, residual value retention, and other factors have also increased the economic inputs of our Mobility model for Tesla.”

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The announcement of Jonas’ price target boost comes just days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that a Beta of the company’s Full Self-Driving suite would be released “in a few weeks.” It turns out that a very limited number of people will receive the capability on Tuesday, a day ahead of the company’s Q3 Earnings Call.

“Limited FSD beta releasing on Tuesday next week, as promised. This will, at first, be limited to a small number of people who are expert & careful drivers,” Musk said in a Tweet.

If the self-driving Beta program yields positive results, Tesla could launch its Robotaxi program before the end of the year, matching Musk’s expectations from early 2020, when he stated it would be ready by 2021. “I think we could see robotaxis in operation with network fleet next year. Not in all markets, but in some,” he said.

With Tesla’s record quarter in deliveries and production, Morgan Stanley also adjusted its forecast of how many cars will use the autonomous ride-hailing platform.

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“We forecast a launch of 1,000 cars (from the existing fleet) in Tesla Mobility by 2021, rising to 500k cars by 2030, which would account for 2.7% of our Tesla global fleet estimate (18.6mm units) by that year. Our previous assumption for the Tesla Mobility fleet was 240k units by 2030,” Jonas wrote. “We assume $45,000 per cost car (vs. $60k previously) and a 7-year useful life, and other savings, driving our exit OP margin of Tesla mobility to 14.7% (10.4% previously). We use a 10% WACC (11% previously) and a 4% terminal growth rate (2% previously) implying an exit PE multiple of 17.3x (11.3x previously). Taken together, our valuation of Tesla Mobility rises to $42bn ($41/share) vs. $7.3bn ($7/share) previously.”

With increased production rates in the U.S., along with a new facility being built in Texas, Tesla will have more than enough opportunities to bring a new wave of ride-sharing to the United States. Eventually, the service will make an international debut, but this depends on regulatory permissions that vary in each market.

Jonas’ $333 price target is met with a $716 bull case price target, and a $108 bear case.

At the time of writing, TSLA shares were trading at $452.45, up about .8% for the session.

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Disclaimer: Joey Klender is a TSLA Shareholder.

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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Investor's Corner

Tesla crushes Wall Street expectations, beats delivery estimates by over 15 percent

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Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) beat Wall Street expectations of 406,000 vehicles delivered in Q2 by reporting 480,126 deliveries for the three months ending in June.

Tesla reported it delivered 467,762  Model 3 and Model Y units, while 12,364 Model S, Model X, and Cybertrucks switched hands during the quarter. The Model S and Model X were officially sunset this past quarter and will no longer be part of the company’s Production & Delivery reports moving forward.

The quarter is a pleasant surprise and a good rebound from Q1, when Tesla slightly missed the Wall Street consensus of 365,645 cars by reporting 358,023 deliveries for the first three motnhs of the year.

Energy storage deployments also provided some strength in Tesla’s delivery report, hitting 13.5 GWh for Q2. This is a particular division of Tesla’s business that has been overwhelmingly robust over the past few years, truly being a strong point of the company’s overall model.

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For the year, Tesla analysts still predict deliveries to trend in the 1.69 million unit region, a modest 3 to 5 percent increase from the 1.64 million cars the company delivered last year. Tesla will likely return to more sequential and noticeable year-over-year growth as the Cybercab project starts to ramp up considerably in the next few years.

Tesla has some other potential catalysts to spur vehicle deliveries, too. Not only is it expecting Cybercab to truly start making a change in the next few years, but other vehicles could be entering the company’s lineup.

Tesla sends production Cybercab with no steering wheel, pedals to on-road testing

The slightly longer Model Y L has been a highly speculated release candidate in the U.S. It has already done incredibly well in China, and U.S. buyers have been wanting slightly more interior space than the Model Y. Now that the Model X is gone, it is more needed than ever.

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Q2 highlights a pretty stable automotive division within Tesla, and no true concerns arise from these figures, especially considering it managed to beat expectations convincingly.

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Investor's Corner

Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’

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Credit: MarcoRP | X

Tesla short seller Michael Burry, the subject of the film “The Big Short,” where he was portrayed by Steve Carell, has revealed he has opened a new bet against the stock.

In a new update to his Substack newsletter in a post titled “Trading Post June 30, 2026,” Burry revealed a new set of bets against Tesla, Caterpillar, NVIDIA, Applied Materials Inc., and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.

In regard to Tesla, Burry wrote:

“And finally I shorted Tesla at 416.22. Happy it jumped back to this level.”

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This means Burry likely opened his new short position after the company’s recent rally on Wall Street, which saw Tesla shares sink in mid-May, only to recover to well over the $400 mark. Currently, shares trade at around $427.

The company saw a big Tuesday as shares climbed considerably, over 10 percent. The size of the Tesla short was not provided, nor did Burry give any information on the position’s structure, the number of shares, dollar value, or whether options were used in the short.

The Tesla and SpaceX merger everyone is talking about is quietly building

Over the years, Burry has been one of the more vocal critics of Tesla, calling its share price “media inflated,” and saying it was “ridiculously overvalued” as recently as December.

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The company has largely transitioned away from being known as an automotive company and instead is much more widely regarded as an AI play, mostly due to its Full Self-Driving efforts, Optimus robot development, and data collection related to both.

This has not pulled those skeptics away from being vocal about their distaste for how Tesla is valued, but there’s no denying that the company is a global force in many things, including sustainable energy, automotive, and AI.

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Investor's Corner

SpaceX gets initial stock coverage from Tesla’s biggest bull

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SpaceX Starship V3 flight 12
SpaceX Starship V3 flight 12 (Credit: SpaceX)

Wedbush Securities is initiating stock coverage on SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), marking the first comments on the company since it went public several weeks ago. Wedbush and its analyst handling coverage, Dan Ives, are widely bullish on fellow Musk company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).

Ives wrote his first note initiating coverage of SpaceX shares on Wednesday with a $190 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating. The firm believes the company is well positioned off of its IPO because of its wide array of projects, including AI compute power and infrastructure, connectivity projects, and launches.

“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity,” Ives wrote, “Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel and increasing deal flow for its Colossus clusters.”

Elon Musk called it Epic: The full story of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 12

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Wedbush leans heavily on Starlink, which they say is the “profitability driver given the strength of its recurring revenue base of ~12 million subscribers as of June 5th.” Ives believes Starlink is still in the “early innings” of penetrating the global telecommunications and broadband market, as it only holds less than a 1 percent share. However, this number is sure to increase over time.

It also highlights the importance of Starship, which it says is an “essential layer” of SpaceX’s overall success. SpaceX developing and displaying the ability to reuse rockets is a major cost and reliability advantage “as it reduces the necessary hardware launch costs while generating a feedback loop for future flights to improve their launch flight rate without accelerating capex spend.”

Finally, SpaceX’s recent AI/Compute projects are also very elementary, Ives writes. It is worth mentioning Wedbush said its $190 price target is derived from a valuation forecast that sees the company yielding roughly $2.48 trillion of implied enterprise value.

There are also some factors that Wedbush did not take into account with its initial coverage. The firm wrote in the note:

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“We note that there is optional value coming from Starship’s accelerating scale towards sub-$200/kg unit economics, orbital data centers, and enterprise AI monetization as these factors could drive meaningful upside but these face major hurdles, so we do not take that into account with our valuation.”

SpaceX shares are down just over 2 percent today, trading at around $167 at the time of publication.

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