Investor's Corner
Tesla’s opportunities in the auto market remain intact, declares billionaire investor
Legendary investor Ron Baron is one of the most ardent supporters of Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA). During a recent segment on CNBC, the CEO, CIO and portfolio manager for Baron Capital declared that the opportunities for Tesla as a company in the auto segment are as strong as ever, despite all the volatility it has been facing over the past few months.
The present year has not been kind to Tesla stock. Since hitting $379 per share last year, the electric car maker’s stock has reached as low as $176 per share. Despite ending the second quarter with record deliveries, Tesla also reported a net loss of $408 million, translating to a loss of $2.31 per share. This was below Wall Street’s estimates, which pointed to an adjusted loss of $0.25 per share.
Yet, despite these results, Tesla also ended the second quarter with $5 billion in cash, the highest in the company’s history to date. The Model 3 remains competitive in international markets as well, and the impending operations of Gigafactory 3 in China are poised to bring the affordable versions of the electric sedan to the rapidly-growing, lucrative mainstream Chinese market.
While addressing the CNBC hosts, Baron stated that he has not sold any TSLA stock despite the turbulent nature of the company’s stock. Explaining his stance, Baron noted that Tesla is actually in a unique position in the auto industry because it is showing growth at a time when veteran carmakers are not growing. This, according to the billionaire, shows a notable opportunity for Tesla.
“The opportunity here is 90 million cars a year that are sold, and our guy is now going to sell 350-400,000 cars. Right now, they’re able to expand in a time when no one else is expanding in the automobile industry. So they’re able to build now in China with all the learnings that they’ve had in the United States. They’re building for 70% less than it would cost for the same cars to build in the United States and 30% less than it would have cost to build a year ago,” Baron said.
Baron also emphasized that Tesla is not a static target, even when veteran automakers seem to be putting serious efforts into producing and releasing premium electric cars. For Baron, part of this is due to the fact that experienced carmakers such as BMW are entrenched in the internal combustion engine. At a time when the internal combustion engine is being pushed aside by batteries and electric motors, some of these carmakers are dragging their feet in the adoption of compelling EVs, translating to an even bigger opportunity for Tesla.
“The quality of (Tesla’s) cars improve. The distances improve. The opportunity has not shrunk. In fact, the reason they have this opportunity is all these car companies have hundreds of billions of dollars invested in plants that make motors. So their business is making motors. That’s what they do. They make motors. So if your competitive advantage is you make motors better than anyone else in the world, and some guy comes along and says, ‘hey, you know what, all that stuff, all those motors you make, we don’t need them anymore,’ are you gonna drop all the motors that you’re making and go make a battery, (even though) you’re five or ten years behind? Tesla has an opportunity because other people are sort of slow walking,” Baron explained.
Wall Street has a generally skeptical stance on Tesla as of writing. Based on 27 analysts polled by TipRanks in the last three months, seven had a “Buy” rating, 6 had a “Hold” rating, and 14 maintained a “Sell” rating. The average price target for Tesla shares currently stands at $245.62, marking an 8% upside from the current levels of TSLA stock.
Watch Ron Baron’s discussion on Tesla in the video below.
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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