Investor's Corner
Tesla at $420 is a bargain considering its Autopilot data is key to a self-driving future
Questions continue to swirl around the fate of Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA) as the market waits for updates about Elon Musk’s initiative to make the company private. Tesla’s privatization, provided that it does go through, will be the largest one in history, amounting to around $70 billion at Musk’s target of $420 per share. While this amount is substantial, $420 is actually a pretty good deal for Tesla’s would-be funding partners, considering the volume of Autopilot data the company has gathered from its Model S, Model X and Model 3 fleet.
Tesla’s possible privatization has caused wild swings in Tesla’s stock price, though not too far a departure from its usual volatility. Upon Musk’s announcement, shares climbed up 11%, before falling back as reservations emerged from critics about the plausibility of the company’s privatization. On Thursday’s after-hours, Tesla stock recovered some of its losses as the company’s board of directors issued a statement stating that they would formally review Musk’s plans.
Gene Munster, Managing Partner at Loup Ventures believes that there is more than a 50% chance that Tesla would become a private company. Munster noted that while concerns about the possible repercussions of Musk’s go-private Twitter announcement might affect the stock, the effects would only be felt at the very short-term. Ultimately, the venture capital firm believes that neither Tesla nor Elon Musk is at legal risk, especially since the company stated on a 2013 Form 8-K that social media might be used as an outlet for disseminating company information. Loup Ventures also estimates that Tesla would need around $25-$30 billion to take the electric car and energy company private.
If Loup Ventures’ calculations prove accurate, the entities providing the company with the funding to go private would be getting quite a deal at $420 per share. Apart from Tesla’s electric car and energy business — both of which are growing at an immense rate — investors would also be buying into a company that holds what could very well be automotive world’s most extensive amount of real-world driving data. As of July, a report from MIT’s Lex Fridman estimated that Tesla had acquired around 1.2 billion miles on Autopilot and approximately 7.8 billion miles in Autopilot “Shadow Mode.”
In comparison, Waymo’s fleet of vehicles have driven a total of 5 million real-world miles in self-driving mode and an additional 5 billion miles in simulation as of May this year. GM Cruise, another leader in self-driving technology, does not release the numbers of its fleet, but accident and disengagement reports based on autonomous miles driven provide a rough estimate of the miles Cruise’s vehicles have traveled so far. Between June 2015 and November 2017, the California Department of Motor Vehicles estimated that GM Cruise’s self-driving cars covered a total of 141,691 miles in CA. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas estimates Waymo to be worth $175 billion. GM Cruise, on the other hand, is valued at $11.5 billion after securing more funding from Softbank’s Vision Fund earlier this year.
Tesla’s development of self-driving technologies has taken a backseat in the media coverage of the company, particularly during the past year as the company struggled with the Model 3 ramp. Regardless of this, Keith Wright, a professor from Villanova University, notes that Elon Musk’s decision to invest heavily in AI would likely pay off soon. Among the participants in the self-driving race, Tesla is the company with the most real-world experience. Elon Musk once noted that it would likely take around 6 billion real-world miles before regulators would approve self-driving technology. So far, Tesla is the company closest to that mark.
Tesla’s focus on data gathered from real-world miles was emphasized by Nidhi Kalra, a senior information scientist for the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization. According to the information scientist, simulations such as the ones used by Waymo to train its fleet of autonomous vehicles are a “simplification” of the real world.
“The problem with any simulator is that it’s a simplification of the real world. Even if it stimulates the world accurately, if all you’re simulating is a sunny day in Mountain View with no traffic, then what is the value of doing a billion miles on the same cul-de-sac in Mountain View? I’m not saying that’s what anyone’s doing but without that information we can’t know what a billion miles really means. Real-world miles still really, really matter. That’s where, literally, the rubber meets the road, and there’s no substitute for it,” Kalra said.
And Tesla is just getting started. In Tesla’s Q2 2018 earnings call, the company provided an update on its efforts to develop its own self-driving hardware. According to Pete Bannon, who leads the development of Hardware 3, the company’s new hardware is different from the industry standard.
“We did a survey of all of the solutions that were out there for running neural networks, including GPUs. We went and talked to other people like at ARM that were building embedded solutions for running neural networks. And pretty much everywhere we looked, if somebody had a hammer, whether it was a CPU or a GPU or whatever, they were adding something to accelerate neural networks. But nobody was doing a bottoms-up design from scratch, which is what we elected to do.”
“We had the benefit of having the insight into seeing what Tesla’s neural networks looked like back then and having projections of what they would look like into the future, and we were able to leverage all of that knowledge and our willingness to totally commit to that style of computing to produce a design that’s dramatically more efficient and has dramatically more performance than what you can buy today.”
Tesla could very well be approaching its most significant turning point in years. Regardless of whether Tesla becomes private or not, one thing seems sure — once Tesla starts rolling out its first full self-driving features, and once Hardware 3 makes it to the company’s fleet, leaders in the self-driving industry would probably be forced to recognize the presence of a new, possibly dominant player.
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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