Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) stock has a healthy combination of both bulls and bears, enthusiasts and skeptics, long-holders and short-sellers. However, Gordon Johnson of GLJ Research is sticking with an $87 price target for the electric automaker, and he refuses to change it until the end of 2021.
Johnson is CEO of GLJ, and he is skeptical of Tesla’s surge toward the ranks of some of the most prestigious stocks to own on Wall Street today. He believes it so much that he is unwilling to change his price target for Tesla, which would incite a nearly 95% downside from the company’s current price per stock. At the time of writing, TSLA is trading at $2,008.04.
“In a nutshell, Tesla is essentially a busted growth story. I know that sounds crazy to people looking at the stock,” he said to Yahoo Finance’s the First Trade.
Johnson’s argument for TSLA being overvalued is based on production rates and sales figures, and not about technology or vehicle efficiency. Nor does his analysis of the electric automaker’s stock take into account that Tesla also is competitive in the sustainable energy market.
“It’s trading at more than double VW’s market cap, yet VW sold 11 million cars last year. Tesla sold just under 370,000 cars last year, looking to sell roughly 500,000 cars this year,” Johnson said.
Tesla only had one vehicle manufacturing plant that was fully operational for consumer sales at the end of 2019. Volkswagen had 125.
Breaking it down in terms of output per plant, Volkswagen manufactured and sold 88,000 vehicles per production facility. Tesla sold and delivered 367,500 with its one facility.
Tesla has been delivering a mass-market vehicle since 2017 with the Model 3 and has only been in the automotive business for seventeen years. Volkswagen, on the other hand, was founded in 1937.
The market is changing, and consumers are focused on more sustainable forms of transportation. The widespread appeal of Tesla electric vehicles in the United States and China has contributed to the company’s success, but even that isn’t enough for Johnson to change his mind. He believes the acceptance of Tesla in China is not as impressive as some analysts, like Dan Ives of Wedbush, make it seem.
“The reality is in the month of July, they sold about 11.4 thousand cars in China. They produced about 12.2 [thousand], so they actually built inventory, and that’s despite a price cuts globally this year, four of which were in China,” Johnson added.
However, Tesla is only manufacturing one vehicle in China: the Model 3. It will soon begin producing the Model Y as well, but construction on that portion of the facility is currently in progress. Giga Shanghai is expected to start building the Model Y in early 2021.
Johnson is willing to keep his price target and believes the stock will go down when data “matches up.”
“The real data doesn’t match up. We think once that matches up, you’re going to have selling, which we think will drive the stock lower,” he said.
Tesla’s stock has risen 385% so far in 2020, and its valuation has skyrocketed due to technology developments and increases in demand.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
Investor's Corner
Tesla crushes Wall Street expectations, beats delivery estimates by over 15 percent
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.
🚨 BREAKING: Tesla delivered 480,126 vehicles in Q2, ANNIHILATING Wall Street expectations of 406,000. Production was reported at 451,758.
Deliveries:
Model 3/Y: 467,762
Other Models: 12,364Production:
Model 3/Y: 442,936
Other Models: 8,822 https://t.co/TTHwQAsKt8 pic.twitter.com/7qI4Zj6FE5— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 2, 2026
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.
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.
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.
Investor's Corner
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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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:
“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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