Investor's Corner
Tesla’s unfair advantage: Batteries, talent, and more, says Morgan Stanley
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) stock hiked 11.20% in trading on Monday, and Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas explained why the company’s future advantage lies within batteries and talented people wanting to work for Elon Musk.
Jonas appeared on an episode of CNBC’s “Squawk Alley” on Monday to discuss his price target for the electric car company, which he increased to $1,360 from $1,050 last week.
According to Jonas, Tesla has the potential to be “a large, if not dominant” third-party battery supplier for other car companies in the future. Morgan Stanley, with the help of technology colleagues in Asia, determined that the company’s potential battery supply business is worth around $310 a share, which contributed to a majority of the $350 price target increase that occurred last week.
But what lies past the development of battery cells is who will develop them, and that is where Jonas says Musk has the most significant advantage in the race to become a large-scale battery supplier.
“The battery is not mature. This is an arms race. It is an arms race for talent,” Jonas said. “And, amongst all of Elon’s benefits that he has right now, the one that is probably the most valuable and the one that is on display here folks, is that the best people in the world want to work for Elon.”
The best people in the world want to work for Musk, but it isn’t just in the race to become a battery supplier. The world’s most advanced minds are looking for employment in any of Elon’s ventures, Jonas added.
“The best people in batteries, chemistries, software, rockets, you name it, they don’t want to work for some conglomerate in a traditional 1970’s oriented, little bit by bit evolutionary. They want to put their skills to work to just go completely and take it up a notch,” Jonas added. He then indicated that there was value in that, and Morgan Stanley said the additional worth in the price target to coincide with this fact.
However, Jonas’ and Morgan Stanley’s price target for the company is still more than 20% below where TSLA stock was trading at during the Monday session.
“I didn’t have a chance to ask the question in the last [Earnings] Call, but even Elon, back in May, said he thought his stock was overvalued in his opinion,” Jonas said.
“I can only boil it down for my clients and my colleagues to fundamentals and assumptions. Here’s how I think about it: Each one million units of third-party battery supply is worth maybe $120 a share to Tesla. We gave them about two and a half million units by 2030, so that was about $310. If you wanted to get to $2,000, let’s say, just solving for batteries alone, we think you’d have to get closer to ten million units of batteries in addition to the three or four or five or ten million that people were giving them credit for in their own business,” he added.
Jonas believes that if an analyst were to do that, Tesla would be getting 100% or at least a large portion of the battery market share for EVs by 2030, which to him, does not seem realistic. Instead, the price that the company is trading at currently has to do with another unaccounted factor. He believes that it could be autonomy, or something unorthodox, like a relationship with SpaceX, but he sticks with his current $1,360 price target with an “Equal-Weight” rating.
TSLA stock closed at $1,835.64 on Monday. It gained only $.36 during aftermarket trading.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
H/t: @TeslaNY on Twitter
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.
Tesla stock (NASDAQ: TSLA) just got a price target boost from its biggest bear, Gordon Johnson of GLJ Research, who raised his expected trading level to one that is 95 percent lower than its current trading level.
Johnson pushed his Tesla price target from $19.05 to $25.28 on Wednesday, while maintaining the ‘Sell’ rating that has been present on the stock for a long time. GLJ has largely been recognized as the biggest skeptic of Elon Musk’s company, being particularly critical of the automotive side of things.
Tesla has routinely been called out by Johnson for negative delivery growth, what he calls “weakening demand,” and price cuts that have occurred in past years, all pointing to them as desperate measures to sell its cars.
Johnson has also said that Tesla is extremely overvalued and is too reliant on regulatory credits for profitability. Other analysts on the bullish side recognize Tesla as a company that is bigger than just its automotive side.
Many believe it is a leader in autonomous driving, like Dan Ives of Wedbush, who believes Tesla will have a widely successful 2026, especially if it can come through on its targets and schedules for Robotaxi and Cybercab.
Justifying the price target this week, Johnson said that the revised valuation is based on “reality rather than narrative.” Tesla has been noted by other analysts and financial experts as a stock that trades on narrative, something Johnson obviously disagrees with.
Dan Nathan, a notorious skeptic of the stock, turned bullish late last year, recognizing the company’s shares trade on “technicals and sentiment.” He said, “From a trading perspective, it looks very interesting.”
Tesla bear turns bullish for two reasons as stock continues boost
Johnson has remained very consistent with this sentiment regarding Tesla and his beliefs regarding its true valuation, and has never shied away from putting his true thoughts out there.
Tesla shares closed at $431.40 today, about 95 percent above where Johnson’s new price target lies.
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