Investor's Corner
Tesla (TSLA) gets new PTs after Battery Day breakthroughs
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) received a variety of new price targets from investment firms following the conclusion of the company’s Battery Day event last night. Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and Baird analysts all raised their outlook for the electric automaker’s stock following the successful Battery Day presentation, which revealed Tesla’s plans for a new battery structure, more efficient manufacturing, and its roadmap for more affordable vehicles. Morgan Stanley also commended Tesla’s event but did not increase its price target.
Tesla stock suffered a small pullback in value during and following the event, which can likely be attributed to the fact that the revealings at Battery Day will not be available immediately. CEO Elon Musk stated a day prior to the event that some of the developments will take a few years to come to fruition.
However, some firms are advising that investors take advantage of the pullback in stock value. Tesla’s announcements last night proved that the company is head and shoulders above the rest of the EV sector in terms of manufacturing, performance, and battery technology.
Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs analyst Mark Delaney raised his price target on TSLA stock from $295 to $400 and maintained a “Neutral” rating, according to TheFly. The increased outlook from Delaney is based on Tesla’s importance in the future widespread adoption of electric cars, as well as potential margin upside from software. Delaney wrote in a note to Goldman investors that Tesla’s goals to produce its own battery cells, along with a possible 100 GWh capacity by 2022, and 3 TWh in 2030, shows the company’s plan is set and it has a roadmap to achieve it.
Deutsche Bank
Deutsche Bank’s Emmanuel Rosner upgraded his rating on Tesla stock from “Hold” to “Buy” and raised his price target from $400 to $500. Rosner stated that although Wall Street’s reaction to the Tesla event was not positive, it is an opportunity for investors to take advantage of a discount on the share price. “With the stock price indicated down post-market traders ‘sell the news,’ we recommend longer-term investors to take advantage of weakness to buy Tesla as the best way to invest in vehicle electrification,” Rosner wrote to investors, according to CNBC.
Tesla debuts new 4680 battery cell: 500% more energy, 6X power, range increase
Baird
Ben Kallo of Baird increased his price target to $360 from $332 and reiterated his “Neutral” rating on the stock. The minimal increase in Kallo’s price target is because he believes the company’s current valuation already reflects significant disruption potential. “With the Battery Day in the rearview, we think there is a lack of upcoming catalysts and are cautious about demand given the recessionary environment,” Kallo writes to investors. He believes the company’s future holders should take advantage of pullbacks in stock price, MarketWatch reported.
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Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas stated that Tesla Battery Day “largely lived up to the hype, by didn’t clearly exceed it.” However, Jonas indicated that the plan to reduce cell cost and increase total investment cost was “substantial for this industry.” The analyst added that “applying Tesla’s 69% targeted savings to this figure (implying $174mm/10 GWh) to the 3 TWh target implies over $50bn of battery capacity investment needed to Tesla alone and $350bn for the industry to get to 20 TWh.
Tesla’s Battery Day Largely Lives Up to Hype | Morgan Stanley $TSLA pic.twitter.com/h4LeCMNRLW
— David Tayar (@davidtayar5) September 23, 2020
At the time of writing, TSLA stock was trading at $398.42.
Disclaimer: Joey Klender is a TSLA Shareholder.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
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None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.
Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.
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Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.
The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”
Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”
Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”
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Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.
Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.
SpaceX’s massive investment in AI will make it a big winner, Argus Research said after the company’s successful earnings call last week.
The firm also upgraded shares to a Buy from Hold and set a $160 price target.
SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) is currently recovering from its heavy AI infrastructure investments, as it spent nearly $16 billion in Q2 alone. The company did this primarily by monetizing high-demand GPU compute capacity at a much faster pace than traditional data center economics would suggest.
Company CFO Bret Johnsen said that SpaceX would be able to pay back anything on new deployments within a year.
There are plenty of ways the company can do this:
Leasing excess compute capacity through contracts
SpaceX has already built Colossus and Colossus II, largely for its own model training. However, much of that capacity is already rented out to third parties. It already has major deals with Anthropic, Google, and Reflection AI. These partnerships are adding billions per month to SpaceX’s spreadsheet.
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High utilization driven by industry-wide scarcity
The demand for advanced AI training and inference capacity continues to exceed what is available for use. SpaceX can fill new racks quickly after they come online, so the capital deployed converts into revenue with minimal idle time.
Additionally, management and outside observers have described the new compute capital as behaving more like a cost-of-goods-sold than traditional multi-year capex, especially because of this rapid monetization pattern.
Capacity has already scaled from ~0.4 GW a year to 1.4 GW annually by the end of Q2. There are targets of more than 2 GW by year-end.
High incremental margins on the rental business once capacity is online
GPU cloud providers often operate at strong gross margins. SpaceX can monetize capacity that was already partially built or can be added efficiently. This means that incremental EBITDA margins on the rental revenue are usually high. This accelerates cash recovery relative to the gross capital outlay.
Parallel monetization of its own AI software and applications
Beyond pure infrastructure rental, SpaceX also generates revenue from Grok through subscriptions and usage, from X through ads, data, and other related services, enterprise APIs, and the planned integration of the Cursor coding tools acquisition.
These application layers ride on the same compute infrastructure and provide additional high-margin streams that could offset build-out costs. AI-segment revenue overall rose sharply to about $2.6 billion in Q2, according to Motley Fool. This was driven primarily by the infrastructure contracts, but the software side is also partially responsible.
Efficient, large-scale deployment and vertical integration advantages
SpaceX has emphasized the rapid construction of power and cooling infrastructure and favorable cost-per-megawatt economics relative to industry benchmarks in some disclosures.
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Combined with its ability to scale capacity aggressively and the fact that many contracts start generating revenue within months of capacity coming online, the effective payback compresses dramatically compared with more conventional multi-year data-center projects.
SpaceX’s dominant near-term recovery path will turn the AI clusters into a hyperscale-style compute rental business for other leading AI companies while still using a portion for internal models.
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