Investor's Corner
Tesla’s $10 ‘bear case’ from Morgan Stanley highlights the noise surrounding TSLA
Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA) looked alarming right before the markets opened on Tuesday amidst news that Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas had lowered the electric car maker’s “bear case outcome” to just $10 per share, a steep drop from his initial worst-case scenario estimate of $97 per share. The analyst’s findings dealt a blow to Tesla stock during pre-market trading, pushing shares down by over 3% at one point.
The Morgan Stanley analyst’s worst-case estimate was driven in part by concerns about Tesla’s business in China, which would likely be adversely affected by the ongoing trade war between the country and the United States. According to Jonas, Tesla could generate about $9 billion in revenues in China between 2020 and 2024, but if Beijing targets the company with reprisal tariffs and restrictions, that figure could be halved, resulting in more than $16 billion of the electric car maker’s market value getting wiped out.
“Our revised case assumes Tesla misses our current Chinese volume forecast by roughly half, to account for the highly volatile trade situation in the region, particularly around areas of technology, which we believe run a high and increasing risk of government/regulatory attention. We believe as Tesla’s share price declines, the likelihood of the company potentially seeking alternatives from strategic/industrial/financial partners rises,” Jonas noted.
The analyst’s radical $10 estimate for Tesla unsurprisingly attracted a lot of attention, and it did not take long before news of Morgan Stanley’s updated views made the rounds online. What was not reported as much was that Adam Jonas kept his $230 price target on TSLA stock, as well as his equal-weight rating for the company under the firm’s best-case scenario. Also left out in a number of reports was Morgan Stanley’s best-case price target of $391, which is actually pretty optimistic considering the recent movements of Tesla stock.
Other personalities in the financial world eventually gave their take on Jonas’ worst-case scenario for Tesla. Jim Cramer, who has traded barbs with Elon Musk in the past, described the $10 estimate as “insane” and a simple gimmick. “Setting a price target of $10 on a $200 stock really is insane. How about $8? How about $12? Ten basically says, ‘I want to get talked about. Let’s talk about me,’” Cramer said, adding that “if he had done $47 would we have talked about him? No, but 10. Ten is right in your face. I question this piece of research.”
Cathie Wood of ARK Invest, who still maintains a positive stance on the company, also questioned the Morgan Stanley analyst’s findings. “Also interesting to note, Jonas cut his worst-case price by more than 90% but left his price target unchanged at $230. So, I guess he is suggesting that the probability of the bear case has dropped significantly, and/ or the probability of the bull case has increased,” Wood wrote on Twitter.
Considering the pervading negativity surrounding Tesla’s narrative today, it is unsurprising to see aspects of Morgan Stanley’s recent note getting misinterpreted. A look at social media platforms such as Twitter, for example, would reveal some Tesla critics stating that the $10 worst-case estimate was Morgan Stanley’s new price target for TSLA stock. This is untrue, but these instances all but highlight how easy it is for misconceptions about the electric car maker could spread.
This pervading negativity is seen in the mainstream coverage of the company. On Monday, Dan Ives from Wedbush Securities cut his price target and penned a scathing note to Tesla, even describing Elon Musk’s initiatives such as Full Self-Driving and the Robotaxi network as “sci-fi projects.” Ives’ statements on Monday garnered widespread attention, significantly more than his comments on Tuesday, when he explained that he does not think Tesla will eventually file for bankruptcy. Ives also noted on Tuesday that Tesla could return to profitability in the future, provided that demand is sustained and costs are cut.
At this point, it appears that the time is right for Tesla to adopt a more assertive PR strategy that is ready to debunk misinformation and clarify misconceptions at a moment’s notice. By doing so, Tesla can lay out its case clearly, providing explanations as necessary and leaving little to speculation. This would require constant vigilance on the part of the electric car maker, but it would help, at least by straightening out the facts of a story. These initiatives, coupled with an aggressive information campaign that dispels misconceptions about the company and its vehicles, could ultimately allow Tesla to change the course of its narrative for the better.
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As of writing, Tesla stock is trading -0.29% at $204.76 per share.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
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.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
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.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
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.”
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.
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.
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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