Investor's Corner
Tesla stock pullback temporary, China demand paves way to $1T market cap, Wedbush says
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) stock has experienced a slight pullback in the last few weeks, tanking to losses that equate to just under 16% since the beginning of 2021. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives believes the pullback is temporary, and that Tesla could still bring a reward to investors who stand by the automaker’s stock through 2021, as demand, especially in China, may pave the way for the elusive $1 trillion market capitalization.
Already owning the title as the World’s Most Valuable Automaker, Tesla’s meteoric rise on Wall Street was fueled by the ability to overcome adversity in a challenging economic climate in 2020 thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, a year that saw the automotive industry decline as a whole didn’t treat Tesla the same way, as the electric car company managed to outperform itself once again, marking 2020 as its best year in company history.
The beginning of 2021 has seen a different tune to Tesla’s performance on Wall Street. Investors have been spoiled with hand-over-fist gains in 2020, but a Q4 2020 Earnings Call that didn’t outline the company’s goals for the 2021 fiscal year left some analysts feeling unsatisfied and unsure about the company’s goals for the year.
While Tesla didn’t give a specific figure, as last year it outlined a goal of 500,000 deliveries, which it came close to at 499,550 for the year, Elon Musk and Co. did outline targets for growth in a percentage factor, indicating that it expects “to achieve 50% average annual growth in vehicle deliveries. In some years we may grow faster, which we expect to be the case in 2021.”
Ives, a Wedbush analyst who has been bullish on Tesla, believes a million vehicles could be delivered by next year, with China being the main supplier of the company’s momentum in the coming years.
Ives wrote in a note to investors (via Financial Review):
“We believe China could see eye-popping demand into 2021 and 2022 across the board with Tesla’s flagship Giga 3 footprint a major competitive advantage, as domestic players such as BYD, Nio, Xpeng, and Li also are also firing on all cylinders and just scratching the surface of the overall TAM in China…If China stays on its current path for Tesla, Musk & Co. could hit one million delivery units globally by 2022. This speaks to our thesis that Tesla will hit a trillion-dollar market cap in 2021 despite this risk-off moment for EV stocks with the bears coming back to life after a long hibernation in their caves over the past year.”
At 1:45 PM EST, Tesla’s market cap sat at $590.06 billion, and shares were trading at $610.02.
The company’s current delivery output projections, which combine the total yearly output of its currently-active plants, would put the company at a forecasted 1,050,000 production rate for 2021. Deliveries would be within a few percentage points of that, as the company does not typically hold inventory.
Credit: Tesla
Outlook for 2021, according to Ives, seems to point toward quickly accelerating demand and expansion in China, where Tesla has been extremely competitive. Only one vehicle has managed to outsell the Tesla Model 3 in China: a GM-produced car called the Wuling HongGuang Mini EV, which doesn’t compete with any of Tesla’s cars in terms of range or performance.
As for the rest of the industry, Wedbush doesn’t believe the surge is anywhere from over. An extremely young and new sector in the grand scheme of things, the EV industry is influencing mass change within legacy automakers, who are being forced to adapt to the changing sector. “Our answer is emphatically that the EV party and transformation is just beginning as this industry is on the cusp of a $US5 trillion ($6.4 trillion) market opportunity over the next decade,” Wedbush said.
Disclosure: Joey Klender is a TSLA Shareholder.
Investor's Corner
Tesla Robotaxi gets a massive upgrade in Nevada
Nevada regulators just approved a massive expansion of Tesla’s robotaxi fleet across the entire county.
Tesla’s robotaxi footprint in Nevada just grew by roughly 500 times in a single regulatory vote.
The Nevada Transportation Authority approved Tesla’s full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit on Thursday, clearing the way for the company to deploy up to 5,000 driverless vehicles across Clark County over the next 12 months. The decision came during a four hour general session meeting that Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt watched live and reported on X, noting the vote replaces the interim order that had limited Tesla to just 10 robotaxis on a narrow stretch of the Las Vegas Strip.
EXCLUSIVE: Tesla has just officially received approval for its full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit in Nevada, clearing the way for Tesla to launch a paid public Robotaxi service in Las Vegas.
This officially allows @Tesla to deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis over the next… pic.twitter.com/DPs5UtUlrE
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 20, 2026
That earlier cap, covered here after it surfaced on August 13, came with restrictions that looked stricter than what Tesla runs in Austin: a 45 mph speed ceiling, no airport pickups, and a geofence confined to the Strip corridor. The new approval extends Tesla’s operating authority to all of Clark County, with room to request an even wider geofence across the state.
Tesla representatives at the meeting said they have no intention of putting 5,000 cars on the road right away. Commercial rides are expected to start within 30 days, pending vehicle inspections, insurance filings, and fare approval, the standard steps every robotaxi operator in Nevada has had to clear.
Tesla’s own Robotaxi account replied to the news with a short line, The golden future is upon us.
The timing lines up with Tesla’s broader robotaxi push this month. The company is preparing to open Cybercab rides to the public in Austin as soon as this month, and it opened a sweepstakes for riders to win a seat at the launch event. Tesla filed its original application for a 5,000 vehicle Nevada fleet back in June, a request regulators trimmed to 10 vehicles when they issued the interim order in July. Thursday’s vote effectively grants the number Tesla asked for from the start.
Zoox, the Amazon owned robotaxi operator, has run in Nevada since 2025 and was capped at 100 vehicles before Thursday’s decision. Tesla’s new ceiling puts it well ahead of that comparison on paper, though the company has said its actual fleet size will depend on how quickly FSD v15 rolls out, the software update executives have called the gateway to scaling unsupervised robotaxi operations nationwide.
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.
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