Investor's Corner
Wall Street enthusiasm about Tesla’s future prospects continues to climb, with comparison to Ford striking
Tesla’s market cap of $43 billion is 88% of Ford’s $49 billion. What’s happening here?
Is it that Tesla’s technology and innovation advantage has finally clicked with investors? Or it is that Ford is too late to the electric vehicle (EV) game to be a viable player?
Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) is on the brink of introducing self-driving vehicles to the mass public. This is in addition to a decade of R&D around EVs. Tesla has made decisions that haven’t translated immediately from architect’s design to production (think Model X gull wings), but years of manufacturing have also allowed Tesla to demonstrate a proven track record of EV performance, reliability, and safety. Oh, yeah. And then there’s customer satisfaction rates, which are at about as high a level as they can be. Consumer Reports’ 2016 Annual Owner Satisfaction Survey ranked Tesla in the top spot, with 91% of owners saying they would buy a Tesla again, given the chance.
Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F), on the other hand, is largely dependent on its legacy business of gasoline-powered, human-driven vehicles. Its 2016 production rate exceeded 6.6 million cars, while Tesla’s reached only about 83,000 last year. Tesla’s wildest production dreams in two years is unlikely to go much over 500,000 units.
Many investors argue that Tesla stock is overvalued, and, with any entrepreneurial business, early successes can be fleeting. Nonetheless, Tesla’s stock price is consistent today with levels from August 2014 and June 2015 with market cap level considered “resilient.” Indeed, as 2017 began, Tesla stocks had accrued a number of positive analyst reports and had continued to rise since the 2016 presidential election.
From 2015 – 2017, Ford’s stock price fell 23% to $12.50 during a period in which the S&P 500 rose 11%.
In what is an attempt to imprint a veneer of expertise onto an acknowledged production gap, Ford recently announced it’s investing $1 billion over the next five years in Argo AI, a startup run by Carnegie Mellon robotics engineers who can fill in Ford’s artificial intelligence gap. “With Argo AI’s agility and Ford’s scale, we’re combining the benefits of a technology startup with the experience and discipline we have at Ford,” says Ford CEO Mark Fields. While Ford now has an entry in the race to build self-driving cars, has the endeavor come too late? The field is quite crowded, with numerous various partnerships, pilot programs, and incubators now taking shape among tech companies, computer mapping companies, and automakers.
And Tesla continues to lead the pack. Although Ford has declared it will build autonomous cars for ride sharing at significant levels, with about 30 self-driving Fusion Hybrid sedans on the roads in California, Arizona and Michigan, it may not be enough to catch Tesla. With the Tesla Model X cited as 2016’s “most significant vehicle”, the chase may be too long and too exhausting for Ford. And stock futures are reflecting this struggle.
Electric vehicle maker Lucid Group has denied rumors of an imminent bankruptcy after a report from this morning sent the stock on a dramatic drop on Wall Street, seeing losses of more than 40 percent during trading hours.
Lucid’s Director of Communications, Nick Twork, responded to the report from Eletric-Vehicles.com, which stated the company’s restructuring advisor, AlixPartners, was asked to review two decisions: taking Lucid shares private or filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The report also claims AlixPartners told the Lucid board to “concentrate on Gravity production while improving its quality, and to temporarily hold back the Lucid Air, the sedan that has defined the company since its launch.”
Twork said:
$LCID The rumors are completely false. The company has sufficient liquidity to carry its operations well into next year, as recently published in its last quarterly filings, and it has not formed any special Board committee to explore the scenarios reported today. Our focus is…
— Nick Twork (@ntwork) July 14, 2026
Shares rebounded after the response to the report, halving its losses as the trading day neared 3 p.m. Eastern.
Lucid has struggled to get its sales off the ground and into more respectable numbers, but the company is in its early years, when things are hard to begin with. It is also backed by several notable investors, including the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), which has nearly limitless money and likely would not ditch an investment of this size so soon.
Lucid shares were down just 14 percent at the time of publication, a far cry from the 55 percent its losses topped out at during the day.
Tesla received a price target upgrade just on the heels of what was a crazy successful quarter for its automotive business, as the company reported a delivery beat of over 15 percent for Q2.
Jefferies analysts are upping Tesla’s price target (NASDAQ: TSLA) to $400 from $375, while maintaining their “Hold” rating on shares, and the strong automotive deliveries from Q2 is a big reason. However, there are some other catalysts that Jefferies believes position Tesla for a strong position in the second half of the year.
Strong Deliveries
Tesla reported 480,000 deliveries for Q2, while Wall Street was between 395,000 and 405,000, as an overall consensus. It was an incredibly strong quarter from a delivery perspective, and Tesla sold well more than it produced during the three months.
Tesla crushes Wall Street expectations, beats delivery estimates by over 15 percent
While vehicle deliveries are not necessarily looked at in the light that they used to be, Tesla still maintains a lot of advantages for keeping deliveries strong. With the loss of the $7,500 EV Tax Credit last year, Tesla still maintains a strong demand case for its EVs.
Robotaxi Performance
Tesla has been operating Robotaxi for over a year now, as it launched in Austin in mid-2025. That program has expanded to Houston and Dallas, the San Francisco Bay Area, and, most recently, Miami, Florida, the suite’s first appearance in the Sunshine State.
While the Robotaxi suite is still in its early phases and Tesla is working through things like fleet size and wait times, the company has been able to undercut the pricing of its competitors and has a great safety record.
Merger Speculation with Tesla and SpaceX
This is perhaps the biggest topic that many are speaking about with Tesla and SpaceX, and it is the one thing that seems to be on the mind of every investor.
Jefferies warns that growing talk of a Tesla-SpaceX merger could cause Tesla stock to trade more like a SpaceX proxy, which may disconnect it from underlying automotive fundamentals. SpaceX has a lot going for it, especially its compute deals that have been widely publicized as of late.
Profitability in New Projects Could Take Some Time
Tesla has a few long-term ventures in the pipeline, most notably the Optimus project and Robotaxi, which is launched but will take several years to expand to a meaningful level that resonates with everyday people.
This is something that investors need to be careful of. Tesla’s projects could take some time to round out, so Jefferies advises that these may carry initial losses, rather than immediate profit. Seasoned Tesla investors have echoed something like this for a long time; they knew going in it would not be an open-and-shut strategy. It was going to take time.
These new projects are no different.
Investor's Corner
NASA taps SpaceX to launch the telescope that could unlock new worlds
NASA’s Roman Space Telescope heads to orbit this August aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy with massive scientific ambitions.
SpaceX is set to play a central role in one of NASA’s most anticipated science missions in years. The company’s Falcon Heavy rocket, currently the most powerful operational launch vehicle in the world, will carry the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into orbit on August 30 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Roman is now in final preparations inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, where on June 26 technicians used a crane to lift the observatory into a specialized stand for fueling and pre-launch testing.
Roman is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy, whose career helped shape how the agency approaches space science.
NASA chose SpaceX Falcon Heavy because of Roman’s needs to reach a specific orbit far from Earth, well beyond where a standard Falcon 9 can deliver it. The Falcon Heavy, which first flew in 2018, has since become NASA’s go-to option for missions that need serious muscle without the cost and complexity of older launch systems.
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Roman will carry a field of view at least 100 times wider than the Hubble Space Telescope, meaning it can photograph enormous swaths of the universe in a single shot rather than the narrow slices Hubble captures. That difference in scale is significant. While Hubble reshaped our understanding of the cosmos over 30 years, Roman is built to work faster and wider, surveying hundreds of millions of galaxies at once.
One of Roman’s most compelling capabilities is its potential to discover and photograph planets orbiting stars outside our solar system, and with enough precision to directly image planets that would otherwise be lost. That means scientists could study the atmosphere and surface characteristics of distant worlds rather than simply confirming they exist. Combined with Roman’s sweeping field of view, the telescope could detect thousands of exoplanets, and some of those planets may be in habitable zones where liquid water could exist. No telescope currently in operation has this level of power and capability. That capability alone could change what we know about other worlds, and perhaps finally answer the question: are we the only intelligent lifeforms in existence?
What Roman actually finds once it reaches orbit is an open question, and that is exactly what makes this launch worth watching.
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