The news around Tesla being added to the S&P 500 is resonating through the stock world, and today, Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas lifted Tesla to overweight and raised his one-year price target to $540 a share.
Covering a couple of Elon Musk tweets, I recently wrote an article titled “Tesla = Approximately A Dozen Startups.” The company is involved in several different hardcore tech efforts as well as broader business like insurance and seat production.
Could Tesla buy out Uber, and begin to solve some of Uber’s structural problems by supplying Tesla taxis to the Uber drivers?
In Tesla’s Q2 2020 earnings call, among many other things, Elon Musk gave updates on Tesla Insurance. Tesla Insurance was formulated as an answer to the high cost of insurance for electric vehicles in some places, and inadequate accounting for Tesla vehicles’ superior safety.
Recently, Tasha Keeney of ARK Invest explained the potential she saw in Tesla launching its own ride-hailing network later this year — assuming that it would use human drivers. Keeney sees many benefits for the potential ride-hailing network, including:
With 500,000 Teslas generating data, no other auto manufacturer can offer the constant improvements that Tesla does, says beleaguered exec.
Tesla tech guru Green says a subscription option for Full Self Driving is already included in the latest firmware updates. Tesla has released no information about how that might work.
Published in 2016, Elon Musk’s “Master Plan, Part Deux” proposed the idea for the Tesla Network, essentially an automated version of Uber that would be operating in a world after both technical autonomy is achieved and government regulations allow for the driverless operation of vehicles.
There is a long-standing argument about whether Tesla is a car company or a tech company. This argument is typically made in the context of how Wall Street should value the company. If Tesla is just a new kind of carmaker, it should be valued at something significantly less than its annual revenue — maybe 25% to 50%, like Ford and GM. Alternatively, if Tesla is a tech company, then it could be valued significantly higher. Google, for example, is trading at about 6 times its revenues today, Facebook at 8, Microsoft at 9, and Salesforce at 10 times. Tesla trades at around 3 times its revenues with some profits, while Uber and Lyft trade around 4 times revenues and have never been profitable.
It seems that now is a good time to look at the various types of people who might genuinely buy a Cybertruck and for what reasons.
