Amid softer EV demand and worsening profit margins this year, Tesla is setting its sights on AI as Elon Musk is betting more on self-driving and artificial intelligence.
The AI hype has investors hooked in the past three months since Tesla’s underwhelming first-quarter deliveries and earnings numbers published in April. The company’s value has risen by $386 billion since then, per Bloomberg’s estimates, as Musk has been touting a Tesla future of AI, autonomous driving, and humanoid robots to use in factories to cut costs and sell for consumer use.
Until such a future arrives, Tesla is stuck with multiplying signals of soft EV demand globally and eroding profit margins as it cuts prices amid heated competition.
Tesla’s core EV business is struggling, and it looks like Musk is shifting its focus to autonomy and AI to lure investors into one of the most volatile stocks on the market ever. The AI hype seems to have overridden plans for an affordable EV of $25,000.
Musk claimed last month at Tesla’s annual shareholders’ meeting that the Optimus robots could boost the company’s market value to $25 trillion at an unspecified point in the future.
That’s more than half of the entire value of the S&P 500 index of about $45.5 trillion, per FactSet data from last month cited by CNBC.
“Tesla will have genuinely useful humanoid robots in low production for Tesla internal use next year and, hopefully, high production for other companies in 2026,” Musk said earlier this week.
On Tuesday, Tesla’s CEO said “The value of Tesla, overwhelmingly, is autonomy.”
“If you believe Tesla will solve autonomy you should buy Tesla stock, and all other questions are . . . noise,” Musk added, as carried by the Financial Times.
Also on Tuesday, Musk asked his X followers in a poll if Tesla should invest $5 billion into his startup xAI, “assuming the valuation is set by several credible outside investors”?
The executive noted that the poll was “just to test the waters” and that such an investment would need board approval and a shareholder vote.
For now, Tesla is stuck with its core business of manufacturing electric vehicles, and its market value as of Tuesday's close was about $772 billion.
The shares are likely to dip this week after Tesla reported after market close on Tuesday another set of poor quarterly financial results. In after-hours trade, Tesla’s stock plunged by 7.77% to $246 apiece.
Tesla reported a second-quarter net income plunging by 45% year-over-year to $1.5 billion despite aggressive cost cuts, including via layoffs of 10% of personnel. The earnings missed Wall Street estimates, and so did the automotive profit margin of 14.6%, which was the lowest in five years.
“Overall, our focus remains on company-wide cost reduction, including reducing COGS per vehicle, growing our traditional hardware business and accelerating development of our AI-enabled products and services,” Tesla said in the earnings statement.
“Though timing of Robotaxi deployment depends on technological advancement and regulatory approval, we are working vigorously on this opportunity given the outsized potential value,” the company added.
However, analysts want to see a reversal of the negative earnings trend in the EV automotive business before becoming bullish on the future AI business of Tesla.
Earlier this year, Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas, a long-time bull on Tesla, slashed his earnings estimates on the EV carmaker for this year and wrote in a note that “We believe Tesla has significant attributes to be valued as an AI beneficiary, but the company must see a stabilization in the negative earnings revisions within the auto business first.”
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“We do not believe Tesla will get credit as an AI company as long as core auto earnings are being revised down,” Jonas said.
Following the Q2 earnings release on Tuesday, AJ Bell’s investment analyst Dan Coatsworth told Reuters,
“There is a lot of talk about robotaxis, humanoid robots and autonomous driving, which provides an exciting narrative for investors but doesn’t get over the fact that these are tomorrow’s potential riches, not today’s.”
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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