Analysts still can't agree whether Tesla is a car company or not: Morning Brief

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It’s just under a month until Tesla’s (TSLA) robotaxi event.

Characteristically, CEO Elon Musk has made (or at least endorsed) some big promises. When a fan account recently posted on X, formerly Twitter, “10/10 will be the most significant moment for Tesla since the unveil of the Model 3,” Musk replied, “In my opinion, yes.”

Existentially, though, analysts still can’t agree on what Tesla is.

That debate was captured perfectly in a duo of notes this week.

On Tuesday, D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria announced he was expanding his coverage of Big Tech to include Meta (META) and Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) (he already tracked Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT), and Nvidia (NVDA)), placing them all under the common theme of “compute.”

Close readers might note that the list is a magnificent six of Big Tech — not seven.

“If it looks like a duck (>90% of revenue from cars) and quacks like a duck (>90% of profits from cars) it might just be a duck (a car company),” Luria wrote in his note. He added, “Don't @ me,” no doubt aware of the troll storm that can follow any whisper of Tesla criticism.

Luria elaborated in an interview on Yahoo Finance, noting that while there may be big artificial intelligence investments in the Musk-verse, "the player here isn't Tesla, it's Elon Musk."

That same day, Edison Yu of Deutsche Bank weighed in on Tesla with a very different take: “At the core, we do not see Tesla as an automaker but rather a technology platform attempting to reshape multiple industries, deserving of a unique type of valuation framework,” he wrote.

That framework resulted in a $295 price target from Yu, who named Tesla his top pick among autos.

Musk himself has repeatedly told investors that they shouldn’t buy Tesla shares if they don’t see it as more than an automaker. It looks like a lot of potential investors have taken his advice this year — the stock is down by almost 9%.

With Musk making as many headlines for his support of Donald Trump and political tweets as for what his companies are doing, the robotaxi event may be a welcome catalyst for Tesla shareholders to focus back on what the company does — even if a robotaxi is still a car.

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