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Tesla shares plummet after Elon Musk’s robotaxi event disappoints
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Tesla shares plummet after Elon Musk’s robotaxi event disappoints

Investors hoped Tesla’s highly anticipated robotaxi demonstration would deliver substance and not just style. On Thursday, Elon Musk showed off real vehicles and humanoid robots walking among guests — not just a dancer dressed in a robot bodysuit, as at the company’s “AI Day” three years ago — but many analysts were still unimpressed . During a glitzy event at the Warner Bros. studios. in Los Angeles, Musk made big promises but few details, underscoring the case of Tesla bears seeing a highly inflated stock price.

Instead of adding momentum to the stock’s recent rise, the robotaxi unveiling turned out to be the “sell the news” event that some analysts predicted as shares tumbled more than 7% on Friday morning. The stock is now down about 11% this year, compared to the more than 22% gain of the S&P 500. Tesla has already been removed from the so-called Magnificent Seven – the seven largest technology companies in America by market capitalization – due to the rise of the semiconductor and software giant Broadcom.

Even famous Tesla bulls like Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives said Musk and Tesla didn’t provide enough details about how the company would achieve its autonomous vision.

“That will obviously weigh on stocks this morning as a knee-jerk reaction,” he and his colleagues wrote in a note. “That said, we strongly disagree with the idea that last night was a disappointment, as we would argue the opposite if we saw Cybercab with our own eyes and the vast improvements in Optimus, which we interacted with throughout the evening. ”

Musk has not shied away from the idea that he has staked the company’s future on successfully delivering autonomous vehicles. He and Tesla Bulls agree that robotaxis could propel the company to a $5 trillion valuation, up from about $700 billion today.

Seth Goldstein, an equity strategist at Morningstar, says Tesla believes it can overtake companies like Alphabet-owned Waymo, which is already on the road, because of its vision to deliver a vehicle at a much cheaper price that doesn’t limit is part of a geofenced area. and chairman of the company’s electric vehicle committee, recently shared Fortune.

Musk unveiled 20 vehicles on Thursday and said Tesla’s Cybercab would be available for less than $30,000, compared to about $250,000 for a single Waymo vehicle. Besides noting that the Cybercab would be ready by 2027 — and admitting that he was previously “a little optimistic” about past timelines — Musk did not say where the vehicle would be produced.

The company surprised attendees by also unveiling a “robovan” that can carry up to 20 people, although no production date or price was given for the product.

“The Cybercab demos were conducted on a movie set in a well-controlled environment and closely resembled a slow and short amusement park ride,” Wells Fargo analysts who attended the event wrote in a note Friday morning. “Waymo now runs 100,000 rides per week in major cities, so we expected more from TSLA’s demo.”

Tesla’s autonomous vehicle strategy is based on further development of its fully self-driving software (FSD), which still requires human supervision.

Musk said some Tesla electric vehicles should have “unsupervised FSD” in Texas and California next year. However, many analysts stressed that there had been no short-term updates on the software’s progress or data released to demonstrate improvements.

Wells Fargo analysts acknowledged that the biggest positive was the Optimus robot, several of which were walking around the event serving drinks, although the analysts added that the economics surrounding this product remain unclear.

Any momentum Tesla stock had heading into the event is now gone, and Tesla bears will likely continue to feel vindicated heading into the company’s Oct. 23 earnings call. Shares tumbled after the July earnings call, during which Musk largely neglected to answer questions as profitability deteriorated and instead mused about the company’s future.

For Tesla management, Goldstein explained, that is par for the course.

“They tend to take a long-term view,” he says. “And so if they have a couple of bad quarters, they don’t really care if the stock sells.”

Musk’s charisma and showmanship, along with glamorous product unveilings like Thursday’s event, have helped Tesla build a devoted fan base of shareholders. In the short term at least, their loyalty will continue to be tested.