there are plenty of happy fish
Tesla Pivots to Robots as Investors Question Sales and Soaring Valuation
Priciest Stock
Eager to transform the carmaker into an artificial intelligence powerhouse, Musk earlier this month declared on his social-media platform X that about “80% of Tesla’s value will be Optimus,” referring to the company’s robot initiative. But that’s for the future. In the here and now, Tesla’s 2025 earnings are expected to sink nearly 30%, while its robotaxi business is still years from turning a profit and faces stiff competition from Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo, among others.
Tesla’s performance has suffered an industrywide EV slowdown that hit in 2023 and worsened in 2024. But at the same time, its stock has gotten increasingly expensive. The shares are priced at around 155 times the company’s earnings over the next 12 months, roughly where they were during the tech frenzy in 2021, the year Tesla’s market value first crossed the trillion-dollar threshold driven by optimism around EVs becoming mainstream.
That valuation makes Tesla by far the priciest stock in the Magnificent Seven, which also includes tech giants Alphabet, Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., Microsoft Inc. and Nvidia Corp. The next closest company in the group is AI chip giant Nvidia at 31 times forward earnings. Among all US-listed stocks worth at least $100 billion, only Palantir Technologies Inc. trades at a higher multiple.
“Tesla is priced like a growth company but has seen little meaningful revenue growth in the past two years,” said Dmitry Shlyapnikov, an analyst at Horizon Investments who works with portfolio managers. “Elon Musk needs to provide a different growth story for investors. And Optimus is the answer.”
