Tesla's stock reached an all-time high on Wednesday when it opened at $571 per share, hoisting the company over the $100 billion market cap and making it the most valuable U.S. carmaker. Globally it comes in second behind only Toyota.
The market cap is one more milestone in a heady ascent that began in June 2019 and saw the stock's value increase 230 percent over the next seven months.
Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that Tesla reached a settlement with the state of Michigan that will allow the company to sell cars directly to consumers at company-owned stores. Tesla is still facing similar lawsuits in other states that have banned this kind of vertical integration.
Legal wins and product announcements aside, investor confidence is playing perhaps the biggest role in Tesla's climb.
Bullish stock analysts have raised their price targets and predict strong numbers in Tesla's Q4 earnings report, due out on January 29.
"I think they're going to handily beat numbers and get a pretty strong guidance," said Dan Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, which raised its price target for Tesla to $550 per stock over the next 12 months with a bull case scenario of $900 per stock.
Ives said the stock's rapid rise, unusual in automotive industries, has everything to do with the potential of the Chinese market to explode demand in the coming year.
"China could bring 200,000-250,000 units over the next two years," he said. "That's really the key to the bull thesis, and not just from a demand perspective but from a supply as well."
Ives predicts Tesla will produce 150,000 units in China in the coming year alone. So far, the Shanghai facility has produced just under 1,000 customer salable cars, but Tesla said it has a production run rate of 3,000 units per week. Assuming demand rises accordingly, that gets the company pretty close to the level Ives is anticipating.
The widespread embrace of electric vehicles in China and elsewhere has played the biggest role in the stock's surge, Ives said while comparing the EV boom and rapid adoption to that of the iPhone a decade ago.
"You almost have to think about [Tesla] as a technology company," he said.
Tesla, however, remains one of the most shorted stocks on Wall Street, and a number of analysts have advised caution in the short-term as Tesla ramps up production.
The company reported $5.4 billion in automotive revenues in the third quarter of 2019 with a total of 97,000 deliveries of Model S, Model X, and Model 3 vehicles. That number jumped to 112,000 deliveries in the fourth quarter, according to an early report out of Tesla.
Joe Cecela, Dream Exchange CEO, explains how they are aiming to form the first minority-controlled company to operate an exchange in U.S. history. Watch!
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
