Stock price when the opinion was issued
Very volatile. The story is shifting a bit from rapid EV growth to managing its scale. Q2 saw delivery fall 5% YOY, but still beat reduced expectations. Price cuts help, but continue to pressure profitability. Limited near-term upside. Value is 2/10. Compressed margins, rising Chinese competition. Political drama as well.
He looks at performance in 1-, 6- and 12-month time frames. The 1- and 6 months were negative, but over 12 months the stock is up 55%. Actually, he insists it was positive over the past month. (The host insists it is down the past month, but it depends on precisely which days and times of the day are noted for the calculations.)
For 2026, the big thing is going to be the Optimus robot. Company estimates it will sell 20-30k of these $20k robots. They're already being used in factories. Also things going on with Grok, the large language model; needs a partner, and he feels it will be AAPL.
EVs are important, but you have to look to the future with this one. May be dead money for the next quarter, but will absolutely bounce back with Optimus.
Sales are falling and it is not making much money. No new car models in 5 years although it has some energy storage and services components. There is excitement over its Robo taxis and humanoids but there is a lot of competition all over the world in this. How do you justify a market cap of $1 trillion. If buying, he would consider it a precarious one.
There's no reason why this stock can't go higher, but worries about it in another risk-off environment, which he thinks will happen in coming months. It's traded in $200-300 for a while with $225 as the next level. But there are a ton of cross-currents it faces--lowering prices, decent demand in US, but potential issues in China (suppose Chin's economy contracts). Shares are still in a downtrend, but will revisit it when that trend changes. He's been wrong about Elon Musk before. $