Elon Musk's 'master plan': Is Tesla an EV maker or AI play?

Yahoo

a day ago

Investors are wrestling with Tesla's (TSLA) uncertain future after the company missed on second quarter earnings and shifts away from being a pure electric vehicle (EV) maker while leaning into artificial intelligence (AI) and robotaxis.
Gradient Investments analyst Lisa Schreiber and Yahoo Finance Senior Reporter Allie Canal join Opening Bid host Brian Sozzi to discuss Tesla's delayed tech rollouts, slower EV sales, and challenges ahead without clear profit timelines.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Opening Bid here.
On the Tesla earnings call, Elon Musk hinted at master plan, his next master plan he's working on. Now, master plan number two, if you go back, they are dropped in 2023, April 5th, the day after my uh my birthday. That's how I remember it. Um lots of talk about the green economy. I would think his next master plan will lean into robots and AI. How do you view Tesla here? Is it still a car maker first? Or is it a, is an AI play that should be put on the same pedestal as anvidia?
Yeah, you just mentioned the the great problem here with AI. When we look at valuation, investors also do not know exactly how to value it. Is it an EV maker? Is it more than that? Um, I think we are in the transition phase. So, it's a very critical phase for Tesla at the moment. The thing is, it's not anymore just an EV play, but it's also not a robo taxi robot company already. So, we we have struggles here, and especially with Tesla, we have to be a little bit careful. There is a lot of um, yeah, broken promises down the road, right? A lot of huge um promises, but but then delayed launches and and and it doesn't really realize all that much. So, I think we have to be a little bit careful here. And for us to being able to be a buyer here, we would need really some food, we would need to see some food on the ground, and we would need to see some realization first.
Ali, um, you know, on the earnings call last night, I was looking for something that would hint to me earnings estimates have bottomed in Tesla for this year and next year. We've been tracking that a lot. You could track this on the Yahoo Finance platform. Just go to the Tesla ticker page, click analysis and you can find these numbers. But they have continued to trend lower really over the past year. I didn't get that from this earnings call. It was unclear to me. Has the auto business bottomed? Uh, is Elon really going to truly go all in on robo taxis? Because if he is, this is going to be a very costly endeavor with an unproven top-line benefit.
Yeah, Tesla seems to be a company that's stuck between what it was, what it is, which is that pure EV play, and really what it wants to be, which is this AI powerhouse leaning in on robots, autonomous driving. But that is definitely far out down the line, and we still have murky timelines there for when we could see these rollouts be more aggressive, and ultimately, when that's going to be a profitable part of the business. The EV side of Tesla's business, that's the bread and butter. That's what makes them money. And we're seeing sales slow in the US, in Europe. There's a heck of a lot of competition on that front. So, I get why investors are frustrated. And now with Trump's one big beautiful bill, that's going to be removing those EV tax credits. So that's going to weigh on demand for Tesla's business. That's also going to impact the energy side of the business because those solar tax credits are going to be removed. And that's something executives also talked about on the call. So there just seems to be a lot of hurdles here for a company that's looking way out into the future. Now, the Tesla bulls, they are still bullish and they are banking on that future for Tesla, on the potential, on the possibility. But I wonder when the patience is going to start dissipating for investors. We've already sort of seen that. But there there just needs to be a little bit more clarity on timelines, on profits, before we really start to see a rebound here in shares.