Hyperdrive

The Bursting of the Tesla Stock Bubble

By Esha Dey and Molly Smith
May 24, 2019, 1:00 PM GMT+3 Updated on May 24, 2019, 11:13 PM GMT+3

Shares fell after analysts cited cash flow, demand issues

Musk remains upbeat, saying company will meet delivery targets

In this article For Elon Musk and Tesla Inc., the blows from Wall Street came one after
TSLA another this week -- a relentless barrage that left the stock so beat up that
TESLA INC
188.22 USD
some now wonder if it can ever regain its status as the ultimate 21st century
-1.64 -0.86%
disrupter.
NDX
NASDAQ 100 STOCK
INDX
Morgan Stanley threw the biggest blow, declaring that in a worst-case
7,245.40 USD
+28.54 +0.40% scenario, Tesla’s shares could sink to a shocking $10. A Wedbush analyst said
MS the carmaker is facing a “code red situation” and cast doubt on whether
MORGAN STANLEY
41.83 USD
Tesla can sell enough of its electric cars to make a profit. And Citigroup and
-0.36 -0.85% Robert W. Baird & Co. analysts, among others, slashed their target prices,
C citing concerns about cash flow and consumer demand.
CITIGROUP INC
63.61 USD
-0.10 -0.16%
The stock has fallen almost 10% this week, leaving it down a staggering 43%
Tech Newsletter on the year. Some $23 billion in shareholder value has been wiped out,
sinking the company’s market cap back below that of General Motors and
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our reporters around the
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pushing their yield north of 9%.

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This investor panic could fade, of course, and go down as just more
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evidence of Tesla’s famous volatility. Indeed, the stock rebounded Thursday,
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offers and promotions. briefly approaching the $200 mark again, after an upbeat email that Musk
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agree to the privacy policy. sent to employees countered days of escalating doubt that the company will
hit its vehicle delivery targets. But it plunged again Friday to close at
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$190.63. The stock is the single biggest decliner in the Nasdaq 100 Stock
Index since the start of the year.
 What makes the collapse so stunning is that it comes just five months after
even many of Musk’s critics on Wall Street were beginning to believe he was
poised to put the company on a path toward sustainable profitability. Its
stock soared at year-end as sales, production and profits strengthened.
Tesla Chief Executive
Elon Musk at the unveiling Tesla, it seemed, was almost out of the woods, Musk’s caustic tweets a thing
of the Model Y crossover of the past.
on March 15.

But that optimism has now reversed so dramatically that one bearish
analyst says that Tesla is in danger of ending up a niche player at best. The
concerns about the company -- everything from growing competition to the
consumers’ swing back to big sport utilities -- aren’t necessarily new but
have been stoked by a series of more urgent warnings.

Musk himself added to the gloom and doom last week when he told staff in
a memo that even after a recent $2.7 billion fund raising in markets, the
company risked running out of cash in 10 months without “hardcore” cost
cuts. Then came renewed attention on a fatality in a Tesla operating on
Autopilot -- part of the company’s crucial push into autonomous driving.

“Tesla’s stock for a while was wildly inflated as many investors thought that
the company could not only become a very profitable large automaker, but
will also dominate other fields like solar energy, energy storage and
autonomous mobility,” Barclays analyst Brian Johnson said. But now the
auto part “seems to be headed more towards a niche automaker.’’ Those
other businesses? “Nowhere to be seen,” he said.

The cracks in the Tesla story started showing up early in the year: A
decision to cut prices, Musk’s warning about a “difficult” road ahead and
fourth-quarter profit that missed estimates all fueled concern that demand
was waning for its cars. But the fears finally burst open after the company
reported a massive loss for the first three months of the year, along with a
sharp drop in sales.

Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives called the quarter “one of top debacles” ever
seen in his 20 years of experience. Citron Research founder and prominent
short seller Andrew Left -- who said last year Tesla was smoking the rest of
the automotive industry -- abandoned his long bet on the stock.

Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas, who just a year ago had set a price
target as high as $379 on Tesla, said the share price may now be headed for
as low as $10.
 “Demand is at the heart of the problem,” Jonas wrote in a note, becoming
more blunt in a call the next day. Once a growth story, Tesla is now more of
a “distressed credit and restructuring story,’’ he said. The company is
burning through cash and demand is lacking, he said. One risk is in China,
where Tesla has a big focus at a time of increasing trade tensions and more
local competition.

Tesla stands by its forecast of delivering 360,000 to 400,000 cars in 2019. A

leaked email from Musk to Tesla employees suggested the company has a
chance to hit its targets for the second quarter, and may even exceed the
record 90,700 deliveries achieved in the last three months of 2018. Many
analysts are skeptical. Evercore ISI estimates Tesla will deliver 343,000 cars
in 2019, for example.

Tesla also failed to excite market enthusiasm with its sudden decision last
month to pivot towards becoming a robo-taxi company, running a fleet of
Tesla Faces 'Everest-Lik
self-driven cars. Musk has said Tesla’s autonomous technology has the
potential to make it a half-trillion-dollar company one day.
A Tesla showroom in
Hong Kong. But Barclays’ Johnson ascribes no value to the robo-taxi business. Morgan
Stanley’s Jonas assumes a $45 a share valuation for it, a far cry from August
2015 when he said it could be worth as much as $244.

While historically Tesla has behaved like an emerging growth stock, where 2:23

management could invent its own milestones, that has changed in the last
six months, said Roth Capital Partners analyst Craig Irwin. Investors now
“care more about units, average pricing, gross margins and the expectations
of profits.”

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That said, there are some who still have faith in the company’s
“transformational” engineering capabilities, like Andrew Telfer, joint senior
partner of Baillie Gifford, Tesla’s largest shareholder after Musk. In an
interview with Bloomberg TV on Friday, Telfer noted that for a car
company, “scaling up is difficult, really difficult, and they’re working their
way through that just now.”
While the bulls and bears on Tesla have a history of being extremely
polarized -- price targets on the stock currently range from $54 to $530,
according to Bloomberg data -- many agree that the company’s electric car
technology overall is still far ahead of the competition. Yet, that may not
prove to be enough to support the lofty valuations of the past.
“Electric vehicles are certainly the future of transportation, but I don’t think
Tesla will be the one that profits from it,” Bradford Meikle, a senior analyst
for Williams Trading who this week cut his Tesla price target to just $70,
said on Bloomberg Television. “The value of the brand is going down every
day.”
(Updates with share closing price in paragraph four, adds Baillie Gifford
comments in paragraph seventeen.)
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