Morgan Stanley Retains ‘Overweight’ Rating on Tesla
Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas reaffirmed on July 8, 2025, an ‘Overweight’ rating and $410 price target on Tesla.
“Party Crasher, Robo-Fest, Delivery Tweak
Just wanted to share a few pithy thoughts as we are well into another volatile period for TSLA shares.
We also updated our TSLA financial model – please reach out to your Morgan Stanley salesperson if you want to dig into it.
Party Crasher
Tesla shares are down 7 to 8% as of this writing on the back of CEO Elon Musk’s announcement that he intends to form a new political party following the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill
As stated in our June 10th report, we see Mr. Musk’s recent ‘campaign’ as part of a planned strategy to achieve a specific goal with his approach designed to bring maximum public attention to a range of issues.
While the situation remains fluid, we believe investors should be prepared for further devotion of resources (financial, time/attention) in the direction of Mr. Musk’s political priorities which may add further near-term pressure to TSLA shares.
Robo-Fest
As Tesla continues to bring more attention to the market opportunity and technological development of humanoid robots, we would expect many other automotive companies (including legacy US auto companies) devoting resources to humanoid robot development and deployment as both enablers and adopters. Tesla has 125,665 employees worldwide (year-end 2024).
On our calculations, a 10% substitution to humanoid at approximately ($200k NPV/humanoid) could be worth approximately $2.5bn.
General Motors has approximately 162k employees (year-end 2024).
A 10% substitution to humanoid would be worth potentially $3.2bn to GM.
Delivery Tweak
2Q deliveries (384k) were relatively in line with MSe (383k) but ahead of buy side expectations (350k–360k) with inventory rising by 6 days supply (MS est).
While deliveries beat a low buy side bar, they were still down ~14% y/y.
We expect deliveries to remain subdued in 2H25 (-13% y/y), highlighting the continued strategic importance of robotaxi rollout and Optimus advancements – we expect an AI Day slated for the fall as Tesla pushes into recruiting applied AI and robotics talent.
Storage deployments came in at 9.6 GWh (~flat y/y) vs. MSe of 14 GWh and consensus expectations of 11.8 GWh. 2Q25 earnings will be released Wednesday, July 23.”
This research note is reproduced verbatim from the issuing firm. Price Target never edits, paraphrases or alters analysts’ words — we only republish them in one place.
