William Blair Keeps Tesla’s ‘Market Perform’ Rating
William Blair analyst Jed Dorsheimer reiterated on September 15, 2025, a ‘Market Perform’ rating on Tesla.
“Our Call
Elon Musk’s Form 4 this morning disclosed a purchase of nearly $1 billion for 2.56 million shares on Friday, September 12.
This partly explains the move in shares on Friday, and is pushing shares another 7% in premarket trading this morning. We see this as a clear signal of confidence from Musk.
The market has looked through our concerns over how margins will react to the elimination of environmental tax credit revenue in the second half of this year.
With Musk’s purchase, combined with the upward momentum for delivery expectations and robotaxi rollout, we are becoming more bullish but retaining our Market Perform rating.
Strong Signal of Confidence in Robotaxi
This purchase is Musk’s first buy since 2020.
To us, this sends a strong signal of confidence in the most important part of Tesla’s future business, robotaxi.
Tesla recently announced that robotaxi is now open to the public and the app has hit top of the charts for downloads.
Musk stated that V14 will be two to three times better than a human driver, and we believe it will be rolled out in the next month to the robotaxi fleet.
Fast Follower Advantage. In the autonomy game, we believe the advantage goes to the fast follower rather than the first mover.
Waymo’s service has been in operation since 2017, and making overhaul changes to the tech stack while in operation is difficult to execute due to the complexities involved.
Tesla swallowed the bitter pill in 2023 and switched its code base out in favor of neural nets and vision-only, taking a big step backwards at the time but beginning again on a platform that has far greater scaling potential.
We’re seeing this play out now; since the launch on June 22, Tesla has expanded its robotaxi coverage area in under three months— something that took Waymo five years.
While critics will push back against Tesla’s approach with a safety driver, it is obvious to us that this is a temporary measure.
If Tesla can achieve the safety milestones with its vision-only approach, it has a significant cost advantage.
Elon’s pay package supports this scale.
Board Support of Musk’s Performance Package
We recently participated in a meeting with Tesla’s board of directors to discuss the details of Musk’s performance package.
The board is confident of its position in the Delaware case and anticipates a verdict by end of year. It does not expect a similar situation to occur under new Texas jurisdiction.
The chair of the board, Robyn Denholm, appeared on CNBC last week to discuss the package as well. Similar to the 2018 package, this is purely based on Tesla performance and aligns Musk with shareholders 100%.
Musk has the board’s full support, and we expect he’ll get more than enough shareholder support for this to pass with flying colors. Valuation and Risks.
Shares trade at an enterprise value of 126x our 2026 EBITDA estimate factoring in the premarket move, a significant premium to technology peers at 20-25x.
Risks include
- competition, particularly from Chinese EV and energy storage players;
- geopolitical risk, with large exposure to customers in China; and
- key-man risk with CEO Elon Musk.”
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