GLJ Research Reiterates Sell on Tesla, $24.86 PT
GLJ Research analyst Gordon Johnson reiterated a Sell rating and $24.86 price target on Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).
“TSLA is down –24.55% year-to-date against an S&P 500 that is up 13.14% — 37.7 points of relative return surrendered in seven and a half months, with the one-year return roughly flat.
That is not macro. That is a private repricing of a public promise.
The second quarter was ugly — a 1.4% operating margin, negative $1.1bn of free cash flow, and energy gross margin nearly halved to 20.4% — but at ~340x trailing earnings, nobody owns this stock for the earnings.
They own it for the robotaxi. The robotaxi now produces data.
Crowdsourced telemetry shows FSD v14 on HW4 disengaging every 40 miles; the tracked fleet is 865 vehicles with 18 active in the past week (link); and NHTSA filings show 22 collisions in 12 months — with safety monitors aboard.
The dream asset finally has a tape, and the tape is terrible.
The Cybercab “launch” in Austin, targeted internally for this month, is in our view a promotional event for a product that does not yet exist: a two-seat vehicle with no steering wheel whose entire value is software that currently disengages every 40 miles, and ~2K miles critically (vs. ~500K for the avg. human critical disengagement — yes, you heard that right).
We would treat the event as a negative catalyst, not a milestone. Management’s own arithmetic values Optimus at ~$20tn and the autonomy-plus-everything-else stub at ~$5tn.
Management is also, per press reports, 80–90% likely to fold the company into SpaceX within a year, somewhere near $1.3–1.6tn.
Both cannot be true. We know which one we would underwrite.
We now see FSD as the main reason TSLA’s stock will bleed lower this year, and see the shares edging materially lower over the course of 2H26 toward the sub-$200/shr level — generous, in our opinion, for reasons laid out in Section 7.”
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