Tesla stock had a surprising Wednesday, boosted by hopes for robots.
AI-trained humanoid robots are still a ways off, though, but Wall Street has started to quantify what that business could be worth.
Tesla stock was up 1.7% at $454.12 in morning trading Thursday, while S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.1% and 0.2%, respectively.
Shares gained 4.1% on Wednesday, helped by a research note from Barclays analyst Dan Levy. He wrote that the White House was considering a potential 2026 executive order related to humanoid robots.
“Robotics [are] increasingly seen as [a] major point of competition with China,” said Levy. “Companies [are] looking for fed funding/tax incentives for help on automation, supply chain, deployment…Increased government involvement on bots could spur excitement on Optimus bull case.” Optimus is Tesla’s humanoid robot. Tesla CEO Elon Musk hopes to be selling Optimus to outside customers as soon as 2026.
But Optimus isn’t for sale yet. There is no firm price, cost, or demand data for the investor to examine. That makes valuing the robot opportunity difficult. Wall Street has some guesses, though.
“We…infer economics based on Musk’s comments regarding a $20,000 per unit cost and an assumed 50% gross margin,” wrote Baird analyst Ben Kallo when he upgraded Tesla stock to Buy from Hold in September.
He didn’t go as far as projecting robot sales, but noted that Tesla has “a lot of iron in the fire,” expecting the company to hit on some of its AI moonshots. Kallo’s price target for Tesla shares is $548.
RBC analyst Tom Narayan rates Tesla stock Buy and has a $500 price target for shares, which values Tesla at north of $1.5 trillion. He projects some $400 billion in robot sales in 2050, valuing that at 10 times sales. Discounting that back works out to some $640 billion today, which means robots account for more than one-third of his Tesla valuation.
Deutsche Bank analyst Edison Yu doesn’t look out to 2050. He projects 1.25 million robots sold in 2035 for about $25,000 each. That’s $31 billion in revenue. He puts a 30 times multiple on that revenue, calling that worth about $111 per share today after discounting that value back. Yu rates Tesla shares Buy and has a $470 price target for the stock.
It’s hard to project the path of robot sales when no one sells truly useful humanoid robots yet. Another thing investors can remember is that Musk’s recently adopted trillion-dollar pay package has a robot goal.
Tesla needs to sell one million robots, cumulatively, by 2035. If things turn out like the most bullish analysts think, hitting that number will be easy.
