Cathie Wood's Ark Invest made waves in April when it claimed that it expects Tesla (TSLA) -) to be trading at $2,000 a share by 2027. At the time, the company's stock was trading at around $160 per share.
Tesla's stock has risen since — though it remains at around 10% of the value Wood expects it to reach — but margin challenges amid consistent price cuts have not led Ark Invest to change its thesis.
Related: Elon Musk on Tesla's stock "10X-ing" as Cathie Wood has predicted
The reason behind this stalwart support of Elon Musk's EV company is simple: Ark does not view Tesla as a traditional auto stock.
“This is not an auto play. This is an autonomous taxi platform play with software-as-a-service like margins,” Wood told Benzinga. "Tesla should trade like a technology stock and not like traditional automakers, something that analysts and Tesla bears can’t grasp."
Though Ark is bullish on Tesla as an AI company, the big vertical it is so optimistic about involves the aforementioned autonomous taxi business, which Ark thinks could lead to up to $10 trillion in revenue by 2030.
Musk said in July that Tesla might be close to starting production on its robotaxis, a product he thinks will have "quasi-infinite demand," though Tesla still has yet to provide true self-driving technology. And the budding robotaxi industry — of which Tesla is currently not involved — has been struggling recently in the few cities in which it is active.
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Musk in July said he sees a pathway to a five or 10 times increase in the company's value, echoing and adding weight to Wood's own projections. Weighing in on Wood's opinion of Tesla as a tech play, rather than an automotive play, Musk dropped a simple line of approval Friday.
"Accurate," he said.
This view of Tesla as a tech giant, rather than a carmaker, is one shared by Wedbush's Dan Ives. Ives, who recently projected that Tesla's supercharger network could bring in up to $20 billion in annual revenue by 2030, told TheStreet that the coming monetization of Tesla's services positions the company for enormous growth.
"Bulls have disruptive technology and that continues to be the big debate around the name," Ives said. "I've always viewed them as a tech play. And I can argue the FSD angle makes them one of the best AI plays when you look down the road three to five years."
