Ark Invest updated its price target for Tesla last April, saying that Elon Musk's car company will be worth $2,000 per share by 2027. At the time, Tesla's stock was trading at around $160 per share, less than 10% of the value Ark predicted Tesla will see over the next four years.
And though Tesla (TSLA) -) wasn't performing amazingly at the time, having just reported a 24% drop in income for the first quarter of 2023, Ark's bullish take was -- and remains -- centered around a business that still has yet to exist: robo taxis.
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Some investors at the time found Cathie Wood's analysis to be off-base, with some calling her expectations "delusional" and "disingenuous." But Tesla has been on a hot streak throughout the second quarter and is now up more than 120% for the year.
During its second-quarter earnings conference -- in which the EV company reported a 47.2% increase in revenue from the previous year to a record $24.5 billion -- Chief Executive Elon Musk weighed in on the likelihood of his company growing at such an intense rate.
"I have very high confidence in the long-term value of Tesla, I see it, I really see a path to a 10x, maybe call it a 5x increase in the value of the company," Musk said."Maybe a 10x. Where things go along the way, the trials and tribulations and the mood of the markets, one cannot predict."
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A growth of five times the company's current value would see Tesla's stock trading at around $1,300 per share, a market cap of more than $4 trillion. A growth of 10 times its current value would see the company trading at around $2,700 per share with a valuation of close to $9 trillion.
For context, the largest company in the world, Apple, is currently worth just north of $3 trillion. Apple has been around since the 1970s, but didn't go public until 1980, when it debuted on the stock market at $22 per share. The beloved makers of the iPhone had a market cap of around $7 billion in 2001, which rose to just under $300 billion by 2010.
Apple didn't cross the $1 trillion mark until 2019.
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Ark Invest thinks the future robo taxi vertical could be worth up to $10 trillion by 2030. And Musk said Wednesday that Tesla is getting closer than ever to leading this as-yet, nonexistent business, just as Ark has predicted.
"Our future dedicated robo taxi products we think have quasi-infinite demand," Musk said. "The way we're gonna manufacture the robo taxi is also itself a revolution. It'll be the highest units per hour of any vehicle production ever."
