Elon Musk attends a discussion session during the Cannes Lions International Festival Of Creativity in Cannes, France, June 19, 2024.
Marc Piasecki | Getty Images
A day after its sharpest rally since 2013, Tesla’s stock on Friday headed for its highest close in more than a year as investors and analysts continued to applaud the electric vehicle company’s third-quarter results.
Tesla shares rose 2.8% on Friday morning to $267.79, putting the stock on pace for its highest finish since September 2023. With the two days of gains, the stock erased its loss for the year and is now up about 8% in 2024, still trailing the Nasdaq’s 24% increase.
Analysts at Piper Sandler were the latest to bolster their price target following Wednesday’s earnings report. The firm, which already had a buy rating on the stock, said it was increasing its 12-month stock price prediction to $315 from $310 “to reflect higher deliveries and higher margins.”
Tesla shares on Thursday soared 22%, their second-best performance since the company’s IPO in 2010. That came after Tesla reported revenue of $25.18 billion, which just missed analysts’ expectations of $25.37 billion, but was up 8% compared with a year earlier. Tesla reported earnings per share of 72 cents adjusted, topping the average analyst estimate of 58 cents.
Tesla’s profit margins were boosted by $739 million in revenue for environmental regulatory credits, which JPMorgan Chase analysts noted in a report were a “potentially unsustainable driver” of earnings and cash flow. Results were also boosted by $326 million in revenue from FSD, the company’s Full Self-Driving Supervised system.
CEO Elon Musk said on the earnings call that his “best guess” is that vehicle growth will reach 20% to 30% next year, citing lower-cost vehicles and the “advent of autonomy.” Analysts surveyed by FactSet were expecting delivery growth of about 15% for 2025.
When it comes to autonomy, however, Musk has consistently missed his own deadlines for getting products to market. Bernstein analysts wrote in a note after earnings that Musk has a “long history of being overly optimistic about FSD,” adding that research shows “Tesla continues to lag well behind competitors” on robotaxis.
Musk also said on the call that Tesla plans to start production of its recently unveiled Cybercab, a robotaxi with butterfly doors and no steering wheel or pedals, by the end of 2026. He said Tesla would conduct driverless ride-hailing in California and Texas next year in its existing cars, which are not currently safe to use without a human driver ready to steer or brake at any time.
With the two-day rally, Musk has now increased his paper wealth by roughly $30 billion, bringing his total net worth to about $274 billion, according to Forbes. That puts him $60 billion ahead of the world’s second-richest person, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who is a former Tesla board member and a good friend of Musk’s.
Still, Tesla’s stock remains about 35% below its all-time high reached in 2021. The company had a brutal first quarter of 2024, with year-over-year deliveries falling and consumers flocking to EVs from a host of competitors.
The competitive risks remain.
In China, companies such as BYD and Geely, along with a new generation of automakers such as Li Auto and Nio, have been ramping up sales. In the U.S., legacy automakers Ford and General Motors are starting to sell more electric vehicles, despite walking back prior electrification commitments.
People wait in line for t-shirts at a pop-up kiosk for the online brokerage Robinhood along Wall Street after the company went public with an IPO earlier in the day on July 29, 2021 in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images
It was a bad day for tech stocks, and a brutal one for fintech.
As the Nasdaq suffered its steepest decline since 2022, some of the biggest losers were companies that sit at the intersection of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
Stock trading app Robinhood tumbled 20%, bitcoin holder Strategy fell 17% and crypto exchange Coinbase lost 18%. Much of the slide in those three stocks was tied to the drop in bitcoin, which fell almost 5%, continuing its downward trajectory. The price of the leading cryptocurrency is now down 19% in the past month, falling after a big-post election pop in late 2024.
Beyond the crypto trade, online lenders and payments companies also fell more than the broader market. Affirm, which popularized buy now, pay later loans, dropped 11%, as did SoFi, which offers personal loans and mortgages. Shopify, which provides payment technology to online retailers, fell more than 7%.
JPMorgan Chase fintech analysts on Monday highlighted declining consumer confidence as a potential challenge for companies that rely on consumer spending for growth. In late February, the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index slipped to 98.3 for the month, down nearly 7%, the largest monthly drop since August 2021. Walmart recently reported a shift away from discretionary purchases, underscoring the potential trouble.
“Our universe has modestly outperformed the S&P 500 since the election, but sentiment has soured of late on declining consumer confidence and signs of slowing discretionary spend,” the JPMorgan analysts wrote.
The fintech selloff follows a strong rally in the fourth quarter, driven by Fed rate cut expectations and hopes for a more favorable regulatory environment under the Trump administration.
Larry Ellison, chairman and co-founder of Oracle Corp., speaks during the Oracle OpenWorld 2017 conference in San Francisco on Oct. 1, 2017.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Oracle issued quarterly results on Monday that trailed analysts’ estimates, but the company offered bullish comments on its cloud infrastructure segment.
Here is how Oracle did compared to LSEG consensus:
Earnings per share: $1.47 adjusted vs. $1.49 expected
Revenue: $14.13 billion vs. $14.39 billion expected
Revenue increased 6% from $13.3 billion in the same period last year. Net income rose 22% to $2.94 billion, or $1.02 a share, from $2.4 billion, or 85 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue in Oracle’s cloud services business jumped 10% from a year earlier to $11.01 billion, accounting for 78% of total sales.
The company’s cloud infrastructure segment, which helps businesses move workloads out of their own data centers, has been booming due to demand for computing power that can support artificial intelligence projects. Oracle said revenue in its cloud infrastructure unit increased 49% from a year earlier to $2.7 billion.
“We are on schedule to double our data center capacity this calendar year,” Oracle Chair Larry Ellison said in a release. “Customer demand is at record levels.”
In January, President Donald Trump announced plans to invest billions of dollars in AI infrastructure in the U.S. in collaboration with Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank. The first initiative of the joint venture, called Stargate, will be to construct data centers in Texas — an effort that is already underway, Ellison said during the announcement at the White House.
Oracle’s cloud and on-premises licenses business contributed $1.1 billion in revenue during the quarter, down 10% year over year.
Oracle also said it is increasing its quarterly dividend to 50 cents a share from 40 cents.
As of Monday’s close, the stock is down almost 11% year to date.
Oracle will hold its quarterly call with investors and will share its outlook at 5 p.m. ET.
Asana CEO and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz
PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA | AFP | Getty Images
Dustin Moskovitz, the CEO of Asana and one of the original founders of Facebook, is retiring from the software company he started in 2008.
Asana announced Moskovitz’s retirement on Monday as part of the company’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings report, and its board has retained an executive search firm to help choose a new CEO. Moskovitz notified its board “of his intention to transition to the role of Chair when a new CEO begins,” the company said Monday.
“As I reflect on my journey since co-founding Asana nearly 17 years ago, I’m filled with immense gratitude,” Moskovitz said in a statement. “Creating and leading Asana has been more than just building a company — it’s been a profound privilege to work alongside some of the most talented minds in the industry.”
Asana said fourth-quarter sales rose 10% year-over-year to $188.3 million, which was in-line with analyst estimates.
The company said its fourth-quarter adjusted earnings per share was breakeven, ahead of analyst estimates of a loss of one cent per share.
Asana said it expects fiscal first-quarter revenue of $184.5 million to $186.5 million, trailing analyst expectations of $191 million.
Asana’s stock price was down more than 25% in after-hours trading Monday.