Tesla shares head for highest close in 13 months as post-earnings rally continues
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.
WATCH: Tesla’s price war is over
Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., during the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025.
Stefani Reynolds | Bloomberg | Getty Images
In the weeks leading up to Nvidia’s third-quarter earnings report, investors debated whether the markets were in an AI bubble, fretting over the massive sums being committed to building data centers and whether they could provide a long-term return on investment.
During Wednesday’s earnings call with analysts, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang began his comments by rejecting that premise.
“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Huang said. “From our vantage point we see something very different.”
In many respects, Huang’s remarks are to be expected. He’s leading the company at the heart of the artificial intelligence boom, and has built its market cap to $4.5 trillion because of soaring demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units.
Huang’s smackdown of bubble talk matters because Nvidia counts every major cloud provider — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle — as a customer. Most of the major AI model developers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Meta, are also big buyers of Nvidia GPUs.
Huang has deep visibility into the market, and on the call he offered a three-pronged argument for why we’re not in a bubble.
First, he said that areas like data processing, ad recommendations, search systems, and engineering, are turning to GPUs because they need the AI. That means older computing infrastructure based around the central processor will transition to new systems running on Nvidia’s chips.
Second, Huang said, AI isn’t just being integrated into current applications, but it will enable entirely new ones.
Finally, according to Huang, “agentic AI,” or applications that can run without significant input from the user, will be able to reason and plan, and will require even more computing power.
In making the case of Nvidia, Huang said it’s the only company that can address the three use cases.
“As you consider infrastructure investments, consider these three fundamental dynamics,” Huang said. “Each will contribute to infrastructure growth in the coming years.”
Reversing the slide
In its earnings release, Nvidia reported revenue and profit that sailed past estimates and issued better-than-expected guidance. Last month, Huang provided a $500 billion forecast for sales of the company’s AI chips over calendar 2025 and 2026.
The company said on Wednesday that its order backlog didn’t even include a few recent deals, like an agreement with Anthropic that was announced this week or the expansion of a deal with Saudi Arabia.
“The number will grow,” CFO Colette Kress said on the call, saying the company was on track to hit the forecast.
Prior to Wednesday’s results, Nvidia shares were down about 8% this month. Other stocks tied to the AI have gotten hit even harder, with CoreWeave plunging 44% in November, Oracle dropping 14% and Palantir falling 17%.
Some of the worry on Wall Street has been tied to the debt that certain companies have used to finance their infrastructure buildouts.
“Our customers’ financing is up to them,” Huang said.
Specific to Nvidia, investors have raised concerns in recent weeks about how much of the company’s sales were going to a small number of hyperscalers.
Last month, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet all lifted their forecasts for capital expenditures due to their AI buildouts, and now collectively expect to spend more than $380 billion this year.
Huang said that even without a new business model, Nvidia’s chips boost hyperscaler revenue, because they power recommendation systems for short videos, books, and ads.
People will soon start appreciating what’s happening underneath the surface of the AI boom, Huang said, versus “the simplistic view of what’s happening to capex and investment.”
WATCH: Nvidia posts Q3 beat
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