Tesla Stock Inches Toward $500 as Wall Street Argues About What Tesla Even Is

TSLA hit $498.83 intraday Monday. Four hundred ninety eight dollars and eighty three cents. Were knocking on $500 and the weird part is nobody agrees why.

Is Tesla an overpriced car company? An AI platform? A robotaxi bet? A humanoid robot play? Depends which analyst you ask.

The Numbers Right Now

Tesla closed Monday at $488.73 after briefly touching that $498.83 high. In premarket Tuesday it was hovering around $487. The stock has ripped from around $401 in late November to these near-record levels in about a month.

Meanwhile delivery forecasts are getting cut. Wall Street Pit reports Deutsche Bank expects Q4 deliveries around 405,000 units – down 14% year over year. UBS cut their forecast to 415,000. Canaccord trimmed theirs to 427,000.

Full year 2025 deliveries might come in around 1.62 million units. Thats a 9% decline from 2024.

So the car business is shrinking and the stock is mooning. Make it make sense.

The Robotaxi Narrative

Heres where it gets interesting. Elon Musk recently confirmed Tesla is testing robotaxis in Austin with no occupants in the car. No safety driver. No monitor in the passenger seat. Just the car doing its thing on public roads.

Carbon Credits reports Morgan Stanley thinks Tesla could have 1 million robotaxis on the road by 2035. Thats the bull case anyway.

The stock jumped almost 5% on the driverless testing news alone. Investors are basically trading Tesla like an autonomy/AI option now rather than an automaker.

The Analyst Split

This is where it gets wild. Look at these price targets:

– UBS: $247 (Sell rating)
– Canaccord: $551 (Buy rating)
– Deutsche Bank: $500 (Buy rating)
– Wedbush: $600

Thats a $353 spread between the low and high targets. On the same stock. At the same time.

The bears see a car company trading at 177x 2026 earnings with declining sales. The bulls see an AI platform thats about to print money from robotaxis and humanoid robots.

What Happens January 2nd

Q4 delivery numbers drop. Thats when we find out if the market cares about actual car sales anymore or keeps trading the dream.

If deliveries miss badly and the stock shrugs it off? That tells you everything about where investor heads are at. If it tanks? Maybe the robotaxi stuff needs to actually materialize first.

The AI hype train is pulling Tesla along for the ride. Whether thats justified depends entirely on how much you believe in Musk’s timelines.

Because remember – the robotaxi was supposed to be in “multitude of major markets” by end of this year. Its mid-December and we have 31 test vehicles in Austin.