Apple just delivered its strongest June quarter ever, and one investor sees a clear path to $400 that gets easier to defend with every earnings report. Here is what the numbers reveal that Wall Street might still be underpricing.
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I keep hitting the buy button on Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL | AAPL Price Prediction) because the math on a re-rating toward $400 keeps getting easier to defend, and every quarter Tim Cook hands me another reason to add. Shares closed at $319.97 on September 4, 2026, up 33.94% over the past year, and I am still adding.
Why I Keep Coming Back to the Same Ticker My thesis is simple. Apple runs a dual-engine business where a $54 billion hardware quarter now travels with a services annuity that keeps setting records, and management is retiring the share count fast enough to lift per-share earnings even in a flat quarter. That combination is what I keep paying for.
The Q3 FY26 report backs it up. Revenue landed at $109.42B, up 16.36% YoY, EPS came in at $2.02 vs $1.89 consensus, and that was the 9th straight EPS beat. iPhone revenue was $54.25B against $44.58B a year prior, and Services printed $30.74B. Cook called it “our strongest June quarter ever”, and this time the superlative fit.
Three Receipts That Keep Me Adding First, the Services engine. A 75.6% Services gross margin on $30.74B of quarterly revenue is a software business hiding inside a hardware wrapper, and paid subscriptions surpassed 1.5 billion. That is recurring income that compounds.
Second, the capital return program is doing the heavy lifting on per-share math. The board authorized a new $100 billion buyback and a 4% dividend increase in Q2 FY26. Apple has already repurchased $62.094B in the first nine months of FY26, on top of $90.711B in FY25 buybacks. The quarterly dividend sits at $0.27.
Third, the installed base of 2.5 billion+ active devices is the moat. Return on equity of 171.42% and return on invested capital of 53.35% tell you what that base does to profitability.
Path to $400 Written in the Estimates Analysts now model $9.5329 in FY27 EPS across 39 analysts. Our internal five-year base case models a final price of $508.47, with a bull case of $518.38 and a bear case ending at $358.68. That is the asymmetry I want in a core retirement holding.
Risk I Will Not Wave Away Q3 gross margin got a one-time lift from tariff refunds worth roughly two percentage points and 11 cents of EPS. Strip that out and next year’s comparisons get harder. Memory pricing is what Cook flagged as “a 100-year flood on the memory pricing with exponential increases in memory prices”. Valuation is rich too, with a P/FCF of 47 and a yield of only 0.33%.
My thesis holds. Apple guided September-quarter revenue growth of 9% to 11% even with a 2.5 percentage point FX headwind, and iPhone and Mac demand is running so hot that Cook called the supply crunch “a demand forecast issue”. That is the problem I want a company I own to have.
Why the Buy Button Stays Active Services keep compounding, the buyback keeps shrinking the float, the installed base keeps feeding both. When a business earns $29.79B in a quarter and hands back $33 billion to shareholders, patience is the only edge I need. I plan to keep accumulating until $400 stops looking like a floor.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Apple is expected to unveil its first foldable iPhone and new iPhone 18 Pro models Wednesday, but history suggests Apple stock could have a muted reaction.
Longtime Apple executive Phil Schiller reportedly stepped away from running the App Store partly because he wanted no involvement with a push by the tech giant’s new leadership to squeeze more money from the lucrative platform.
Schiller, 66, a veteran of both the Steve Jobs and Tim Cook eras, remained in charge of the App Store and Apple’s splashy product-launch events after stepping down as the company’s marketing chief and becoming an Apple Fellow in 2020.
But new Apple CEO John Ternus and services boss Eddy Cue are looking for ways to wring greater profits and more repeat revenue from the App Store, Bloomberg reported over the weekend.
Longtime Apple executive Phil Schiller reportedly stepped away from running the App Store partly because he wanted no involvement with efforts to squeeze more revenue from the platform. SXSW Conference & Festivals via Getty Images Schiller, by contrast, believed that pushing the App Store harder for profits would only inflame tensions with developers and governments, according to Bloomberg.
The disagreement never erupted into an internal clash, but Schiller reportedly shunned the strategy.
The Bloomberg report sheds new light on Schiller’s decision to relinquish oversight of the App Store, a business estimated to generate more than $30 billion a year that has faced mounting pressure from regulators and developers.
Schiller’s latest concerns echoed objections he privately raised over Apple’s efforts to collect commissions on outside purchases during its long-running legal battle with “Fortnite” maker Epic Games.
New Apple CEO John Ternus (pictured) and services chief Eddy Cue want to find ways to boost profits and recurring revenue from the App Store, according to Bloomberg. AFP via Getty Images In 2023, he opposed Apple’s plan to slap a 27% commission on purchases made on developers’ websites after users followed links from their apps, according to court records.
Schiller said internally that he had “many issues with the commission concept” and made clear he was “not on team commission/fee,” according to the records.
Apple’s chief financial officer, Luca Maestri, and other finance executives favored charging the commission, while Schiller opposed it and later testified that collecting fees from developers could damage Apple’s relationship with them.
Former Apple CEO Tim Cook sided with finance executives over Schiller in a 2023 dispute over charging commissions on purchases made outside the App Store, according to court records. AP Photo/Annie Mulligan CEO Tim Cook ultimately sided with Maestri’s camp. The decision later came back to haunt Apple.
US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled in April of last year that Apple had willfully violated an earlier injunction stemming from the Epic case. In her blistering order, the judge singled out Schiller as having pushed Apple to comply with the injunction.
“Cook chose poorly,” Rogers wrote of the CEO’s decision to side with the finance team over Schiller.
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Rogers held Apple in civil contempt, ordered it to stop collecting commissions on purchases made through external links and required the tech giant to cover Epic’s legal fees stemming from the contempt fight.
A federal appeals court upheld the contempt finding in December 2025 but narrowed Rogers’ punishment, ruling that Apple could potentially charge developers a fee tied to legitimate costs and intellectual property used in facilitating outside purchases.
The episode marked a striking shift for an executive who had spent years publicly defending Apple’s tight control over the App Store.
“Fortnite” maker Epic Games challenged Apple’s App Store rules in a legal battle that eventually led a federal judge to hold Apple in civil contempt. REUTERS Schiller publicly argued in 2020 that the marketplace was designed around “one set of rules for everybody,” and defended Apple’s commissions by pointing to the company’s investments in app distribution, developer tools, security, privacy and payments.
But he had questioned the size of Apple’s cut as far back as 2011.
In an internal email disclosed in the Epic litigation, Schiller floated whether Apple should “ratchet down from 70/30 to 75/25 or even 80/20,” in terms of the split of profits between developers and Apple, if the App Store surpassed $1 billion in annual profit and could maintain that level.
After Schiller formally took charge of the App Store in 2015, Apple began introducing lower commission rates for some developers.
In 2016, the company cut its take on subscription revenue from 30% to 15% after customers remained subscribed for more than a year. Apple later introduced a program charging qualifying small developers a 15% commission.
Schiller nevertheless remained a tough enforcer of the App Store’s rules. The Post has sought comment from Apple.
Apple has added sensor technology company Sonera to its list of acquisitions. The deal actually happened in May, per a notice on the European Commission website flagged in a report Tuesday (Sept.
Apple is expected to introduce a new line of foldable iPhones at their upcoming launch event, which is also expected to be the beginning of a bigger product overhaul for the company. CNBC's Mackenzie Sigalos joins 'The Exchange' to discuss what to look for in Apple's launch event.
Apple is gearing up for one of its biggest product launches in years, with the company expected to unveil its first foldable iPhone, a device that has been a decade in the making and which could cost as much as $2,199. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman explains how it marks the biggest design change to the iPhone in nearly twenty years.
Key Takeaways
Apple is expected to unveil new iPhones and other devices at the tech giant’s launch event Wednesday.John Ternus is set to host the annual event for the first time as CEO, after taking over for Tim Cook earlier this month.
Apple and its new CEO face a big test this week.
The consumer tech giant is set to unveil its latest products at its annual launch event tomorrow, with John Ternus hosting for the first time as CEO after taking over for Tim Cook earlier this month. The event, themed “surprise and shine,” is scheduled to start at 1 p.m. ET Wednesday. (You can stream it live here.)
Apple’s (AAPL) first foldable iPhone is widely expected to be part of the new lineup, along with premium models of the iPhone 18. Analysts at Morgan Stanley said they’ll be looking for new Apple watches and AirPods as well. A base model of the iPhone 18 might not be released until next spring, they told clients in a recent note.1
Morgan Stanley said Apple could also test demand in the face of “what are likely to be the broadest, and most significant, like-for-like iPhone price hikes in company history.”
Why This Matters to Investors
Wednesday’s event could represent the first major test for Apple under new CEO John Ternus, who took over the top job from Tim Cook at the start of the month.
Whether and how much Apple might raise prices for its iPhone lineup could be the biggest unknown heading into the event, according to analysts at JPMorgan, after Apple lifted prices across several products earlier this year. The analysts called it “the variable most likely to drive the reaction in shares.”2
Apple’s product launches typically tend to be “sell the news” events, as details about the iPhone maker’s plans are often reported ahead of time. The shares fell 1.5% the day after last year’s reveal of the iPhone 17 and thinnest-ever iPhone Air.
Wall Street is somewhat divided on Apple’s stock ahead of Wednesday’s event, with the seven analysts tracked by Visible Alpha split between five “buy,” one neutral, and two “sell” ratings. Their mean price target of $324 would suggest less than 3% upside from Tuesday’s close.
The stock, which dropped about 1% to $316 Tuesday, has gained about 16% since the start of the year, though it’s pulled back from its July record in the wake of a disappointing forecast.
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Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said that the foldable phone expected to be announced by Apple this week has been 'a long time coming' for the company after Tim Cook took inspiration from similar phones he saw on a 2020 trip to Asia. Gurman said that the stakes for Apple's new product releases are high because every issue a new product has could be detrimental to the brand and its reputation.
Equity markets have historically delivered lower returns in September than in other months, a phenomenon known as the September effect. Will the same thing happen this year? It's hard to say, but it's also not particularly important for investors focused on the long game. There are plenty of stocks worth buying that could beat the broader market over the long run, regardless of what happens this month. Here's one great example: Apple (AAPL -1.17%). The tech giant has a rock-solid business, excellent prospects, and a major potential catalyst coming up (very) soon.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
The start of a new era On Sept. 1, Tim Cook, the longtime CEO of Apple, stepped down from his position and became executive chairman of the company's board of directors. Apple's new CEO is John Ternus, the former vice president of hardware engineering. Since Tim Cook led Apple through a period in which it crushed broader equity indexes, many investors were not thrilled about his decision to step down as CEO.
However, John Ternus could start his tenure as CEO with a bang and help investors regain some confidence about the company’s outlook. On Sept. 9, the company will unveil a new lineup of products, probably including the newest iPhone. This event is always highly anticipated, but it is even more so this year, and not just because of the recent CEO change. Apple has reportedly been working on a foldable iPhone for some time and might finally reveal it to the world. A foldable iPhone could meaningfully move the needle for Apple.
Foldable smartphones launched by other brands have proved popular. Yet, the category still accounts for just 2% of the smartphone market, according to some estimates. There is plenty of room to grow, and if Apple launches a high-quality foldable phone, it could strengthen its ecosystem, enable it to retain more customers, and attract new ones.
The long-term view Apple's foldable iPhone may well disappoint investors and analysts, leading to a meaningful dip in the company's share price following its September event. Of course, the opposite could also happen. But it's important not to be too concerned with the stock's short-term movements. Whatever happens on Sept. 9, Apple will almost certainly still be an excellent stock to hold onto for a while. Here are three reasons why.
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First, the company's financial results have remained strong in recent years despite significant headwinds, including tariffs. In the third quarter of its fiscal year 2026, ended June 27, Apple's revenue climbed 16% year over year to $109.4 billion. Revenue growth has rebounded meaningfully in recent quarters, providing evidence that the iPhone can still drive strong top-line increases.
AAPL Revenue (Quarterly YoY Growth) data by YCharts
The company's earnings per share came in at $2.02, up 29% compared to the year-ago period. Apple's shares fell following its latest update, largely due to concerns about supply constraints. Still, the tech leader has performed fairly well in recent quarters, especially considering the broader economic environment. That speaks to the resilience of its underlying business. Second, Apple has a massive user ecosystem. It boasts an installed base of more than 2.5 billion devices, providing significant monetization opportunities.
Apple is already squeezing plenty of money out of its ecosystem with the many subscriptions it offers. But there is room for improvement, and as the company's high-margin services segment continues to grow, expect it to lift company-wide margins. Third, Apple generates more than enough cash to pour into R&D. The company's trailing-12-month free cash flow is $136.68 billion, up 38.4% year over year.
That grants Apple the flexibility to pursue opportunities in potentially lucrative areas, including artificial intelligence, while still rewarding shareholders with share buybacks and dividend increases. All of these factors make Apple an attractive stock to buy, regardless of how it performs this month.
Apple's newest CEO walked into the top job with a $55 million equity target and eight days to prepare before stepping onto the keynote stage to pitch the most expensive iPhone the company has ever attempted to sell.
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Apple’s board built new chief executive John Ternus a pay structure that only compounds if consumers absorb the boldest iPhone pricing test in a decade. On Wednesday, September 9, eight days into the job, he steps onto the Cupertino keynote stage to sell it.
Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL | AAPL Price Prediction) disclosed the package in a Form 8-K/A filed with the SEC. Per Fortune, Ternus received a $3 million salary, a $2.5 million prorated restricted-stock grant for the balance of fiscal 2026, and a fiscal 2027 annual equity award with a target value of $55 million. Three-quarters of the annual award vests on Apple’s total shareholder return relative to the S&P 500; the rest vests 12.5% every six months over four years. Tim Cook, staying on as executive chair, saw his salary cut from $3 million to $2 million and received a $45 million target equity award.
Selling a $2,400 Foldable on Day Eight The keynote is expected to unveil the foldable iPhone Ultra starting near $2,400, with higher-storage versions potentially exceeding $3,000. Supply is thin: production is limited to a few hundred units daily, with shipments potentially delayed until October or early November. Morgan Stanley models 6.5 million units generating roughly $14 billion in December-quarter revenue. Pro models get the A20 Pro chip and are expected to run $200 to $500 higher than iPhone 17 counterparts, the most aggressive iPhone pricing cycle in nearly a decade.
Ternus inherits a company already stretching pricing. On the fiscal Q3 2026 call, Cook framed recent hikes as forced:
“On the pricing front, we reluctantly raised prices, I would say. We did it because we’re in what I would characterize as a 100-year flood on the memory pricing with exponential increases in memory prices.”
CFO Kevan Parekh said memory alone drove the sequential margin move, adding that “more than 100% of that can be explained by the memory cost change that Tim outlined.”
Saturday’s Preorder Window Is the Verdict CNBC’s MacKenzie Sigalos framed the handoff on Fast Money: “Tim Cook may be giving up the CEO title, but he’s not really leaving Apple. As Executive chairman… Cook is expected to stay heavily involved… serving as Apple’s diplomat in chief.” Ternus, she added, “is a hardware engineer who spent his career building Apple products” and now inherits “what could be the company’s biggest hardware cycle in more than a decade.”
The fundamentals give Ternus cushion. Fiscal Q3 revenue reached $109.42 billion, up 16.36% YoY, with EPS of $2.02 extending a nine-quarter beat streak. Shares are up 32.9% over one year and 16.3% year-to-date at $316.22. At a P/E of 42 and a $4.61 trillion market cap, execution is priced in. Preorders open Saturday. That window is the first falsifiable read on whether a $2,400 iPhone, and a $55 million equity target, will be funded by consumers.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
U.S. stock futures are pointing to a mixed open early Wednesday, with tech and benchmark futures edging higher even as Brent crude surges toward $100 per barrel amid escalating U.S.-Iran military exchanges and ahead of Apple Inc.'s (NASDAQ:AAPL) annual product launch event.
Meta Platforms is undergoing a major transformation, shifting from asset-light to asset-heavy with aggressive AI infrastructure CapEx. Despite investor skepticism over AI investment payback and free cash flow declines, META trades at a 19.4x forward P/E, an 11.96% discount to its 5-year average. AI enhances META's ability to identify latent commercial intent, increasing user engagement and ad conversion across its 3.6 billion user base.
Meta's ad engine is accelerating at a historic pace while the stock sits near a level that has historically signaled a cyclical floor, but the $130 billion capex bet hanging over the company changes every calculation an investor needs to…
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At $616.77, Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META | META Price Prediction) is a Buy, and the reason has less to do with the size of the capex bill than with the price the market is charging to underwrite it. After a 17.35% one-year drawdown, investors are being handed the largest advertising franchise on the internet at a trailing multiple that historically marked a cyclical trough even though the company is in hyperscaler build mode.
Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads, plus the Reality Labs hardware unit that ships Meta Quest and Ray-Ban Meta glasses. The Family of Apps reached 3.60 billion daily active people in Q2 2026, and advertising still generated $59.36 billion of the quarter’s $60.80 billion in revenue.
What has brought the stock here is a straight collision between two facts. The ad engine is accelerating, with 28% revenue growth in Q2. At the same time, full-year 2026 capital expenditures have been guided to $130 billion to $145 billion, and free cash flow collapsed to $784 million in the quarter. The market has decided to price the spend before the returns.
Why the Ad Engine Alone Justifies the Multiple The bull case starts with a business that keeps accelerating. Ad impressions rose 14% in Q2 with price per ad up 12%, and Advantage Plus reached a $75 billion annual revenue run rate. AI-driven ranking changes drove an 8.3% increase in ad clicks on Facebook and a 15.7% uplift in conversions. The capex is already monetizing inside the core product.
Valuation is the second leg. Meta trades at a trailing P/E of 23 and a forward P/E of 18, with a PEG of 0.808. Gross margin sits at 82.0% and ROE at 30.24%. Analysts model 2027 revenue at roughly $305 billion.
Why the Capex Bill Could Break the Model The bear case is structural. Q2 operating margin compressed to 31% from 43% a year ago, total costs rose 55%, and long-term debt was raised to $83.66 billion to fund infrastructure. Annual capex has climbed from $37.256 billion in 2024 to $69.691 billion in 2025, and the 2026 range doubles that again (all of that spend has to be powered, cooled, and networked by somebody, which is the whole point of our free report on seven AI infrastructure suppliers that aren’t chipmakers: here).
ROI is the real question. Unlike Microsoft or Amazon, which monetize AI directly through enterprise cloud subscriptions (Azure and AWS), Meta is spending enterprise-cloud levels of capex on open-source Llama models and consumer features that produce no direct subscription revenue. Q2 EPS of $6.18 missed the $7.2214 estimate by 14.42%, ending a six-consecutive-quarter beat streak. Reality Labs added a $4.03 billion quarterly operating loss.
Why Patience Has a Real Case Too The hold argument is that the picture will not resolve for 12 to 24 months. Investors do not yet know whether the enterprise API, business agents, and compute-rental offerings Zuckerberg described will generate the returns needed to justify the depreciation stack now being built. Susan Li said Meta expects to remain “demand constrained” in the foreseeable future, which is bullish for utilization but silent on margin.
Two binary risks also argue for waiting. Q2 absorbed $2.4 billion in legal charges, and management flagged youth-related U.S. trials that may result in material losses. Q3 revenue guidance of $61 billion to $64 billion and the depreciation ramp into 2027 give an investor several clean check-in points before committing capital.
What the Numbers Actually Say About the Setup Meta trades at $616.77 against a consensus analyst target of $754.77, an implied upside of roughly 22%, though targets are one data point rather than a promise. The stock is down 6.4% year to date and 17.35% over one year, while the S&P 500 via SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) has returned 12.94% YTD and 18.65% over one year. That is roughly 35 percentage points of underperformance in a year.
Of the 62 analysts covering the stock, the breakdown is:
Strong Buy: 8 Buy: 47 Hold: 7 Sell: 0 Strong Sell: 0 No sell ratings against a stock trading below both its 50-day and 200-day moving averages is a specific signal.
Why $616 Is the Buy Print At $616.77, the setup favors accumulation.
The path to price appreciation runs through 2027 estimates. Consensus 2027 revenue of $305 billion and EPS of $33.95 imply that today’s price is roughly 18 times next-year earnings on a business still growing revenue in the high 20s. If capex plateaus while ad monetization keeps compounding at the pace shown by Generative Recommender and Advantage Plus, the operating margin snapback in 2027 does the work without needing a re-rating.
The catalysts that matter most are near. Q3 revenue of $61 billion to $64 billion, the Connect event on September 23, 2026, and the first quarter of clean commentary on Meta 1 subscription tiers and the business agent auction will all reprice the ROI question. Entry at $616 sits close to the 50-day moving average of $595.49 and well off the 52-week high of $788.22, which is where the risk/reward tightens.
The thesis is invalidated if 2027 capex guidance lands materially above 2026, if ad pricing decelerates below high single digits, or if a youth-litigation verdict lands in the billions. Watch quarterly free cash flow, price-per-ad growth, and any language around the 2027 depreciation curve. A stall in any of those flips the call.
The reason to own Meta at $616 is that the ad engine is already paying for the AI buildout while the stock is being priced as if it is not.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
DAEJEON, South Korea--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Panmnesia, a fabless semiconductor company, and Meta, a global hyperscaler, have jointly proposed a next-generation artificial intelligence datacenter architecture in which an entire datacenter operates like a single chip. The work appears as an invited Review in Nature Reviews Electrical Engineering (NREE), a Nature Portfolio journal. The unit of AI execution is moving from one chip to the whole datacenter As AI models grow into the trillions of parameter.
Meta is quietly assembling one of the largest AI compute empires on the planet, and the funding source hiding in plain sight changes everything about how you should value this stock.
I keep hitting the buy button on Meta, and I will say so plainly. The pitch, once you strip out the noise about Reels dances and glasses fashion shows, is straightforward: this company is quietly turning itself into one of the largest owners of AI compute on the planet, and it is paying for the buildout with cash thrown off by an ad machine that reaches 3.60 billion daily active people. A captive audience feeding a captive supercomputer is what keeps pulling me back.
Why the Ad Engine Is the Real Story Retirement money likes durability, and the core business earns it. In Q2 2026, Meta (NASDAQ:META | META Price Prediction) posted advertising revenue of $59.36 billion, up 27% year over year, with ad impressions up 14% and average price per ad up 12%. Volume and price both moved, which is the mark of a scarce advertising surface. Full-year 2025 operating cash flow reached $115.80 billion. That is the checkbook funding the AI plan.
Compute As a Second Product Line Meta’s 2026 capex guidance sits at $130 to $145 billion, up from $72.22 billion in 2025. Compute has become a second product line for the company. Mark Zuckerberg told analysts on the Q2 call that Meta is currently “demand constrained” and that industry capacity will stay tight “for the foreseeable future.” The company also announced a venture with BlackRock for a one-gigawatt data center in El Paso, Texas. Its business agents already reach more than 1 million businesses each week on WhatsApp and Messenger.
Balance Sheet That Can Actually Fund the Bet Meta ended Q2 with $90.3 billion in cash and marketable securities against $83.7 billion in debt. Return on equity runs at 30.2%, operating margin at 41.4%, and gross margin at 82.0%. Interest coverage sits at 71.5x. This is a balance sheet built to carry the buildout without shredding shareholders.
Why Not Alphabet or Amazon Instead The two names a long-term investor reaches for first are Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN). I own some of both. I still keep buying Meta. Amazon trades at a higher P/E multiple with a slimmer operating margin, so every dollar of capex travels through a much thinner profit funnel than Meta’s 41.4%. Alphabet is cheaper on a P/E basis, but its 2026 capex plan is aimed largely at defending Google Cloud, which chases the same enterprise dollars Meta’s business agents are now targeting. Meta is spending less absolute capital, at higher margins, into a captive user base neither peer can replicate.
Risk I Own Up To Q2 2026 free cash flow fell to $784 million from $8.55 billion a year earlier, EPS missed by 14.42%, and Meta absorbed $2.40 billion in legal charges tied to youth-related regulatory matters. More trials are scheduled. What keeps me steady is that operating cash flow still climbed 24.65% to $31.86 billion in the same quarter. Meta chose to redirect that cash into physical AI capacity rather than let it sit.
Why the Buy Button Stays Active Meta trades at a P/E of roughly 22 while building one of the most valuable physical asset bases of the next decade: gigawatts of AI compute funded by the largest ad audience on Earth. All of that buildout has to be powered, cooled, and networked by someone, and we pulled together seven suppliers doing exactly that in a free report here. The stock is down 17.35% over the past year and still up 379.54% over the past ten. I keep buying because every quarter this thesis gets more concrete and the market keeps handing me shares at a discount to what Meta is actually building.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
West Virginia's attorney general just called Meta's $17 billion child safety settlement a smart business move, then pointed directly at Apple as the next target. What he says Apple's iCloud is hiding could upend the privacy brand Tim Cook spent…
On the morning John Ternus took over as Apple CEO, the most consequential headline about the company had nothing to do with the iPhone cycle or Siri AI. It came from a CNBC Squawk Box interview on September 1, 2026, where West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey called Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META | META Price Prediction)’ recent $17 billion child-safety settlement “a very smart business decision,” naming Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) as the next platform in the crosshairs. His warning to the remaining defendants was blunt: the last company to settle gets hit hardest.
That message landed on a market that is not listening. Apple is up 16.3% year to date and roughly 33% over the past year, trading around $316.29 with a $4.6 trillion market cap. Meta shares, by contrast, are down 18.4% over the past year after absorbing a legal charge that snapped a six-quarter earnings streak.
Meta Wrote the Template. It Was Expensive. Meta disclosed the damage in its Q2 2026 report on July 29, 2026: revenue of $60.80 billion, up 28% year over year, wrecked at the bottom line by $2.40 billion in legal charges tied to youth-related litigation. Diluted EPS came in at $6.18 versus $7.22 consensus, a 14.42% miss. Meta lifted the low end of full-year expense guidance to $165 to $169 billion specifically to absorb the charge.
The money is only half of the tale. According to McCuskey, the injunctive relief in the Meta deal imposes daily time limits, blocks platform use during school hours and overnight, and forces 15-minute breaks after one continuous hour of use. Roughly $5 billion of the $17 billion is contingent on YouTube and TikTok adopting similar restrictions, giving the state coalition, in McCuskey’s phrase, “all the ammunition in the world” to bring the rest of the industry to the table. CEO Mark Zuckerberg made his case in an open letter to rivals.
Apple’s Cloud Is the Alleged Weak Spot The specific claim McCuskey aimed at Apple is narrower than Meta’s algorithmic-harm case and, if the states prevail, harder to defend. He alleged that iCloud is the only major cloud platform that does not permit FBI and law enforcement searches for child sexual abuse material, citing roughly 200 reports from Apple’s cloud versus 600 million found within Google’s. The gap is the argument.
Apple has not disclosed a reserve. On the company’s July 30, 2026 earnings call, former CEO Tim Cook pitched the WWDC26 rollout of “Ask to Browse” and “Time Allowances” as tools to help parents “encourage kids to develop healthy digital habits;” filings continue to flag “effects of unfavorable legal proceedings and complex regulations” in generic terms. There is no line item that resembles Meta’s $2.4 billion hit.
What to Watch Next Apple’s balance sheet can absorb a Meta-sized number. $147 billion in cash and marketable securities against $29.8 billion in quarterly net income makes a headline settlement a rounding error. The injunctive piece is the risk retail holders should sit with. If a coalition of state AGs forces Apple to open iCloud to law enforcement scanning, the privacy positioning Cook has spent a decade building becomes a liability rather than a moat. Watch for two things over the next two quarters: any new legal-reserve disclosure in Apple’s next 10-Q, and whether McCuskey’s coalition files a coordinated complaint or announces a tolling agreement. Silence from Cupertino signals a bet that the states blink first.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Australia looks poised to claw social media back to an earlier era, if it can convince users to actually opt in. The government of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese shared new legislation Tuesday that targets personalized feeds — the sticky and lucrative recommendation algorithms baked into Meta (META)'s Instagram, Alphabet (GOOGL)'s YouTube, and ByteDance's TikTok.
Australia already influences social media policy globally. In December, it pushed through a ban on social media use under age 16, inspiring legislation in California and Texas, across Europe, and in the U.K. But investors seem to neither buy (nor sell) Australia's proposed opt-out button for default algorithmic feeds.
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Why Big Tech's Business Model Is Under Threat
It’s been 30 years since the Telecommunications Act was signed into law under President Clinton. It laid the foundation for the internet to run as an information superhighway, free from government regulation. But recent court cases are chipping away at the protections of Section 230, which has shielded tech companies from liability issues for decades. Investor’s Business Daily technology reporter Ryan Deffenbaugh discusses the implications of these legal rulings on the internet landscape.
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Cheap Chinese Models Threaten U.S. AI Dominance. So Why Is Nvidia's CEO Defending Them?
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Why Big Tech's Business Model Is Under Threat
Meta stock was mostly flat in afternoon trading Tuesday, along with Alphabet, while Snapchat parent Snap (SNAP) edged lower. One explanation: This sort of pressure isn't totally new.
Australian Push Meets Meta's $18 Billion Settlement
There's no question algorithmic feeds have upped app usage while boosting tech giants' ad revenues, but app makers such as Meta have already felt some heat to curtail personalized recommendations in the U.S.
With its $18 billion settlement in August, Meta agreed to offer under-18 users the option to opt out of algorithmic feeds. The settlement also includes setting two-hour daily usage limits for teens. However, the Aussie government's "My Feed, My Way" legislation would extend such an offer to adults as well as teens over the age of 16.
You Can Still 'Doom Scroll'
The upshot of Australia's initiative could be greater control for users over the stuff they see in Australia and beyond, while limiting the ability of app makers to serve up posts as they see fit.
"This is not about giving government control," Prime Minister Albanese said in a statement to press. "If people want to doom scroll, as you call it, that's fine, that's up to them," he said.
For such legislation to have noteworthy business impact, hordes of users would have to opt in. In Australia, at least, such a rule wouldn't fly under the radar. "Social media platforms will be required to send a notification to new and existing users offering them a choice over their default feed," the Albanese government said.
Age-Related Bans In Parallel
The simultaneous push to limit kids' social-media use faces pushback from researchers and privacy advocates.
There's mixed evidence that social media restrictions improve peoples' well-being unilaterally, even for kids, and Australia's age rules have proved relatively easy to get around. Age-related restrictions that require ID uploads also create new privacy risks, exposing sensitive information to hacking threats while making it easier for governments to surveil users across the Internet.
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Meta Platforms NASDAQ: META just settled a legal headache that has cast a significant shadow over the firm and the stock. The company agreed to pay up to $18 billion over the course of a decade to end its youth social media addiction trial. With this case behind it, one of Wall Street’s top sell-side analysts believes Meta may be at an inflection point.
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Morgan Stanley Thinks Meta Could Walk in Alphabet’s FootstepsBrian Nowak of Morgan Stanley anticipates that the end of the trial will usher in a wave of new product releases at Meta. This would represent a positive development for the firm, as a notable issue with the company’s AI strategy is the relatively few product releases it has announced with real revenue-generating potential.
Meta Platforms Today
$613.48 -3.29 (-0.53%)
As of 09/8/2026 04:00 PM Eastern
$520.26▼
$790.800.34%
23.11
$785.22
Nowak has a laundry list of products he believes are in Meta’s pipeline. This includes agentic advertising tools for businesses, subscription offerings, a better version of Meta AI, and a potential cloud business. Nowak estimates that these products and services could add $10 to Meta’s earnings per share (EPS).
If this materializes over time, it would be a very significant growth driver for Meta’s EPS. Notably, in 2025, the company’s adjusted EPS was $29.68, and its GAAP EPS was $23.49. Depending on which metric Nowak is referencing, his forecast implies a 34% to 43% uplift in these figures.
Nowak cites Alphabet’s NASDAQ: GOOGL recent history as a reason Meta could start releasing more products now. This time last year, Alphabet resolved its antitrust case with the Justice Department, after which it began releasing many AI tools and models. The stock went on to perform very well in Q4 2025, rising 29%.
To Meta’s Credit: Muse Models Are Flying off the Factory LineWhile Meta’s overall number of AI product releases has been underwhelming, the company has made some meaningful progress on this front recently. In the last five months, Meta has released five new Muse models, including Muse Glimmer and its latest Muse Spark 1.3 in September. This pace of model releases is impressive, rivaling the cadence of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Additionally, Meta is now charging for access to its models on a pay-as-you-go basis, which could meaningfully contribute to revenue. This comes as Muse Spark 1.3 ranks highly on a variety of key AI model benchmarks. According to model evaluation by Artificial Analysis, Muse Spark 1.3 ranks only below OpenAI and Anthropic’s frontier models on its Intelligence Index. The closer Meta can stay to OpenAI's and Anthropic’s models in terms of intelligence, the more likely it will be to attract paying users.
Furthermore, Meta’s ability to attract paying users should be aided by the model’s much lower price. Artificial Analysis places Muse Spark 1.3’s cost per Intelligence Index task approximately 50% to 80% below OpenAI and Anthropic’s frontier models. Of course, these lower prices may also result in significantly lower-margin sales. Nonetheless, Meta is gaining real momentum with its product releases. It is possible that the end of its legal case will allow management to focus more energy on products and help this momentum to continue.
Youth Restrictions Could Be a Minimal Near-Term IssueNowak also made another notable point regarding the implications of Meta’s legal case. As part of its settlement, Meta will have to implement certain features for youth accounts. This includes a two-hour daily time limit across Facebook and Instagram, and blocking usage from midnight to six a.m. These features will likely decrease youth engagement on Meta’s apps, and engagement is the heart of Meta’s business model.
However, according to Morgan Stanley, users under 18 account for just 1% of Meta’s revenue. If accurate, this implies that reduced youth engagement will have a very minimal impact on Meta’s revenue generation in the near term. Still, there could be longer-term negative revenue impacts if these features cause young people to stop using their apps altogether and stay off as they age.
Current Price$613.48High Forecast$1,000.00Average Forecast$785.22Low Forecast$595.00Meta Platforms Stock Forecast Details
Analysts Coalesce Around Nowak’s Bullish Price TargetOverall, Morgan Stanley clearly has a favorable view of Meta going forward, demonstrated by its $775 price target on the stock. This figure implies about 20% upside in shares.
Morgan Stanley is not alone on this front. Even after seeing some considerable price target decreases after its latest earnings report, Meta still has 38 Buy ratings, compared to nine Hold ratings and zero Sells. The MarketBeat consensus price target is moderately higher than Nowak’s forecast at approximately $785.
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Less than two weeks after Meta agreed to a massive $18 billion multistate settlement in a lawsuit over social media’s consumer harms, the company announced its biggest bet on consumer AI to date — and one that requires significantly more trust than social media ever did. On Tuesday, the company introduced Muse, its new personal AI agent that helps consumers with everyday tasks and projects for users in the U.S.
To use Muse, consumers will have to trust Meta with more of their personal information than ever before. The AI agent works by connecting to the user’s apps and services that are a part of everyday workflows, like email, calendars, payments, and other things the individual may regularly use, like apps for health and fitness, the smart home, dining, shopping, music and events, and more.
The idea is a sizable bet on what comes after the ChatGPT era, where AI chatbots answered questions, served as sounding boards, or even became digital companions. Instead, Muse is focusing on AI that can actually do things for you.
Image Credits:Meta The company says the agent can do things like sending emails, booking travel, lowering bills, filling out forms, creating plans, turning recipe reels into grocery lists, sending party invitations, and making purchases, leveraging Link by Stripe for checkout. The latter offers purchase protections, which could potentially ease consumers’ fears of letting an AI check out on their behalf. (Shopify’s Shop Pay and 1Password integrations are also coming soon.)
Muse’s users can decide which apps and services they want to connect, doing so one at a time, to make the opt-in nature of using Muse more transparent. The agent is powered by Meta’s AI model, Muse Spark, and ships with built-in connectors (pictured below) for several services, with plans to add more over time. If a service the user wants isn’t available but offers a public API, Muse can set up a connection using credentials the user provides. When no API is available, Muse can access the service via the browser instead.
Image Credits:Meta Muse will initially be available via the web at muse.ai, through apps on iOS and Android, and through chats in WhatsApp. It will soon also make its way to Meta’s AI glasses, the company says. It will be free to use, with subscription plans kicking in as usage increases, which is why Muse requires a payment card to get started.
Two paid plans will be available at launch: Power at $20/month and Maximum at $100/month. Both of these subscriptions offer more Muse usage for handing off everyday tasks, though Meta believes most people will remain on the free tier. (The company says the app includes a usage meter that shows users what percentage of their usage they have left. It will also warn users when free usage runs out and present options to subscribe.)
Like other AI agents, Muse will continue to work even after the user leaves the app. It will also improve over time by learning from the user’s conversations what’s important to them to make suggestions unprompted, Meta noted.
Image Credits:Meta The concept is not unique to Meta. The agentic era is now coming into its own, as larger companies and smaller startups alike are experimenting with how AI agents will make the most sense for consumers and can become integrated into people’s daily lives.
Some have tried AI web browsers or services, like Gemini Spark or Claude Cowork, that can kick off various tasks on consumers’ behalf. Others are integrating AI into the chat applications consumers use the most, like Apple’s iMessage platform, SMS, and WhatsApp.
Image Credits:Meta Despite their usefulness, these powerful agents have forced consumers to wrestle with difficult questions about how much privacy they’re willing to give up. Many early testers of the AI assistant Instinct were shocked to see the app required a broad “perpetual and irrevocable” license to “access, use, host, cache, store, reproduce, transmit, display, publish, distribute, and modify” any of the user’s materials, including for training its AI models.
Image Credits:Meta Under the hood, Meta claims that Muse runs in its own “dedicated, secure computer with its own browser,” Muse Secure VM, which offers various privacy, safety, and security protections over customers’ data. The company says a separate Sentinel agent runs on that same virtual machine, but is kept apart from Muse at the system level.
Image Credits:Meta This means Muse won’t have visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods. Meta also claims that Muse doesn’t share people’s conversations or data with Meta’s ads systems.
(These claims are explained in more detail in a technical post, also released today, but will require deeper investigation by security experts.)
Could Meta’s history hurt Muse adoption? Despite Meta’s documentation of its security measures, it remains to be seen whether the company has enough consumer trust for its agent to be successful.
As it stands, Meta has a history of proclaiming one thing and doing another. In 2011, for instance, the tech giant settled with the FTC over charges that it deceived consumers by making users’ private information public without their approval. In 2019, the FTC penalized Facebook in a then record-breaking $5 billion settlement over eight separate privacy-related violations. In 2023, the FTC charged Meta with violating a privacy order that was filed after the 2019 settlement.
In terms of technical matters, Meta has also had some big missteps before, having discovered in 2019 a number of users’ passwords in readable formats, exposing people to potential hacks. The massive Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which saw Facebook data belonging to millions of consumers collected by a third-party without their consent, still lingers in some people’s minds, too.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., exits Los Angeles Superior Court in Los Angeles, California, US, on Wednesday, February 18, 2026. Zuckerberg testified that it’s “very difficult” to enforce Instagram’s age limits and downplayed how much teen users do for the company’s business during a landmark trial over social media addiction.Image Credits:Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Meta has also been repeatedly hauled before Congress to testify on how it protected — or failed to protect — minors from harm. With Congress failing to act, Meta ultimately became the target of several related lawsuits, including the one Meta just settled with 29 states in August, a New Mexico lawsuit over harms for children, where Meta was ordered to pay $942 million, and the thousands of personal-injury and school-district cases that are still pending against multiple social media giants.
To ease consumers’ fears, Meta not only talks in depth about its security promises, offering technical documentation and explanations. The company has also designed Muse in a way that would make consumers feel more connected with the agent itself. Users can customize Muse by giving it a name, picking out its avatar, and configuring its look and various settings that dictate how the agent communicates with them.
Time will tell if this personal connection and the utility Muse provides are enough for consumers to once again trust Meta with their personal information.
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Meta on Tuesday rolled out Muse, an artificial intelligence agent that acts as a personal digital assistant by autonomously using software apps and websites on behalf of people.
It is one of the first times that a major tech company has introduced a mass market agent, which is a type of A.I. that researchers predict will become more sophisticated than simple chatbots. Many agents can already do the tasks of office workers, like filling out spreadsheets. But while A.I. agents like OpenClaw are a popular tool among developers and programmers, they have yet to catch on widely.
Muse can be spoken to as if it were a chatbot and instructed to send emails, book travel reservations, make online purchases and do more through an app or through WhatsApp, which Meta owns, the company said. Muse also connects to Meta’s other apps, like Instagram and Facebook, to learn more about its user. And it can be linked to third-party apps like Spotify, Ticketmaster, Shopify, Gmail and OpenTable.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has described Muse as Meta’s next breakthrough, which works “24/7 on your behalf to help achieve your goals and improve your life, your health, your relationships, your finances.”
Muse is among the first significant consumer A.I. products created by Meta Superintelligence Labs, which Mr. Zuckerberg established last year to propel his company forward in the A.I. race. Meta has been spending billions of dollars to develop foundational A.I. models and to build data centers so that it can compete with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and others on the cutting edge of the rapidly evolving technology.
So far, Meta has had hits and misses. Products like its A.I. smart glasses have sold millions of pairs while stoking privacy concerns. In July, the company temporarily took down its Instagram A.I. image generator after widespread criticism about copyright and privacy.
The Muse app is free but has limits on usage, which people pay $20 or $100 a month to increase. The agent is only for adults and can be given a custom name and avatar.
When people link their accounts from OpenTable or Ticketmaster to Muse, it can send messages about upcoming concert tickets or restaurant reservations if it thinks its user might be interested, and book them with one click. Muse also connects to Stripe and Shopify, allowing it to make purchases on someone’s behalf. Muse is the first A.I. agent to be covered by Stripe’s warranties and return policy, in case it makes a purchasing mistake, Meta said.
Since A.I. is not foolproof, Meta says that the agent “will sometimes make mistakes” but that it was designed to “help the user stay in control without being overwhelmed.” The Silicon Valley company has created a program so people can report bugs in Muse for a reward. Meta has also said personal data collected by Muse, as well as the agent itself, is securely stored on its cloud servers and hardware.
The agent is powered by Muse Spark, the A.I. model that Meta released in April. The model was Meta’s first developed under Alexandr Wang, the company’s 29-year-old chief A.I. officer, whom Mr. Zuckerberg hired to remake the division last summer.
Muse Spark trails leading models from Anthropic and OpenAI, but Meta plans to release a more powerful model, internally called Watermelon, as soon as next month.
Meta said it also planned to add more features to Muse in the coming months, including integrating it with its smart glasses that have a camera and a voice assistant.
Meta introduced its AI personal agent app on Tuesday and is asking a subset of users to pay at a time when the company and broader artificial intelligence industry face intensifying scrutiny and public skepticism.
The app, which was given the internal code name Hatch, is powered by the Muse Spark family of foundation models that Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang has been debuting at a breakneck pace since April.
Meta said the Muse app lets people offload digital tasks like booking appointments, filling out electronic forms and even monitoring home security camera feeds to AI-powered assistants. The company designed the app so "it feels very approachable and friendly and explainable, and it doesn't feel too complicated," Wang told CNBC in an interview.
"Behind the scenes, Muse might be doing very advanced coding workflows, or building sophisticated integrations, or doing quite a lot of heavy lifting while keeping that very sort of simple for the user," Wang said.
Wang said the Muse personal agent will be available in either a free tier or through monthly subscription plans of $20 or $100, depending on usage.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who hired Wang last year as part of a $14 billion investment in his startup, Scale AI, has been dropping hints to investors that the company's next big AI bet involves supercharged digital assistants that sift through emails or look for deals on furniture.
Zuckerberg has said that supercharged digital assistants represent the next big leap for AI models, pitching them as one of the reasons that Meta is spending heavily on data centers and infrastructure. In the company's earnings call in July, Zuckerberg said "new personal agents that will be the foundation for our next wave of products and revenue lines in the months and years ahead."
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Meta's launch of its personal assistant comes amid a particularly fraught time for the company. Meta recently agreed to pay nearly $17 billion in a major settlement with a coalition of state attorneys general that had sued the company for misrepresenting the prevalence of harm on apps like Facebook and Instagram. Meta still faces a wave of personal injury and school district lawsuits involving similar allegations.
Meanwhile, there are rising concerns about the potential cybersecurity risks posed by AI agents and their underlying foundation models, and the country faces a growing backlash against AI data centers and the companies that are building them.
But Meta is also under pressure from Wall Street to show returns on its AI investments, as the company tries to diversify its business and reduce its reliance on digital ads. The personal agent follows other newer initiatives like the Muse Code AI agent for developers and various subscription plans that Meta has recently rolled out to generate new lines of business.
In addressing security concerns, Wang said the app runs within "its own isolated environment" inside Meta's computing infrastructure, and "never sees your actual passwords or payment details and asks before doing anything sensitive."
Read more CNBC tech news'Model fatigue' sets in as AI labs race to roll out new versions at frenetic paceMeet the CISO: A new front-line star in the AI cybersecurity warMistral bags $24 billion valuation as Samsung leads funding for Europe's AI championTSMC, Samsung commit to ASML's newest chipmaking tools as AI drives demandUsers must opt out of letting Meta use their interactions with the Muse personal agent to train the company's AI models. If they don't, the company will scrub "critical personally identifying information" before using the agent conversations and interactions to improve AI models, said David Singleton, Meta vice president of engineering.
The company is exploring potential monetary initiatives, such as taking a cut of AI agent-related shopping transactions, but hasn't settled on any concrete plan, Wang said.
"We think the commerce business model is potentially really interesting for this product because of how much it enables people to to actually find the things that they are excited about and ultimately fulfill a lot of those purchases," Wang said.
Users of the Muse personal agent app will be able to see a feed that shows them various updates from their connected Facebook and Instagram accounts, or certain articles or stories gleaned from the web, depending on what they want the feed to aggregate and summarize. The agent will also be available via WhatsApp, but that version won't contain the app features like the feed or an ideas tool that recommends AI agent trips and tricks, Wang said.
"The core functionality that you have in the main conversation with your agent is the same across those two services," Wang said.
Meta is playing into a major industry trend. Since the rapid rise of OpenClaw, used by coders to manage the AI models powering digital assistants, companies like OpenAI and Google have introduced similar agentic tools and features alongside startups like Town.
Wang said the Muse personal agent is intended to be "more accessible to the broader audience," compared to competing products, but conceded that it's still "pretty early in in this new era of personal agents."
Meta is asking third-party security researchers to find vulnerabilities within the Muse personal agent through a so-called bug-bounty program that includes financial rewards if they discover certain issues.
"We've hardened Muse based on extensive dogfooding, agentic red teaming, and against issues found in real adversarial scenarios by security researchers in our private bug bounty program," the company said in a technical blog post.
Meta said the personal agent will be available to U.S. consumers via iOS, Android or through a standalone website. It will eventually be accessible through the company's Ray-Ban Meta glasses.
WATCH: Colorado AG says Meta lawsuit's most important takeaway is the change in behavior, not money.
Meta (META.O) rolled out on Tuesday a long-touted AI assistant that can autonomously send emails, sell a car and book travel on a person's behalf, despite internal concerns that the technology mismanages its access to sensitive personal data.
The company's Muse agent, known internally as Hatch, is the centerpiece of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's plan to offer "personal superintelligence" to the billions of people who use Meta's services daily.
The product will be available only in the U.S. initially, via a dedicated Muse app or Meta's WhatsApp messaging service, Meta said in its announcement. Meta said it plans to add the agent to its line of smart glasses "soon," without elaborating.
Modeled on the open-source AI agent OpenClaw, Muse is designed to access a person's apps across categories like email, calendar, payments, health, shopping and the smart home, Meta said. People choose which apps it connects to and can revoke access at any time.
Each Muse agent runs on its own virtual machine, a cloud-based emulation of a personal computer, which enables it to keep carrying out requests in the background even when a person is not actively using it.
Syncing up with apps containing a person's real data increases the agent's potential utility, while also significantly raising the stakes for safety and reliability issues, both for users who have entrusted it with their information and others who may be on the receiving end of agent misbehavior.
Vishal Shah, vice president of AI products at Meta, said the company had initially delayed the release of the product in April to make it more secure. Meta determined the extra work had allowed it to "cross the threshold" and meet its minimum requirements for product safety, security, privacy, model performance and other metrics.
"It is impossible to say that there is never going to be a mistake, but every single part of the architecture has been designed to make this as safe, as secure, as private as we can possibly make it," Shah said in an interview.
INTERNAL TESTS REVEAL MIXED RESULTS
As recently as this week, Meta employees testing the tool have reported mixed results with Muse, with one person praising its utility in vacation planning and others describing cases in which it disconnected without explanation and uploaded sensitive information without permission, according to internal posts seen by Reuters.
One person wrote that the product had been so useful in arranging itineraries and ground transportation that it had become "the third participant" on a recent three-week honeymoon in Indonesia.
In another post, an employee who had prompted Muse to monitor for tickets and other items that sell out quickly reported encountering "many failure modes that made it unreliable." The product stopped refreshing the page after about 15 minutes, silently ignored other errors and at times disabled monitoring "for no apparent reason," the person said.
Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth posted that he kept getting logged out and needing to log back in, sometimes several times within a few minutes.
Others flagged serious security flaws, like an agent routing around guardrails to expose a person's personal iCloud photos after being prompted to identify toys visible in pictures from a child's birthday party.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the specific incidents described in the internal posts.
Meta unveiled a new artificial intelligence agent designed to carry out tasks on a user's behalf. Meta said the tool, called Muse, will assist with online shopping, buying movie tickets and scheduling appointments.
Proficio Capital Partners LLC increased its holdings in shares of Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA – Free Report) by 142.2% during the second quarter, according to its most recent Form 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The institutional investor owned 19,081 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock after buying an additional 11,202 shares during the quarter. Proficio Capital Partners LLC’s holdings in Tesla were worth $8,025,000 as of its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Other hedge funds have also recently bought and sold shares of the company. Brighton Jones LLC increased its holdings in shares of Tesla by 11.8% in the 4th quarter. Brighton Jones LLC now owns 87,929 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock valued at $35,509,000 after purchasing an additional 9,293 shares during the period. Revolve Wealth Partners LLC boosted its holdings in shares of Tesla by 21.2% during the fourth quarter. Revolve Wealth Partners LLC now owns 5,317 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock worth $2,147,000 after purchasing an additional 931 shares during the period. Bison Wealth LLC grew its position in Tesla by 52.2% during the fourth quarter. Bison Wealth LLC now owns 10,368 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock valued at $4,187,000 after purchasing an additional 3,558 shares in the last quarter. Sivia Capital Partners LLC grew its position in Tesla by 9.1% during the second quarter. Sivia Capital Partners LLC now owns 12,135 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock valued at $3,855,000 after purchasing an additional 1,011 shares in the last quarter. Finally, AGP Franklin LLC increased its stake in Tesla by 21.2% in the 2nd quarter. AGP Franklin LLC now owns 4,861 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock valued at $1,544,000 after buying an additional 851 shares during the period. 66.20% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.
Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades A number of brokerages have issued reports on TSLA. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft set a $420.00 target price on shares of Tesla in a research note on Monday, July 27th. JPMorgan Chase & Co. dropped their price target on shares of Tesla from $475.00 to $445.00 and set a “neutral” rating on the stock in a research note on Thursday, July 23rd. HSBC reiterated a “hold” rating on shares of Tesla in a report on Monday, June 15th. TD Cowen restated a “buy” rating on shares of Tesla in a research note on Friday, August 14th. Finally, Robert W. Baird set a $475.00 target price on Tesla in a research report on Monday, July 27th. One equities research analyst has rated the stock with a Strong Buy rating, twenty-two have issued a Buy rating, eighteen have assigned a Hold rating and four have issued a Sell rating to the stock. Based on data from MarketBeat, the company presently has a consensus rating of “Hold” and a consensus price target of $401.74.
Get Our Latest Analysis on TSLA Tesla Price Performance Shares of TSLA stock opened at $354.08 on Tuesday. The stock has a 50 day moving average of $357.06 and a 200-day moving average of $382.45. The firm has a market cap of $1.40 trillion, a PE ratio of 327.85, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 17.88 and a beta of 1.84. The company has a quick ratio of 1.55, a current ratio of 1.94 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.09. Tesla, Inc. has a 12 month low of $297.38 and a 12 month high of $498.83.
Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA – Get Free Report) last released its earnings results on Thursday, July 23rd. The electric vehicle producer reported $0.33 EPS for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $0.50 by ($0.17). Tesla had a net margin of 3.67% and a return on equity of 3.82%. The company had revenue of $28.24 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $26.42 billion. During the same quarter in the previous year, the company earned $0.33 earnings per share. Tesla’s revenue for the quarter was up 25.5% compared to the same quarter last year. On average, equities analysts predict that Tesla, Inc. will post 0.88 EPS for the current year.
Trending Headlines about Tesla Here are the key news stories impacting Tesla this week:
Positive Sentiment: European FSD expansion: Tesla’s supervised Full Self-Driving system received a regulatory green light in Slovenia, potentially supporting wider European deployment and additional high-margin software revenue. Tesla also cited safety data showing 4.1 times fewer collisions than manually driven Teslas in five European markets. Tesla FSD Supervised Gets Regulatory Green Light in Slovenia Positive Sentiment: Robotaxi opportunity: Tesla has begun limited paid Cybercab rides in Austin. Goldman Sachs believes the purpose-built vehicle could have a cost advantage in robotaxis, while Cathie Wood and other Tesla bulls continue to view autonomy, Optimus and AI as major long-term growth opportunities. Cybercab Could Transform Tesla, But Regulatory Risks Loom Positive Sentiment: AI ecosystem narrative: Investor interest remains focused on Tesla’s integration of FSD, Grok and the Optimus humanoid robot, as well as its indirect exposure to SpaceX. Supporters argue these businesses could eventually justify Tesla’s premium valuation. Cathie Wood Has Stuck With Tesla Through Repeated Missed Robotaxi Deadlines Tesla Company Profile (Free Report)
Tesla, Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) is an American company that designs, manufactures and sells electric vehicles, energy generation and energy storage products. Founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, Tesla grew into a vertically integrated mobility and clean‑energy company with Elon Musk serving as its chief executive officer. The company’s stated mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, reflected in its combined focus on electric drivetrains, battery technology, renewable energy products and software.
Tesla’s automotive business includes a lineup of battery‑electric vehicles and related services.
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Freestone Grove Partners LP purchased a new stake in Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA – Free Report) during the 2nd quarter, according to the company in its most recent disclosure with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The institutional investor purchased 28,930 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock, valued at approximately $12,168,000.
Several other large investors have also modified their holdings of the business. Chapman Financial Group LLC purchased a new stake in Tesla in the 2nd quarter valued at approximately $26,000. Friedenthal Financial grew its holdings in Tesla by 66.7% during the 1st quarter. Friedenthal Financial now owns 75 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock valued at $28,000 after buying an additional 30 shares during the last quarter. Turning Point Benefit Group Inc. purchased a new position in Tesla during the third quarter worth $30,000. Texas Capital Bancshares Inc TX acquired a new position in shares of Tesla in the third quarter worth $31,000. Finally, Harborfront Financial Group LLC acquired a new position in shares of Tesla in the second quarter worth $34,000. 66.20% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.
Tesla Price Performance Shares of NASDAQ:TSLA opened at $354.08 on Tuesday. The company has a current ratio of 1.94, a quick ratio of 1.55 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.09. The firm has a market cap of $1.40 trillion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 327.85, a PEG ratio of 17.88 and a beta of 1.84. The stock’s 50-day moving average price is $357.06 and its two-hundred day moving average price is $382.45. Tesla, Inc. has a 12-month low of $297.38 and a 12-month high of $498.83.
Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA – Get Free Report) last posted its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, July 23rd. The electric vehicle producer reported $0.33 EPS for the quarter, missing analysts’ consensus estimates of $0.50 by ($0.17). The company had revenue of $28.24 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $26.42 billion. Tesla had a net margin of 3.67% and a return on equity of 3.82%. The company’s revenue was up 25.5% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same period in the prior year, the company earned $0.33 EPS. On average, research analysts forecast that Tesla, Inc. will post 0.88 EPS for the current year. Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades A number of analysts recently commented on the company. Roth Capital reaffirmed a “buy” rating and set a $505.00 price objective on shares of Tesla in a research note on Thursday, July 23rd. Truist Financial set a $370.00 target price on shares of Tesla and gave the company a “hold” rating in a research note on Thursday, July 23rd. The Goldman Sachs Group began coverage on shares of Tesla in a research note on Friday, June 5th. They set a “buy” rating on the stock. Evercore upgraded shares of Tesla from a “hold” rating to an “outperform” rating in a report on Friday, June 5th. Finally, William Blair reissued a “market perform” rating on shares of Tesla in a research report on Thursday, July 2nd. One investment analyst has rated the stock with a Strong Buy rating, twenty-two have issued a Buy rating, eighteen have given a Hold rating and four have assigned a Sell rating to the company. Based on data from MarketBeat, the company currently has an average rating of “Hold” and an average price target of $401.74.
Read Our Latest Stock Analysis on Tesla
Key Tesla News Here are the key news stories impacting Tesla this week:
Positive Sentiment: European FSD expansion: Tesla’s supervised Full Self-Driving system received a regulatory green light in Slovenia, potentially supporting wider European deployment and additional high-margin software revenue. Tesla also cited safety data showing 4.1 times fewer collisions than manually driven Teslas in five European markets. Tesla FSD Supervised Gets Regulatory Green Light in Slovenia Positive Sentiment: Robotaxi opportunity: Tesla has begun limited paid Cybercab rides in Austin. Goldman Sachs believes the purpose-built vehicle could have a cost advantage in robotaxis, while Cathie Wood and other Tesla bulls continue to view autonomy, Optimus and AI as major long-term growth opportunities. Cybercab Could Transform Tesla, But Regulatory Risks Loom Positive Sentiment: AI ecosystem narrative: Investor interest remains focused on Tesla’s integration of FSD, Grok and the Optimus humanoid robot, as well as its indirect exposure to SpaceX. Supporters argue these businesses could eventually justify Tesla’s premium valuation. Cathie Wood Has Stuck With Tesla Through Repeated Missed Robotaxi Deadlines About Tesla (Free Report)
Tesla, Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) is an American company that designs, manufactures and sells electric vehicles, energy generation and energy storage products. Founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, Tesla grew into a vertically integrated mobility and clean‑energy company with Elon Musk serving as its chief executive officer. The company’s stated mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, reflected in its combined focus on electric drivetrains, battery technology, renewable energy products and software.
Tesla’s automotive business includes a lineup of battery‑electric vehicles and related services.
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Invst LLC purchased a new position in shares of Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA – Free Report) in the second quarter, according to the company in its most recent Form 13F filing with the SEC. The fund purchased 4,008 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock, valued at approximately $1,686,000.
Several other institutional investors and hedge funds have also modified their holdings of TSLA. Brighton Jones LLC lifted its holdings in shares of Tesla by 11.8% in the fourth quarter. Brighton Jones LLC now owns 87,929 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock worth $35,509,000 after acquiring an additional 9,293 shares during the last quarter. Revolve Wealth Partners LLC boosted its stake in shares of Tesla by 21.2% in the 4th quarter. Revolve Wealth Partners LLC now owns 5,317 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock valued at $2,147,000 after purchasing an additional 931 shares in the last quarter. Bison Wealth LLC grew its holdings in shares of Tesla by 52.2% during the 4th quarter. Bison Wealth LLC now owns 10,368 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock valued at $4,187,000 after purchasing an additional 3,558 shares during the last quarter. Sivia Capital Partners LLC increased its position in Tesla by 9.1% during the 2nd quarter. Sivia Capital Partners LLC now owns 12,135 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock worth $3,855,000 after purchasing an additional 1,011 shares in the last quarter. Finally, AGP Franklin LLC increased its position in Tesla by 21.2% during the 2nd quarter. AGP Franklin LLC now owns 4,861 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock worth $1,544,000 after purchasing an additional 851 shares in the last quarter. 66.20% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors.
Wall Street Analyst Weigh In A number of analysts have weighed in on TSLA shares. Glj Research restated a “sell” rating on shares of Tesla in a research report on Friday. Phillip Securities lowered their price target on shares of Tesla from $220.00 to $215.00 and set a “sell” rating for the company in a report on Wednesday, May 13th. Guggenheim assumed coverage on Tesla in a research note on Monday, June 29th. They issued a “neutral” rating for the company. TD Cowen reissued a “buy” rating on shares of Tesla in a report on Friday, August 14th. Finally, Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft set a $420.00 price objective on Tesla in a research report on Monday, July 27th. One research analyst has rated the stock with a Strong Buy rating, twenty-two have given a Buy rating, eighteen have issued a Hold rating and four have issued a Sell rating to the company’s stock. Based on data from MarketBeat, Tesla currently has an average rating of “Hold” and a consensus price target of $401.74.
Check Out Our Latest Analysis on TSLA More Tesla News Here are the key news stories impacting Tesla this week:
Positive Sentiment: European FSD expansion: Tesla’s supervised Full Self-Driving system received a regulatory green light in Slovenia, potentially supporting wider European deployment and additional high-margin software revenue. Tesla also cited safety data showing 4.1 times fewer collisions than manually driven Teslas in five European markets. Tesla FSD Supervised Gets Regulatory Green Light in Slovenia Positive Sentiment: Robotaxi opportunity: Tesla has begun limited paid Cybercab rides in Austin. Goldman Sachs believes the purpose-built vehicle could have a cost advantage in robotaxis, while Cathie Wood and other Tesla bulls continue to view autonomy, Optimus and AI as major long-term growth opportunities. Cybercab Could Transform Tesla, But Regulatory Risks Loom Positive Sentiment: AI ecosystem narrative: Investor interest remains focused on Tesla’s integration of FSD, Grok and the Optimus humanoid robot, as well as its indirect exposure to SpaceX. Supporters argue these businesses could eventually justify Tesla’s premium valuation. Cathie Wood Has Stuck With Tesla Through Repeated Missed Robotaxi Deadlines Tesla Price Performance TSLA stock opened at $354.08 on Tuesday. The company has a market capitalization of $1.40 trillion, a P/E ratio of 327.85, a PEG ratio of 17.88 and a beta of 1.84. The company has a fifty day moving average price of $357.06 and a 200-day moving average price of $382.45. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.09, a quick ratio of 1.55 and a current ratio of 1.94. Tesla, Inc. has a 52-week low of $297.38 and a 52-week high of $498.83.
Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA – Get Free Report) last issued its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, July 23rd. The electric vehicle producer reported $0.33 earnings per share for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $0.50 by ($0.17). The business had revenue of $28.24 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $26.42 billion. Tesla had a return on equity of 3.82% and a net margin of 3.67%.The business’s revenue for the quarter was up 25.5% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same period in the prior year, the firm earned $0.33 EPS. As a group, equities analysts expect that Tesla, Inc. will post 0.88 EPS for the current year.
Tesla Profile (Free Report)
Tesla, Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) is an American company that designs, manufactures and sells electric vehicles, energy generation and energy storage products. Founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, Tesla grew into a vertically integrated mobility and clean‑energy company with Elon Musk serving as its chief executive officer. The company’s stated mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, reflected in its combined focus on electric drivetrains, battery technology, renewable energy products and software.
Tesla’s automotive business includes a lineup of battery‑electric vehicles and related services.
Featured Articles Five stocks we like better than Tesla 3 Under-the-Radar Defense Stocks With Record Backlogs This Korea ETF Has Soared, But the Rally May Not Be Over Why Guidewire’s Post-Earnings Plunge May Not Last Ride-Share Reckoning: Tesla Drives Into Uber’s Lane Want to see what other hedge funds are holding TSLA? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA – Free Report).
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Corient Private Wealth LP acquired a new stake in shares of Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA – Free Report) in the second quarter, according to the company in its most recent disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The institutional investor acquired 935,745 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock, valued at approximately $393,178,000.
Several other hedge funds have also modified their holdings of TSLA. Permanens Capital L.P. acquired a new stake in shares of Tesla in the second quarter worth approximately $397,000. Philadelphia Investment Partners LLC increased its position in Tesla by 445.1% during the second quarter. Philadelphia Investment Partners LLC now owns 834 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock worth $351,000 after purchasing an additional 681 shares during the last quarter. Atreides Management LP raised its stake in Tesla by 1.7% during the second quarter. Atreides Management LP now owns 204,275 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock worth $85,918,000 after purchasing an additional 3,480 shares during the period. Bamco Inc. NY boosted its holdings in shares of Tesla by 5.0% in the 2nd quarter. Bamco Inc. NY now owns 12,524,752 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock valued at $5,267,911,000 after purchasing an additional 591,243 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Bluefin Capital Management LLC acquired a new position in shares of Tesla in the 2nd quarter valued at $1,262,000. 66.20% of the stock is owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.
Tesla Stock Performance Tesla stock opened at $354.08 on Tuesday. The firm has a market capitalization of $1.40 trillion, a PE ratio of 327.85, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 17.88 and a beta of 1.84. Tesla, Inc. has a one year low of $297.38 and a one year high of $498.83. The stock’s 50 day moving average price is $357.06 and its 200 day moving average price is $382.45. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.09, a quick ratio of 1.55 and a current ratio of 1.94.
Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA – Get Free Report) last issued its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, July 23rd. The electric vehicle producer reported $0.33 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $0.50 by ($0.17). The firm had revenue of $28.24 billion during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $26.42 billion. Tesla had a net margin of 3.67% and a return on equity of 3.82%. The firm’s revenue was up 25.5% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same period last year, the business earned $0.33 EPS. As a group, sell-side analysts expect that Tesla, Inc. will post 0.88 EPS for the current fiscal year. Analysts Set New Price Targets A number of analysts have recently commented on the company. Phillip Securities dropped their price objective on Tesla from $220.00 to $215.00 and set a “sell” rating for the company in a report on Wednesday, May 13th. JPMorgan Chase & Co. reduced their target price on Tesla from $475.00 to $445.00 and set a “neutral” rating on the stock in a report on Thursday, July 23rd. HSBC restated a “hold” rating on shares of Tesla in a research note on Monday, June 15th. Citizens Jmp initiated coverage on Tesla in a report on Thursday, July 9th. They issued a “market perform” rating on the stock. Finally, Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft set a $420.00 price objective on Tesla in a research note on Monday, July 27th. One research analyst has rated the stock with a Strong Buy rating, twenty-two have issued a Buy rating, eighteen have given a Hold rating and four have assigned a Sell rating to the company. According to MarketBeat.com, Tesla presently has a consensus rating of “Hold” and a consensus target price of $401.74.
Check Out Our Latest Research Report on Tesla
Key Tesla News Here are the key news stories impacting Tesla this week:
Positive Sentiment: European FSD expansion: Tesla’s supervised Full Self-Driving system received a regulatory green light in Slovenia, potentially supporting wider European deployment and additional high-margin software revenue. Tesla also cited safety data showing 4.1 times fewer collisions than manually driven Teslas in five European markets. Tesla FSD Supervised Gets Regulatory Green Light in Slovenia Positive Sentiment: Robotaxi opportunity: Tesla has begun limited paid Cybercab rides in Austin. Goldman Sachs believes the purpose-built vehicle could have a cost advantage in robotaxis, while Cathie Wood and other Tesla bulls continue to view autonomy, Optimus and AI as major long-term growth opportunities. Cybercab Could Transform Tesla, But Regulatory Risks Loom Positive Sentiment: AI ecosystem narrative: Investor interest remains focused on Tesla’s integration of FSD, Grok and the Optimus humanoid robot, as well as its indirect exposure to SpaceX. Supporters argue these businesses could eventually justify Tesla’s premium valuation. Cathie Wood Has Stuck With Tesla Through Repeated Missed Robotaxi Deadlines About Tesla (Free Report)
Tesla, Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) is an American company that designs, manufactures and sells electric vehicles, energy generation and energy storage products. Founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, Tesla grew into a vertically integrated mobility and clean‑energy company with Elon Musk serving as its chief executive officer. The company’s stated mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, reflected in its combined focus on electric drivetrains, battery technology, renewable energy products and software.
Tesla’s automotive business includes a lineup of battery‑electric vehicles and related services.
Read More Five stocks we like better than Tesla 3 Under-the-Radar Defense Stocks With Record Backlogs This Korea ETF Has Soared, But the Rally May Not Be Over Why Guidewire’s Post-Earnings Plunge May Not Last Ride-Share Reckoning: Tesla Drives Into Uber’s Lane Want to see what other hedge funds are holding TSLA? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA – Free Report).
Receive News & Ratings for Tesla Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for Tesla and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter.
Bamco Inc. NY increased its stake in shares of Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA – Free Report) by 5.0% during the 2nd quarter, according to its most recent Form 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The fund owned 12,524,752 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock after purchasing an additional 591,243 shares during the quarter. Tesla comprises about 7.9% of Bamco Inc. NY’s portfolio, making the stock its 2nd biggest position. Bamco Inc. NY owned 0.32% of Tesla worth $5,267,911,000 as of its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
A number of other institutional investors have also recently bought and sold shares of TSLA. Wealthquest Corp acquired a new position in Tesla during the fourth quarter valued at approximately $1,035,000. Private Capital Advisors Inc. grew its holdings in shares of Tesla by 139.3% in the 4th quarter. Private Capital Advisors Inc. now owns 21,331 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock valued at $9,593,000 after buying an additional 12,417 shares during the period. Knights of Columbus Asset Advisors LLC increased its position in shares of Tesla by 34.8% in the 4th quarter. Knights of Columbus Asset Advisors LLC now owns 64,481 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock valued at $28,998,000 after buying an additional 16,652 shares in the last quarter. Canada Post Corp Registered Pension Plan raised its stake in Tesla by 26.6% during the 4th quarter. Canada Post Corp Registered Pension Plan now owns 70,955 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock worth $31,910,000 after buying an additional 14,900 shares during the period. Finally, Cascade Financial Partners LLC raised its stake in Tesla by 866.8% during the 4th quarter. Cascade Financial Partners LLC now owns 207,999 shares of the electric vehicle producer’s stock worth $93,541,000 after buying an additional 186,485 shares during the period. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 66.20% of the company’s stock.
Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades A number of research analysts have issued reports on TSLA shares. William Blair reissued a “market perform” rating on shares of Tesla in a research note on Thursday, July 2nd. Phillip Securities lowered their target price on Tesla from $220.00 to $215.00 and set a “sell” rating for the company in a research note on Wednesday, May 13th. Needham & Company LLC reiterated a “hold” rating on shares of Tesla in a report on Thursday, July 23rd. Morgan Stanley restated a “mixed” rating on shares of Tesla in a report on Wednesday, September 2nd. Finally, Weiss Ratings reaffirmed a “hold (c-)” rating on shares of Tesla in a research report on Tuesday, July 21st. One analyst has rated the stock with a Strong Buy rating, twenty-two have given a Buy rating, eighteen have issued a Hold rating and four have issued a Sell rating to the company’s stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the stock presently has an average rating of “Hold” and a consensus price target of $401.74.
Get Our Latest Stock Analysis on Tesla Key Tesla News Here are the key news stories impacting Tesla this week:
Positive Sentiment: European FSD expansion: Tesla’s supervised Full Self-Driving system received a regulatory green light in Slovenia, potentially supporting wider European deployment and additional high-margin software revenue. Tesla also cited safety data showing 4.1 times fewer collisions than manually driven Teslas in five European markets. Tesla FSD Supervised Gets Regulatory Green Light in Slovenia Positive Sentiment: Robotaxi opportunity: Tesla has begun limited paid Cybercab rides in Austin. Goldman Sachs believes the purpose-built vehicle could have a cost advantage in robotaxis, while Cathie Wood and other Tesla bulls continue to view autonomy, Optimus and AI as major long-term growth opportunities. Cybercab Could Transform Tesla, But Regulatory Risks Loom Positive Sentiment: AI ecosystem narrative: Investor interest remains focused on Tesla’s integration of FSD, Grok and the Optimus humanoid robot, as well as its indirect exposure to SpaceX. Supporters argue these businesses could eventually justify Tesla’s premium valuation. Cathie Wood Has Stuck With Tesla Through Repeated Missed Robotaxi Deadlines Tesla Price Performance TSLA stock opened at $354.08 on Tuesday. The company has a market cap of $1.40 trillion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 327.85, a P/E/G ratio of 17.88 and a beta of 1.84. Tesla, Inc. has a twelve month low of $297.38 and a twelve month high of $498.83. The business has a 50 day moving average price of $357.06 and a two-hundred day moving average price of $382.45. The company has a quick ratio of 1.55, a current ratio of 1.94 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.09.
Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA – Get Free Report) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, July 23rd. The electric vehicle producer reported $0.33 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, missing analysts’ consensus estimates of $0.50 by ($0.17). Tesla had a return on equity of 3.82% and a net margin of 3.67%.The company had revenue of $28.24 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $26.42 billion. During the same quarter in the prior year, the company earned $0.33 EPS. The company’s revenue for the quarter was up 25.5% on a year-over-year basis. Analysts anticipate that Tesla, Inc. will post 0.88 EPS for the current fiscal year.
About Tesla (Free Report)
Tesla, Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) is an American company that designs, manufactures and sells electric vehicles, energy generation and energy storage products. Founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, Tesla grew into a vertically integrated mobility and clean‑energy company with Elon Musk serving as its chief executive officer. The company’s stated mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, reflected in its combined focus on electric drivetrains, battery technology, renewable energy products and software.
Tesla’s automotive business includes a lineup of battery‑electric vehicles and related services.
See Also Five stocks we like better than Tesla 3 Under-the-Radar Defense Stocks With Record Backlogs This Korea ETF Has Soared, But the Rally May Not Be Over Why Guidewire’s Post-Earnings Plunge May Not Last Ride-Share Reckoning: Tesla Drives Into Uber’s Lane
Receive News & Ratings for Tesla Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for Tesla and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter.
Tesla Inc‘s (NASDAQ:TSLA) Bitcoin (CRYPTO:$BTC) investment has become one of the longest-running corporate crypto bets on Wall Street—but it looks very different today than it did in 2021.
After selling most of its holdings during the 2022 crypto downturn, the electric vehicle maker still owns 11,509 Bitcoin, a position worth roughly $902 million at Bitcoin’s current price of about $78,700.
Tesla disclosed in February 2021 a $1.5 billion Bitcoin purchase, becoming one of the first major public companies to add the cryptocurrency to its balance sheet. The move, announced in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, was widely viewed as a vote of confidence in Bitcoin as both a treasury asset and an alternative store of value.
Just weeks later, Bitcoin’s rally pushed Tesla’s position above $2.5 billion on paper. But the company’s strategy changed dramatically in 2022.
During the second quarter of 2022, Tesla sold approximately 75% of its Bitcoin holdings, citing the need to maximize cash amid COVID-related uncertainty in China rather than a change in its view of Bitcoin. The sale reduced Tesla’s holdings to roughly 11,509 BTC, where they have remained ever since.
Read Next
Bitcoin Holdings TodayAlthough Tesla has made no significant changes to its Bitcoin treasury in years, the position remains one of the largest held by a publicly traded operating company. That makes it a closely watched barometer for how traditional corporations approach digital assets.
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At today’s Bitcoin current price hovering at around $78,700, Tesla’s remaining holdings are worth about $902 million—still below the company’s original $1.5 billion investment despite Bitcoin’s recovery from the depths of the 2022 crypto bear market.
The contrast highlights an often-overlooked aspect of Tesla’s Bitcoin story: it’s no longer represents an aggressive corporate buyer of Bitcoin. Instead, it has effectively become a long-term holder, allowing the value of its treasury to rise and fall with the market without materially changing its position.
What Investors Should WatchTesla’s Bitcoin holdings are no longer large enough to define the company’s financial performance, but they remain an important signal of management’s capital allocation strategy. Any future purchase, sale, or commentary on digital assets would likely attract outsized attention because Tesla remains one of the few global blue-chip companies with a meaningful Bitcoin treasury.
For investors, the key question is no longer whether Tesla will become a larger Bitcoin buyer.
Instead, it is whether the company continues treating its remaining 11,509 BTC as a strategic long-term asset—or decides the time is right to finally close the chapter on one of corporate America’s most influential crypto investments.
Tesla's August numbers out of China signal trouble for a company already struggling to find a win in 2026, and the problems extend well beyond one month of weak demand.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA | TSLA Price Prediction) got some bad news. Its retail sales in China fell 12.4% in August. China is by far the world’s largest EV market. Tesla sales dropped to 50,047, according to the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA). It was Tesla’s weakest August since 2022. The Shanghai factory exported 36,119 vehicles, which was a positive sign.
Tesla’s sales are likely being pulled down because of an overall weak market in China. Across the industry, domestic sales cratered 24% to 1.54 million units.
While the export news was good for Tesla, EV companies need China because of the market’s huge volume. To keep pace with its second quarter, it needs to produce over 450,000 vehicles and deliver over 480,000 vehicles worldwide. Since the US EV market has been weak so far this year, EU and UK sales must make up the difference. Those markets are too small.
The China figures raise the question once again about how important EV sales are to Tesla’s future. Its performance in its home market will not save what is likely to be a down year for global sales. EV reports note, “In the first half of the year, Tesla moved an estimated 234,425 vehicles in the US, roughly 40,200 fewer than the 274,638 sold in the same period of 2025 — a decline of approximately 14.6%.”
Tesla’s appeal to the investment community is that products beyond EVs are the key to the future, that EV sales won’t lift the company’s revenue, and that CEO Elon Musk says other prospects are much larger. An update on its Cybercab was weak enough to drag the stock down 6%, which puts it down 21% for the year. The S&P 500 is 13% higher.
If Tesla’s autonomous driving cab were the only option for this kind of transportation, the market might view it differently. However, several similar products exist, led by Google’s Waymo. The entire industry is also hampered by slow approval from local authorities to operate on the road without restrictions.
Tesla needs a “win” this year, and so far it hasn’t gotten one.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Elon Musk's brief stint as the world's first trillionaire is slipping away fast, and the forces dragging him back down reveal deep cracks in two of his most powerful companies.
The trillionaire status Elon Musk posted in early June, largely on the back of a run-up in SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX | SPCX Price Prediction) stock after its IPO, is gone, and he’s unlikely to regain it this year. Tesla’s (NASDAQ: TSLA) stock is in trouble as it has dropped this year. SpaceX’s stock is off 8% since it went public.
A turnaround in the stock prices of at least one of the companies is almost the only way Musk gets back to $1 trillion. Based on the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, he is just above $900 billion.
There is nothing wrong with the SpaceX rocket business or the Starlink “internet from the sky” division. SpaceX remains the only game in town for commercial satellite launches. Starlink can be used in 160 countries. It may never have any real competition. Starlink has over 11,000 low-orbit satellites, and Musk says that figure could rise into the tens of thousands.
SpaceX is dragged down by its xAI AI product. Grok, the public face of its products, is barely in a sector controlled by OpenAI, Anthropic, and several mega-tech public companies. Nevertheless, Musk continues to push forward on his mistaken assumption that he can pick up market share. Musk’s gamble, in part, is that he can spend several billion dollars moving AI data centers into orbit. That would create an edge over competitors who need to keep their data centers on the ground. There is growing resistance to these.
Musk appears willing to lease out his data centers to competitors. He has begun to do so with Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Anthropic. It gets him cash, but it also seems like a surrender, since he’s leasing capacity.
Tesla has a worse problem. Its car sales may drop this year compared to 2025. And his robot and self-driving cab businesses don’t seem to be going anywhere. Tesla’s stock has dropped 21% since the start.
Musk is not likely to become a trillionaire this year.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Key Takeaways Tesla faces an NHTSA probe into certification of nearly 1,000 Cybercabs for federal safety compliance.The Cybercab lacks a steering wheel, pedals and conventional mirrors, challenging existing vehicle standards.NHTSA is weighing rule changes as Tesla expands its robotaxi service beyond its initial Austin deployment. Tesla, Inc. (TSLA - Free Report) faces a regulatory probe after the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened an investigation into the certification of nearly 1,000 Cybercabs, raising questions about how the driverless vehicles meet federal safety standards.
The inquiry comes as Tesla begins commercial deployment of a limited number of two-seat Cybercabs in Austin, TX. The company plans to gradually expand the service by adding more vehicles and eventually bringing the robotaxis to other markets.
At the heart of the investigation is how Tesla certified a vehicle designed to operate without a human driver despite lacking conventional controls found in traditional road vehicles.
The Cybercab lacks a permanently attached steering wheel, brake pedal, accelerator pedal or conventional mirrors. NHTSA is reviewing the process and technical information Tesla used to certify the vehicles as compliant with federal motor vehicle safety standards. The agency will also examine how Tesla determined that certain standards did not apply to the Cybercab.
Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The investigation comes as Tesla seeks to make the Cybercab the foundation of a larger robotaxi business, while regulations governing vehicles without traditional human controls continue to evolve.
Under current rules, manufacturers generally self-certify compliance with the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. However, the Cybercab's unconventional design creates additional challenges because many existing standards were developed for vehicles operated by a person seated behind a steering wheel.
NHTSA has been considering changes to accommodate autonomous vehicles. In June, the agency proposed eliminating the requirement for conventional manual brake pedals in certain self-driving vehicles and has been evaluating other regulatory changes that could enable autonomous vehicles to operate without equipment designed for human drivers.
The Cybercab probe is notable because regulators are working toward rules that could make vehicles with such designs easier to deploy, while Tesla has already applied its interpretation of the existing framework. TSLA carries a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell) at present.
You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
Updates on Autonomous Driving Efforts by Other AutomakersIn March, Lucid Group, Inc. (LCID - Free Report) unveiled its robotaxi concept, the Lucid Lunar, a two-seat vehicle designed without a steering wheel or pedals. The company is also nearing an agreement with Uber Technologies, Inc. UBER to develop a robotaxi based on an upcoming midsize Lucid model. Meanwhile, Lucid is partnering with autonomous driving firm Nuro to develop a self-driving version of its Gravity SUV, which is expected to join Uber’s network in the San Francisco area by the end of this year.
Rivian Automotive, Inc. (RIVN - Free Report) is also expanding its presence in the autonomous ride-hailing market through a partnership with Uber. In March, Uber announced plans to invest up to $1.25 billion in Rivian as part of an agreement to deploy as many as 50,000 Rivian robotaxis across multiple countries by 2031. The deal includes an initial $300 million investment, subject to regulatory approval. Rivian and Uber expect the R2-based robotaxis to operate exclusively through Uber’s ride-hailing and delivery platform across 25 cities in the United States, Canada and Europe, with San Francisco and Miami targeted as the first markets in 2028.
Tesla’s Price Performance, Valuation and EstimatesTesla has underperformed the Zacks Automotive – Domestic industry in the last six months. Tesla has lost 11.2% compared with the industry’s decline of 5.8%.
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From a valuation perspective, Tesla appears overvalued. Going by its price/sales ratio, the company is trading at a forward sales multiple of 12.24, higher than the industry’s 3.24.
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The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2026 and 2027 EPS has moved down 31 cents and 26 cents, respectively, in the past 60 days.
Key Takeaways Tesla registrations jumped 279% in France and 104% in Denmark during August.Registrations fell 79% in both Norway and Spain, while Sweden, Portugal and Italy also declined.Tesla's European sales recovery has benefited from easier comparisons, incentives and EV interest. Tesla’s (TSLA - Free Report) August vehicle registrations across key European markets delivered a mixed performance, with sharp increases in France and Denmark offset by steep declines in Norway, Spain, Sweden, Portugal and Italy.
New Tesla registrations, which are generally used as an indicator of sales, jumped 279% year over year in France and 104% in Denmark, per the data from France’s PFA and Denmark’s bilstatistik.dk.
However, registrations plunged 79% in both Norway and Spain, while Sweden, Portugal and Italy recorded declines of 41%, 37% and 36%, respectively, per the data from national automotive industry organizations OFV, Mobility Sweden, ANFAC and ACAP, and Italy's Transport Ministry.
In Norway, the steep decline may partly reflect a difficult comparison with last year, when buyers accelerated purchases ahead of a fiscal policy change scheduled for the end of 2025, per the European auto market analyst Matthias Schmidt.
Tesla’s European sales have generally recovered this year following two consecutive years of declines. The improvement has been supported by easier year-over-year comparisons, higher fuel prices, government incentives and increasing consumer interest in electric vehicles. Registration data from the United Kingdom and Germany, Europe’s two largest auto markets, is expected later this week. TSLA carries a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell) at present.
You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
Global Sales Data of Other AutomakersBYD Company Limited (BYDDY - Free Report) reported strong growth in August, selling 440,293 new energy vehicles (NEVs), up 17.8% year over year and 5.03% from July. The figure marked BYD’s highest monthly sales total of the year and extended its recovery with a fourth consecutive year-over-year increase. Passenger NEV sales rose 16.7% year over year to 433,384 units, while BYD’s commercial NEV sales jumped 225.1% to 6,909 units, despite declining from July.
Geely Automobile Holdings Limited (GELHY - Free Report) also recorded another increase in monthly sales, with August deliveries reaching 270,194 vehicles, which increased 8.01% year over year and marked its strongest monthly performance this year. Geely’s overseas shipments were particularly strong, surging 205.2% to 110,094 vehicles. Exports hit a record for the eighth consecutive month and represented about 41% of Geely’s total sales, helping offset continued weakness in its domestic market.
Tesla’s Price Performance, Valuation and EstimatesTesla has underperformed the Zacks Automotive – Domestic industry in the last six months. Tesla has lost 11.2% compared with the industry’s decline of 5.8%.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
From a valuation perspective, Tesla appears overvalued. Going by its price/sales ratio, the company is trading at a forward sales multiple of 12.24, higher than the industry’s 3.24.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2026 and 2027 EPS has moved down 31 cents and 26 cents, respectively, in the past 60 days.
Tesla Shares Jump as Cybercab Puts Autonomous Driving Back in Focus Summary
Tesla is betting that purpose-built autonomous vehicles can help scale its ride-hailing operation and create a new growth engine
Tesla ( TSLA ) shares gained about 2% as investors assessed the company's push beyond electric vehicles and into autonomous transportation, according to a Sept. 3 company update.
The latest step came with the introduction of the Cybercab in Austin. Tesla designed the vehicle specifically for autonomous ride-hailing, with seating for two and without conventional driver controls such as pedals or a steering wheel.
The new model could give Tesla a different cost structure for its robotaxi operations. A purpose-built vehicle may require fewer components than a standard passenger car, potentially helping the company manage expenses as it expands the service.
Tesla began operating robotaxis in Austin in June last year and has since added other U.S. locations. The service currently uses Model Y vehicles equipped with its Full Self-Driving system.
Investors are also watching whether Tesla can turn the robotaxi operation into a larger source of revenue and profit.
Achieving that would depend on fleet growth, software performance and vehicle utilization, while competition and regulatory hurdles remain important risks. The company is also developing humanoid robots as another potential growth business.
Disclosures I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and have no plans to buy any new positions in the stocks mentioned within the next 72 hours.
Anticipation had been building for weeks leading up to last Thursday, and rightly so. Tesla Inc. NASDAQ: TSLA was finally set to launch its Cybercab, the purpose-built robotaxi meant to propel it to the front of the self-driving race, and investors had been sending the shares higher, expecting a landmark moment.
Tesla Today
$368.16 +14.08 (+3.98%)
As of 09/8/2026 04:00 PM Eastern
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$401.74
Instead, Thursday’s event landed with a thud. There was no livestream, no appearance from Elon Musk, and crucially, no detail on how Tesla intends to price, scale, or make money from the service. The market's reaction was swift, with the stock sliding nearly 8% from its intraday high into the long holiday weekend, snuffing out what had been shaping up as a promising rally.
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Tesla shares have steadied a little since, but the damage was done, and the stock remains stuck in its months-long downtrend.
Still, with the shares still up around 20% from July's low, it's worth asking whether this stumble marks a serious setback for Tesla's robotaxi ambitions, or whether the dip is actually a buying opportunity.
A Launch That Raised More Questions Than It AnsweredInvestors' core frustration seems to have been a lack of substance. Rather than the bold statement of intent they’d hoped for, the launch amounted to a limited rollout in a small, tightly defined zone of Austin, with barely any of the information the market needed to get excited about its progress.
There were no figures on fares, no targets for fleet growth, and no sense of the all-important economics: cost per mile, utilization rates, or the revenue each vehicle might generate. Without those numbers, it’s hard to tell if the service is really scaling toward a commercial business or merely inching from demonstration into cautious testing.
For a company whose valuation rests so heavily on the promise of autonomy, that absence of hard detail like this was always going to disappoint. The market wanted to see a business take flight; instead, it saw a carefully controlled experiment.
The Regulatory CloudIf the muted launch was the first blow, the second came less than a day later. On Friday, it emerged that federal safety regulators had opened an investigation into the Cybercab, and their focus fell on the vehicle's most radical feature, the one thing that makes its autonomy possible: its complete lack of a steering wheel and pedals.
That headline matters because the Cybercab was never intended to be a modified conventional car like some of its competitors. The fact that its stripped-back design is raising fresh safety concerns strikes at the very thing that was supposed to set it apart. Adding to the uncertainty, it appears some states may push back on Tesla's decision to rely on cameras alone for navigation, rather than using the additional radar and laser sensors favored by some rivals.
None of this is necessarily fatal in the long run, and other robotaxi operators have navigated similar reviews before winning approval. But it introduces a real risk of delay and reminds us that Tesla's path to a nationwide network of self-driving taxis will be bumpy.
Disciplined, or Falling Behind?The limited scale of last week's launch also caught many investors off guard, and it raises a simple question: Are Tesla's robotaxi ambitions definitely on track, or are they being left behind? Both camps make a fair case.
To the optimists, Tesla's narrow rollout is exactly the right call. By starting small in its home city, Tesla can gather data, refine its systems, and avoid the kind of high-profile early failure that could set the whole project back. Management has made this clear, stressing its desire to get things right before expanding into bigger markets, a sensible priority.
The opposing view is less charitable, however. It holds that the limited launch underlines how far behind Tesla remains. Its best-known rival, Alphabet’s Waymo, has already logged hundreds of millions of autonomous miles and is providing hundreds of thousands of paid rides every week across numerous markets, a scale that dwarfs Tesla's tiny Austin footprint.
Making Sense of It AllTesla Stock Forecast Today12-Month Stock Price Forecast:
$401.74
9.12% Upside
Hold
Based on 45 Analyst Ratings
Current Price$368.16High Forecast$600.00Average Forecast$401.74Low Forecast$25.28Tesla Stock Forecast Details
In truth, last Thursday's launch was neither the triumph the bulls wanted, nor the disaster the bears feared. It was an early milestone, proof that Tesla is edging from concept toward a real, deployable product, but not firm evidence it can build a business to rival the established leaders.
That being said, Tesla's longer-term vision for its Cybercab is still compelling. By building the vehicle, the software, and the charging network itself, it could one day run a robotaxi service far more cheaply than rivals reliant on expensive third-party hardware.
But that’s a bet on the future, and last week did little to bring it closer. The stock's negative reaction reflects that disappointment, and it’s perhaps no surprise that Tesla carries a MarketBeat consensus rating of Hold. For now, Tesla appears to have taken a promising first step, but it still has a lot of work to do to fully convince the market it can deliver on its Robotaxi ambitions.
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A viral video showed a man repeatedly causing a Tesla Cybercab to slam on its brakes by jumping into the middle of the road – raising concerns that pranksters could pose a serious problem for the new driverless vehicles.
The video, which has racked up 1.3 million views and counting on X, shows the unnamed, paunchy man hopping into the street in front of a moving Cybercab and then back onto the sidewalk.
The robotaxi repeatedly slams on the brakes before eventually sitting in the middle of the street with its hazard lights on while a standard car with a driver pulls around.
A man repeatedly jumped in front of a moving Tesla Cybercab, according to a video on social media. @WorldlyReviewer / X It’s one of the first hiccups to pop up since Elon Musk released gold-colored Cybercabs into the streets of Austin, Tex., last week – a generation of autonomous vehicles with no steering wheels, no brake pedals and no straightforward way for humans to take control in an emergency.
Jesse Cohen, senior financial analyst at Investing.com, re-posted the video online and warned that it could be “a big issue going forward with Tesla robotaxis.”
“Any attention seeking [sic] lunatic can continue to do this with zero accountability and delay peoples’ rides and cause accidents,” he wrote in a post on X.
Other concerned social media users worried that a rise in anti-Tesla ne’er-do-wells could cause a spate of traffic accidents.
Elon Musk released gold Tesla Cybercabs into the streets of Austin, Tex., last week. REUTERS “The types of people who do this are very dumb. Sadly, posting a video will likely give more dumb people ‘an idea,’” one person wrote in a social media post.
Another said: “There should be a reasonable penalty for this.”
Some called on the Austin Police Department to take action.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk (above) has said Tesla will focus on artificial intelligence and robotics. REUTERS Musk’s automaker has been testing robotaxis in several markets around the country, all but the latest model equipped with traditional steering controls with a human driver on-board. The Austin launch marked the first fully autonomous rollout.
Immediately following the debut, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched an audit into Tesla’s certification that its new Cybercab meets federal safety standards.
The Cybercab has been lauded as a key facet of the company’s long-term path to growth as it has struggled with slumping sales of its electric cars.
Musk has said the company will transform into a broader tech firm focusing on artificial intelligence and humanoid robots.
Andrew Sather says most investors only understand one of the two engines driving stock returns, and missing the second one is exactly why a name as familiar as Coca-Cola keeps catching people off guard.
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The least exciting name on your watchlist can outrun the flashiest one when the market has priced in nothing and the business quietly grows. Andrew Sather, co-host of The Investing for Beginners Podcast, argues that most investors understand only one of the two engines driving stock returns. Engine one is straightforward: the stock roughly tracks a growing business. Engine two pays better and confuses more people: you buy a stock whose growth the market refuses to acknowledge, and you collect the difference when sentiment catches up.
Sather says he is “starting to lean more towards” the second engine again because “there’s just more opportunities there.” His worked example is Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO | KO Price Prediction), a name so often dismissed as dead money that the framework has room to embarrass its critics. The wrinkle is that the market may already be recalibrating. Shares are up sharply this year, so the real question becomes whether the re-rating still has room to run.
Two Engines of Return Every stock return comes from either the business or the multiple. If earnings grow and the price/earnings ratio holds steady, the stock tracks earnings. If earnings hold steady and the multiple expands, the stock rises anyway.
Sather framed it this way: “it’s not always margin of safety, it’s not always high growth. It’s which combination of the two at any given point in time is going to lead to higher returns.” One factor without the other tends to disappoint.
What Margin of Safety Looks Like in Practice Margin of safety is the gap between what a business is likely worth and what the market is charging you today. You look for durable free cash flow, a share count that isn’t drifting higher, and a story most people find boring.
Coca-Cola’s free cash flow yield sits around 1.40%, and the forward dividend is $2.12. The safety comes from durability: 63 consecutive years of dividend increases and $8.8 billion paid in 2025.
Coca-Cola as the Worked Example Sather characterizes the dead-money bucket as businesses growing 4% to 6% a year, and Coca-Cola’s second quarter outran that. Revenue was $13.38 billion, up 6.7% year over year, and adjusted EPS of $0.97 against a $0.9323 consensus marked the fifth straight beat.
Guidance was raised: organic revenue growth of about 5%, comparable EPS growth of 9% to 10%, and free cash flow near $12.4 billion. The full detail sits in the Q2 2026 release filed with the SEC.
The stock has responded. Shares closed at $88.07 on September 4, up 27.67% year to date and 32.72% over the past year. Whatever dead money meant a few years ago, it does not describe the stock today.
Operating margin expanded to 34.9% from 34.1%, and net debt leverage sits at 1.4 times EBITDA. Trademark Coca-Cola volume grew 5% globally, the strongest in 17 years excluding COVID recovery, helped by a FIFA World Cup activation across 180+ markets.
At a P/E of 29x, the multiple no longer looks apologetic. If Sather’s thesis was that the market underappreciated the growth, the market has partly caught up.
When the Framework Fails A cheap stock can stay cheap, and underappreciated often turns out to mean declining. Tell the difference by checking whether unit volumes are growing, and not simply revenue.
Coca-Cola’s global unit case volume rose 5%, led by India, China, the US, and Brazil. That confirms demand is real. When volumes shrink while price carries the top line, the runway is finite.
Applying the Two-Factor Check to Your Watchlist For any stock, ask two questions. Is the business actually growing on volume and cash flow, or only on headline revenue? Is the multiple you are paying reasonable against a bearish version of that growth?
If both answers are yes, you own both engines. If growth is present but the multiple is stretched, you are paying for delivery with zero room for error. If the multiple is cheap and growth is absent, you are hoping sentiment shifts before fundamentals confirm the story.
Is KO Stock a Buy? Coca-Cola today reads as a hold. The business is executing, guidance was raised, and the balance sheet is enviable, although the re-rating Sather’s framework anticipated is already visible in the stock. A 29 P/E on a mid-single-digit organic grower leaves a thinner margin of safety than the dead-money label suggests.
Against PepsiCo, which has wrestled with volume declines, Coca-Cola is the stronger operator right now. New capital at these prices needs patience; existing holders collect a 2.32% yield backed by 63 straight annual increases, the kind of streak we screened for in our free Dividend Kings guide.
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Coca-Cola just handed retirees their 64th consecutive dividend raise, but the share price surge this year quietly undercut part of that win. Whether this checks out as a buy, hold, or trim depends entirely on which side of the trade…
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If you own Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO | KO Price Prediction) for the income, the date that matters this week is September 15, 2026. That is the next ex-dividend cutoff, and it is the last chance to be on the books for the current payout at the newly raised rate. For a 67-year-old drawing supplemental income from a dividend stock, this is the kind of housekeeping date that quietly determines whether a check lands in October or not.
Coca-Cola declared the higher rate back on February 19, 2026, lifting the quarterly dividend from $0.51 to $0.53 per share. That works out to a forward annual payout of $2.12. It also extended one of the longest income streaks on the U.S. market: 63 consecutive years of dividend increases as of 2025, now 64 with this year’s raise.
Why the Raise Feels Smaller Than It Looks Here is the part that trips up retirees comparing statements from January to September. The payout went up, but the yield on new money went down, because the share price ran hard. Coca-Cola started the year at $69 and now trades near $88, a year-to-date gain of about 28%. Over one year the stock is up nearly 33%.
The current dividend yield sits around 2.3%. A buyer in January was locking in a materially higher yield on cost than a buyer today, even though the dollar payout is the same $2.12 either way. Two things are true at the same time. The company gave you a raise. The market took back part of the income appeal by bidding the shares up.
What Really Backs the Check A 2.3% yield is only useful if you trust it will keep growing. On that score, the coverage picture is comfortable. Coca-Cola paid $8.8 billion in dividends during 2025 against net income of $13.1 billion. Management guided to full-year 2026 free cash flow of roughly $12.4 billion, and the CFO flagged that “Our balance sheet remains strong with our net debt leverage of 1.4 times EBITDA, which is below our target range of 2 to 2.5 times.” Volume grew 5% in Q2, and comparable EPS is guided to 9% to 10% growth for the year.
Translation for a retiree: the dividend is well protected. Coverage is deep, cash generation is expanding, and the balance sheet has room. The BODYARMOR trademark impairment and the ongoing IRS tax case are real, but neither threatens the payout.
New Money Versus Old Money This is where the article earns its keep. The right move depends on which side of the trade you are on.
If you already own the shares: keep collecting. Your yield on cost is whatever it is, the payout just rose, and the tax treatment on qualified dividends stays favorable. For a retiree in the 12% or 22% federal bracket, qualified dividends generally get taxed at 0% or 15%, which is why holding a Dividend King in a taxable account has always been friendlier than pulling the same dollars from a traditional IRA.
If you are deploying new retirement cash today: understand you are buying a 26x earnings consumer staple at a 2.3% yield, with an analyst target of $95 that leaves modest room from here. Broad dividend ETFs currently offer higher starting yields with none of the single-stock concentration risk. At 67, with a portfolio you are meant to live on, one beverage company should not be the whole income engine no matter how long the streak.
Two Things to Do This Month Confirm your position size. If Coca-Cola is more than roughly 5% of your income-generating assets, the streak is doing you a disservice by encouraging concentration. Positions above that threshold leave a retirement income plan hostage to one beverage company’s execution. Mind the ex-dividend date. To collect the October payment at the raised $0.53 rate, you need to own the shares before September 15, 2026. Selling on or after that date still gets you the check. The common mistake here is treating a 64-year raise streak as a reason to add more at any price. The streak is a quality signal about durability, and it says nothing about the price you pay today. A position sized to enjoy the raises works; a position large enough to dominate a retirement income plan concentrates too much of the outcome in one beverage company.
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$104.49
The market often misinterprets the structural evolution of logistics networks, pricing them on legacy models rather than future capabilities. This dynamic is currently playing out with Uber Technologies, Inc. NYSE: UBER. On Sept. 3, Uber initiated its first supervised autonomous ride-hailing service in London. By deploying all-electric Ford Mustang Mach-E vehicles powered by Wayve's AI Driver, Uber is demonstrating a clear pivot in its business model.
Rather than absorbing the heavy capital expenditures required to manufacture proprietary autonomous vehicles, Uber is positioning itself as the commercialization and distribution layer for third-party technology. This asset-light approach allows Uber to bridge the gap toward long-term autonomous margins while avoiding the risks of automotive manufacturing. Investors assessing the current valuation might notice a disconnect between the traditional human-driven logistics multiple and the highly scalable, AI-integrated hybrid network being built.
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Steering Clear of ManufacturingUnderstanding the mechanics of the Wayve partnership reveals why this strategy appeals to institutional capital. Wayve utilizes an AV2.0 approach, relying on mapless, hardware-agnostic artificial intelligence (AI) that learns from complex environments rather than relying on traditional hand-coded rules. This adaptability is critical in a regulatory and geographical maze like London, where mapping every variable is nearly impossible.
The structural advantage for Uber rests on the deliberate avoidance of hardware development. Developing self-driving cars requires billions in research, development, and manufacturing overhead. By supplying the localized rider demand and the routing network, Uber allows partners like Wayve to focus on the intelligence while original equipment manufacturers like Ford NYSE: F and Nissan OTCMKTS: NSANY handle the hardware. Over 140,000 London riders have already opted in to the service, suggesting that consumer adoption barriers may be lower than previously anticipated.
This strategy extends well beyond a single city. Uber participated in Wayve's recent $1.5 billion funding round, aligning financial interests to secure global scaling rights across 12 planned markets. With upcoming integration plans for the Nissan LEAF and partnerships with over 30 external autonomous developers, Uber is on track to facilitate autonomous trips in up to 15 cities by the end of 2026. This allows Uber to scale its autonomous offerings globally without the traditional drag of severe capital expenditures.
Refueling With Free Cash FlowAn asset-light model relies heavily on network density and the ability to generate liquidity without internal cash burn. Recent financial disclosures highlight how this transition is already reflected in profitability metrics. During the second quarter of 2026, Uber generated about $2.8 billion in free cash flow and reported gross bookings of nearly $58.0 billion. This represents a 24% year-over-year increase in bookings, providing the exact liquidity framework required to fund external artificial intelligence integrations.
The ongoing shift toward third-party integration directly supports expansion of the earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) margin. Adjusted EBITDA grew 33% year-over-year to $2.8 billion for the quarter, pushing the margin to 4.9%, up from 4.5% a year prior. By letting venture capital and external partners absorb the research and development costs of autonomous driving, Uber preserves its cash flow to reinvest in market share and core platform density.
This density strategy is evident in concurrent corporate actions, such as the ongoing €41.50-per-share (approx. $46) takeover offer for Delivery Hero. Acquiring complementary logistics networks widens the multi-vertical distribution funnel. A denser network of food and freight delivery creates immediate, practical deployment routes for future autonomous fleets. This allows Uber to maximize vehicle utilization rates across a 24-hour cycle, routing autonomous cars for passenger transport during peak hours and logistics delivery during off-peak times.
Valuations Ready to AccelerateCapital flows often lead retail sentiment, and the structural support for Uber rests heavily on institutional accumulation. Institutional investors currently hold roughly 80% of the public float. Over the trailing 12 months, these buyers initiated inflows of nearly $39.12 billion, far outweighing outflows of roughly $10.36 billion. Entities like the Virginia Retirement Systems hold large positions, suggesting a long-term horizon aligned with the autonomous transition.
Current Price$73.06High Forecast$150.00Average Forecast$104.49Low Forecast$72.00Uber Technologies Stock Forecast Details
From a valuation perspective, Uber trades near $76 with a trailing price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio around 16.8. Compared with broader technology-sector platforms that often command multiples well above 30, the current pricing implies the market still views Uber as a human-reliant logistics business. As the percentage of autonomous trips increases, the marginal cost of routing a vehicle could fall substantially, shifting the business's unit economics.
Sell-side analysts appear to be factoring in this evolution in margins. Of 42 analysts covering Uber Technologies, Inc., 34 maintain a Buy rating, resulting in a consensus of Moderate Buy. A consensus price target near $104 suggests an anticipated upside of roughly 36% from current trading levels.
The recent London rollout serves as tangible proof of concept for the broader analyst community, validating the operational feasibility of replacing human drivers with software in highly congested urban environments.
Plotting the Next DestinationThe integration of Wayve's technology in the United Kingdom provides a clear template for how ride-hailing networks plan to achieve long-term profitability. Transitioning directly from human drivers to fully autonomous fleets carries severe regulatory and operational risks. By steadily phasing in third-party autonomous vehicles to operate alongside human drivers, Uber ensures consistent reliability while gradually lowering the overall cost per trip.
This hybrid approach de-risks the technological rollout while maintaining the supply density required to serve global demand. The combination of strong free cash flow, deep institutional backing, and an expanding global footprint of autonomous partners creates a compelling fundamental setup. Uber is positioning itself not as a car manufacturer, but as the essential operating system for global movement. Investors analyzing the shifting mobility sector might consider adding Uber to their watchlist as the market begins to factor in the long-term margin expansion associated with its software distribution capabilities.
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Uber's profits doubled and free cash flow surged past $10 billion, yet the stock keeps sliding while rivals circle the ride-hailing throne. The real question is whether Wall Street is seeing something bulls are missing, or pricing in a robotaxi…
Uber (NYSE: UBER | UBER Price Prediction) shares were last seen trading at $75.76, leaving the ride-hail and delivery platform down 7.3% year to date and off 17.6% over the trailing year. On the September 6 episode of The Investor’s Podcast (We Study Billionaires), titled “TIP844: Uber (UBER): The Autonomy Referendum: Is Mr. Market Completely Wrong?” hosts Shawn O’Malley and Daniel Mahncke argued the operating business moved sharply in the opposite direction of the tape.
Valuation Compression While Fundamentals Improved O’Malley framed the disconnect this way: “Uber’s fundamentals have dramatically improved: profits doubled, margins swung 55 percentage points, and free cash flow hit $10B, yet the stock is flat as its valuation multiple was cut in half.” Reported operating income climbed from $2.799 billion in fiscal 2024 to $5.565 billion in fiscal 2025, and Uber’s Q2 2026 filing logged net income of $2.39 billion, up 76.7% year over year, alongside free cash flow of $2.79 billion.
Against that backdrop, Uber has a market capitalization of roughly $154.7 billion and a trailing price-to-earnings ratio near 17. A multiple of operating profits simply measures how many years of current profit an investor is paying for. The hosts’ complaint is that the number contracted while the profit stream expanded.
Autonomy Scale Gap Is Wider Than Headlines Suggest The hosts spent most of the episode on autonomous vehicles (AV), because that is what the equity market appears to be pricing. Their point is that self-driving software and demand aggregation are separate problems. Demand aggregation is the work of matching millions of riders to available cars in real time across cities, weather, and payment systems. Waymo is scaling admirably, yet its weekly ride volume pales in comparison to Uber’s daily trip count, and total global autonomous trips per year are dwarfed by Uber’s annual trip growth alone. Uber reported 3.9 billion trips in Q2 2026 and 208 million monthly active platform consumers. Robotaxis still have to earn their way through rainstorms, blizzards, chaotic traffic, and developing-world roads, not just the pristine grids of San Francisco and Austin.
Mahncke sized the actual exposure directly: “If you decompose Uber’s profits and look at the top 20 US cities where robotaxis realistically operate at scale, that’s effectively 9% of Uber’s profits that are genuinely exposed to robotaxi competition in the near to medium term, maybe five to ten years.”
Bear Case the Hosts Actually Take Seriously The hosts do not wave away the threat. Waymo studied Uber’s consumer base and demand aggregation and chose to build its own app, and it is ending exclusive arrangements in Austin and Atlanta. Mahncke noted that Waymo “can afford to have terrible fleet utilization for years if that’s what it takes to displace Uber” given roughly $16 billion of fresh capital and Alphabet backing. Their real fear is a capital-burning subsidy war that produces a bleak picture for shareholder returns, and one host openly admitted he expects to keep questioning his own conviction as the story develops.
Uber’s Counter-Move on AV Partners Uber’s answer is to court every capable AV supplier. The company has grown its partner roster from 14 to more than 20 companies, including Rivian, Nuro, Nvidia, Baidu, and Pony AI, and committed more than $100 million to AV charging infrastructure. If self-driving software becomes a commodity input, meaning many providers offer roughly interchangeable capability at declining prices, the platform aggregating global demand becomes the scarce asset. Meanwhile, Uber returned capital aggressively, with $6.5 billion of buybacks in fiscal 2025 and a $20 billion repurchase authorization. Our coverage of the Q3 2025 reaction captured the same pattern of strong results meeting a skeptical tape.
What Would Falsify the Contrarian Bull Case The hosts call this their most strongly held contrarian opinion. Two developments would break the thesis: Waymo or another rival reaching Uber-scale ride volume globally would collapse the demand-aggregation moat, and a sustained price war that Uber must fund from its own cash flow would consume the buyback capacity that has supported per-share metrics. Absent those, the podcast’s argument is that the equity is priced for an autonomy apocalypse that is not arriving on the assumed schedule.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Tesla Inc‘s (NASDAQ:TSLA) Cybercab has finally moved from concept to commercial service, but its biggest competitor isn’t another automaker—it’s Uber Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:UBER).
While Tesla is building a vertically integrated robotaxi business from the ground up, Uber is assembling an autonomous fleet through partnerships, setting up two very different paths to the future of ride-hailing.
Tesla’s Cybercab StrategyTesla’s robotaxi ambitions center on owning the entire ecosystem. The company develops the vehicle, the autonomous driving software, and the ride-hailing platform, allowing it to capture more of the economics if the model scales successfully.
That vision is now being tested in Austin, where Tesla has launched limited public Cybercab rides using its purpose-built, steering wheel–free vehicle. The rollout is still small, but it marks Tesla’s first attempt to commercialize a robotaxi service built around a vehicle designed exclusively for autonomous ride-hailing.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly argued that autonomy could eventually reduce ride costs to a fraction of today’s prices by eliminating the need for human drivers. The company’s long-term thesis depends on achieving enough scale for those lower operating costs to outweigh the substantial upfront investment in vehicles and AI.
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Uber’s Robotaxi NetworkUber is pursuing a fundamentally different strategy.
Rather than building autonomous vehicles, the ride-hailing giant has positioned itself as a marketplace for robotaxis. The company has announced partnerships with multiple autonomous driving developers, giving riders access to different autonomous fleets through a familiar app., including:
Alphabet Inc‘s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) Google’s Waymo Wayve Amazon.com Inc‘s (NASDAQ:AMZN) Zoox Baidu, Inc‘s (NASDAQ:BIDU) Apollo Go and Nebius Group N.V.‘s (NASDAQ:NBIS) Avride Trending
That approach allows Uber to benefit from advances in self-driving technology without bearing the cost and execution risk of developing its own vehicles.
The contrast is already visible in Austin, where Tesla’s Cybercab service has begun operating.
Early rider comparisons shared online show Cybercab fares on some routes costing more than equivalent Uber rides, although pricing remains highly dynamic and reflects Tesla’s limited fleet size during the initial rollout. Those snapshots offer only a point-in-time comparison, not a definitive measure of long-term economics.
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What Investors Should WatchThe robotaxi race may ultimately be less about who builds the best autonomous vehicle than who controls the customer relationship.
Tesla is betting that owning the vehicle, software and platform will create a durable competitive advantage as autonomous driving matures. Uber, meanwhile, is betting that riders will keep valuing a single marketplace that offers access to multiple robotaxi providers, regardless of who manufactures the vehicles.
For investors, the key metric is unlikely to be today’s fare comparison. Instead, it will be whether Tesla can scale Cybercab production quickly enough to lower costs, or whether Uber’s asset-light platform model proves more resilient in capitalizing on the autonomous transportation market.
Tesla's expanding robotaxi footprint is sending ripples through the rideshare market, and Uber shareholders are absorbing the hit even though Uber's own results gave them no reason to sell.
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A single robotaxi story is pulling two of the market’s biggest mobility names in opposite directions Tuesday afternoon. Uber Technologies (NYSE:UBER | UBER Price Prediction) is sliding as investors weigh the competitive threat from a manufacturer that could run its own purpose-built fleet. Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) is climbing 4% to $366.84 on regulatory progress in Europe and the debut of the Cybercab in Austin.
Uber stock is down 4% to $73.10 in afternoon trading, giving back ground even as large-cap tech holds firm. Meanwhile, Tesla stock is trading higher on the very catalyst weighing on the rideshare peer. For context, the Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ:QQQ) is nearly unchanged on the session at $719.16, so this reads as a name-specific rotation inside large-cap tech.
Direct rideshare peer Lyft (NASDAQ:LYFT) is also lower on the same read, even as its own autonomous-vehicle (AV) positioning leans on a Waymo partnership that began fleet operations in Nashville in June. Furthermore, the Global X Autonomous & Electric Vehicles ETF (NASDAQ:DRIV) is nearly unchanged for today’s session at $34.83, so there doesn’t appear to be a major sector-wide move in progress.
Slovenia Clearance and Cybercab Debut Drive the Split Slovenia’s traffic safety authority cleared Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system, making it the sixth European market to approve the software after the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, and Belgium, according to Reuters. The clearance was characterized as a temporary type approval, and the system still requires an attentive driver responsible for the vehicle. That’s national permission rather than an EU-wide runway, and the distinction matters to the timeline math.
Separately, Tesla introduced the Cybercab in Austin, a vehicle built specifically for autonomous ride-hailing, seating two, with no steering wheel and no pedals. On its Q2 2026 earnings call, Tesla said its unsupervised Robotaxi fleet had accumulated “more than 380,000 miles of unsupervised Robotaxi, now across six cities” with “zero notable incidents”. Robotaxi operations already run unsupervised rides in Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, and Tampa across seven U.S. markets.
Tesla’s Q2 2026 report showed revenue of $28.24 billion, up 25.5% year over year, and record deliveries of 480,126 vehicles, so the FSD monetization runway sits on top of solid vehicle volume rather than propping it up. Active FSD subscriptions reached 1.48 million paid customers globally, up 56% year over year, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on the call that Tesla is “going as fast as humanly possible in scaling Robotaxi” while trying to avoid harm.
Where the Rideshare Case Diverges The bear case for Uber stock today isn’t about the company’s results. Uber reported Q2 2026 revenue of $14.19 billion, up 12.2% year over year, with gross bookings of $58.02 billion and 3.9 billion trips across 208 million monthly active platform consumers. The company generated free cash flow of $2.79 billion and repurchased $518 million of its stock during the quarter.
The concern is structural. If a manufacturer can operate its own robotaxi network with vehicles designed for the job, the marketplace layer Uber monetizes loses some of its scarcity value. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has framed the response as an ambition to become “the world’s leading commercialization platform for autonomous vehicles.”
Uber has committed a $10 billion multi-year AV investment, and management noted AV trips today sit at “less than 0.5%” of Uber’s 300 million weekly rides. Lyft’s own numbers underscore how narrow the peer set is when the robotaxi question intensifies. Lyft posted Q2 2026 revenue of $1.84 billion, up 16.1% year over year, with 30.5 million active riders and gross bookings of $5.5 billion.
The QQQ contrast sharpens the read. Tesla makes up 3% of the fund’s net assets, so Tesla’s rally shows up in the underlying holding while the ETF itself is essentially flat, and the Uber pain is showing up in the stock rather than sector data.
What to Watch Next The tension in this trade is worth noting. Uber is being charged for an event driven outside its own results while itself expanding AV partnerships across Europe and the U.S., and Tesla is being rewarded for regulatory progress that still requires a driver at the wheel. Whether the split survives contact with actual fleet economics remains unresolved.
Traders can watch for signs that Tesla’s Cybercab timeline firms up with U.S. federal clearance, since NHTSA approval for full Cybercab scaling has not yet been granted. Investors weighing their exposure to Uber stock should calibrate their positions carefully given that Uber trades at a P/E of 15 with a $149.5 billion market cap and no earnings miss driving today’s decline.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Alphabet just posted blowout earnings and yet the stock has shed more than 10% from its peak, leaving investors caught between soaring Cloud growth and a balance sheet that suddenly looks very different from a year ago.
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG | GOOG Price Prediction) trades at $338.86 after slipping 10.39% over the past month from its recent high of $404.23. Our 24/7 Wall St. price target for Alphabet is $433.88, implying 28.19% upside over the next 12 months. The recommendation is buy at high confidence (90%). In plain terms, we view this dip as an entry opportunity.
Metric Value Current Price $338.86 24/7 Wall St. Price Target $433.88 Upside 28.19% Recommendation BUY Confidence Level 90% Why Alphabet Sold Off Despite a Blowout Quarter Alphabet is up 6.5% year to date and 57.9% over the last year, but the stock has cooled since summer. The pullback came despite strong results.
Q2 2026 revenue hit $119.80 billion, up 24.23% year over year, with EPS of $9.11 versus a $3.0427 estimate. Google Cloud grew 82% to $24.8 billion and Cloud backlog reached $514 billion.
Investors focused on the cost side: capex was $44.92 billion, free cash flow turned negative $5.86 billion, long-term debt climbed to $98.2 billion, and management suspended the buyback while guiding 2026 capex of $175 billion to $185 billion.
That level of spend has to go somewhere, and the power, cooling, and networking suppliers behind these data centers are the subject of a free report on seven AI infrastructure names that aren’t chipmakers. That fear is why GOOG is on sale.
Why Bulls See a Breakout to $450 and Beyond The bull case rests on Cloud and Gemini. Cloud growth has accelerated four straight quarters, from 34% to 48% to 63% to 82%. CEO Sundar Pichai said Alphabet is “more bullish on the opportunities ahead” for generative AI than a year ago.
Gemini API traffic now runs at 22 billion tokens per minute, and nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 use Gemini Enterprise. Analyst coverage skews strongly positive at 57 Buy and 5 Hold ratings, and our bull-case scenario tops out at $450.80.
What Could Send GOOG Back to the Low $300s The bear case starts with the balance sheet. Long-term debt more than doubled to $98.2 billion, interest expense is up roughly 5x year over year, and free cash flow went negative in Q2.
Bulls will counter that Q2 free cash flow was distorted by inventory buildup for TPU deliveries, and management expects the vast majority of TPU revenue to land in 2027. Insider activity is another yellow flag, with 205 recent transactions net selling, though executive selling at mega-caps is routine. Our bear-case price is $364.77.
How Alphabet Compares to Microsoft and Meta Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is the closest peer on cloud and enterprise AI. MSFT trades at $510.83 and commands a much richer multiple than GOOG. On the same forward P/E of 16, Alphabet looks cheap for a business where Cloud is growing 82% versus Azure’s slower comparable growth. That valuation gap is the core of our buy thesis.
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) at $612.79 is the right digital-advertising comparable. Meta’s ad business is growing fast, but Alphabet pairs Search and YouTube ($11.06 billion in Q2) with a hyperscale cloud Meta cannot match. The peer set makes our $433.88 target look reasonable, arguably conservative.
Company Forward P/E Current Price Alphabet 16 $338.86 Microsoft n/a $510.83 Meta n/a $612.79 Verdict: A High-Confidence BUY Setup My verdict is buy with high confidence, and the 24/7 Wall St. price target of $433.88 reflects both the fundamentals and the factor overlay. The tipping factor is Cloud’s 82% growth against a forward multiple of 16.
The bullish scenario depends on Alphabet converting its $514 billion Cloud backlog into revenue on schedule. The bearish scenario is 2026 capex above $175 billion keeping free cash flow negative into 2027.
Looking further out, here is where our model projects Alphabet could trade, assuming Cloud continues scaling and AI monetization tracks the current trajectory.
Year 24/7 Wall St. Price Target 2026 $361.84 2027 $433.88 2028 $516.01 2029 $593.39 2030 $645.76 These projections assume Alphabet executes on Gemini adoption and Cloud backlog conversion. Significant upside could come from Waymo scaling; the largest downside risk is a regulatory forced separation of Search or ad tech.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Last October, Google said it would bring an Iowa nuclear power plant back from the dead. Now the facility’s owner, NextEra Energy, has received a $1.9 billion loan from the U.S. Department of Energy to finance the refurbishment.
The sizable loan is the second of its kind, suggesting that the Trump administration views revived nuclear power as a key source of electricity for tech companies seeking to power their AI data centers. Last year, the Department of Energy extended a $1 billion loan to Constellation Energy to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island.
James Danly, Deputy Secretary of Energy, said that the Iowa power plant’s restart in 2029 will “drive down electricity costs,” though he did not explain how. Just 50 megawatts will be set aside for the local power cooperative, NextEra CEO John Ketchum said during an earnings call last year. That capacity would cover 18% of Iowa’s demand growth since 2021, the year before ChatGPT was released.
Google is reportedly looking to build up to six data centers near the Duane Arnold Energy Center, which hasn’t operated since 2020 when an intense rainstorm damaged the power plant. Rather than repair it, NextEra decided to mothball it. At the time, cheap natural gas was flooding the market, making nuclear power economically unappealing.
A lot has changed in the last six years, though. After decades of little growth in demand, the sudden rise of AI coupled with broader electrification of the economy meant that utilities and power providers were suddenly scrambling to find new generating sources of electricity. New data centers are expected to nearly triple the sector’s electricity demand by 2035.
Shuttered nuclear power plants are becoming one of the tech industry’s favorite choices to quickly provide clean, firm power.
Microsoft signed a deal with Constellation Energy two years ago to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island that last operated in 2019. The reactor is scheduled to restart in 2028 and generate 835 megawatts.
Another facility in Illinois, Constellation Energy’s Clinton Clean Energy Center, was in danger of closing down before its parent found a new customer in Meta, which is buying all of the clean energy attributes from the 1.1 gigawatt power plant. The arrangement will see Clinton sending its electrons to the local grid, while Meta will use the certificates to offset emissions it is producing elsewhere. The tech giant’s Hyperion AI data center, for example, will need 10 natural gas power plants to operate. If completed, the data center will consume more electricity than all of South Dakota.
Duane Arnold is smaller, but in the process of refurbishment, NextEra will squeeze an additional 14 megawatts from the facility, bringing the total to 615 megawatts.
Altogether, the three power plants represent the lowest hanging fruit in the U.S. There might be one or two more, according to a report from Utility Dive, though those candidates, including San Onofre in California, have been shuttered for longer and would require more work to bring back online.
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Tim De Chant is a senior climate reporter at TechCrunch. He has written for a wide range of publications, including Wired magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Ars Technica, The Wire China, and NOVA Next, where he was founding editor.
De Chant is also a lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, and he was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT in 2018, during which time he studied climate technologies and explored new business models for journalism. He received his PhD in environmental science, policy, and management from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BA degree in environmental studies, English, and biology from St. Olaf College.
You can contact or verify outreach from Tim by emailing [email protected].
AWS and Google Cloud are both burning through tens of billions in capex every quarter, but only one is converting that spending into free cash flow at hyperscale margins right now. Which model actually wins when the 2027 capacity cliff…
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Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) both reported Q2 FY2026 results that put the same question in front of investors: how fast does cloud capex turn into cash? AWS delivered its fastest growth in 18 quarters, while Google Cloud accelerated to 82% year-over-year growth. Both are spending like wartime generals. Only one is monetizing at hyperscale margins today.
AWS Prints Profit. Google Cloud Prints Growth. AWS revenue reached $42.2 billion with operating income of $16.6 billion and a 39% operating margin. Andy Jassy said the AWS backlog now sits at $496 billion, roughly two and a half times the level of Q3 2025. Trainium and Graviton are doing real work here: Graviton is used by 98% of Amazon’s top 1,000 EC2 customers, and the AI chips business already runs at more than $25 billion.
Google Cloud posted $24.77 billion in revenue, smaller than AWS but growing more than twice as fast. Sundar Pichai said nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 now use Gemini Enterprise, and the Gemini App has 950 million monthly active users. That is the full-stack pitch: models, TPUs, Search, and YouTube all reinforcing one another.
Business Driver AWS Google Cloud Q2 Revenue $42.2B $24.77B YoY Growth 36.7% 82% Segment Operating Margin 39% Not disclosed this quarter Capex Bills Come Due Differently Amazon spent $53.1 billion on cash capex in Q2 and expects to double its power capacity by the end of 2027 versus 2025. Alphabet’s capex hit $44.92 billion, up 100.1% year over year. Both companies ran negative free cash flow in the quarter.
The funding paths diverge sharply. Amazon covers its bills largely through operating cash flow of $45.4 billion plus debt. Alphabet raised approximately $70 billion in combined equity and debt, and suspended buybacks. Long-term debt jumped from $46.5 billion to $98.2 billion.
AWS Wins on Pure Profit. Alphabet Wins on Speed. Jassy said server investments break even in a little less than three years, then generate cash across a 30-plus year data-center life. That is a long, patient conversion curve backed by proven margins. Alphabet’s speed advantage is different: 82% cloud growth paired with 34% companywide operating margin means demand is compounding faster than at AWS, even if segment profitability lags.
Watching the 2027 Capacity Cliff I want to see whether Amazon’s $496 billion backlog actually flows through to free cash flow as promised, and whether Alphabet’s Gemini enterprise footprint keeps pulling ahead of the growth curve into 2027. Memory and SSD inflation, flagged by Brian Olsavsky, could squeeze both.
Why I Split the Two for Different Investors If you want proven cloud economics and a slower, surer cash payoff, AWS inside Amazon looks cleaner to me. The 39.4% AWS margin is doing real work while retail scales. If you want faster top-line acceleration and full-stack AI optionality, Alphabet fits, especially with 46.21% one-year returns already earned. I would hesitate on both if capex keeps outrunning cash into 2027.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
