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A known Tesla Inc. bull has a recipe for the electric-vehicle maker’s rebound.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives called for a $10 billion buyback and an end to price cuts, among other ideas, as a way to boost Tesla’s battered shares and restore some confidence on Wall Street after “dark day for the bulls (and us).”
Tesla
TSLA,
on Thursday dropped 12% to end at its lowest level since May. Investors faulted the EV maker for being too “vague” about its outlook following Wednesday’s fourth-quarter earnings, in which the company reported a miss and said it may grow slower this year.
Tesla shares rose around 1% on Friday but were looking at a weekly loss of 13%. The recent bloodbath has sent Tesla’s market cap to under $600 billion.
Ives said in a note Friday that he was “massively disappointed” with the way Tesla executives held the post-results call.
He kept the equivalent of a buy rating on the stock and a price target of $315 but removed Tesla from Wedbush’s “best ideas” list for the time being.
Besides halting the price cuts and instituting a buyback, which was something Chief Executive Elon Musk teased in 2022, Ives’s 10-item list included calls for an artificial-intelligence day before the summer so that investors “can better understand” Tesla’s goals for its Dojo supercomputer, Optimus humanoid robot and FSD, its suite of advanced driver-assistance systems for urban driving.
Tesla should also offer Wall Street a production and delivery timeline for its next-generation EV and offer a new compensation package to “lock in” Musk as chief executive through 2030, Ives said.
See also: Elon Musk has egg on his face
The analyst also had some choice words to describe the Tesla post-result conference calls since the departure of Chief Financial Officer Zach Kirkhorn last year.
Without Kirkhorn, “conference calls have been horror shows; return
to formal guidance and goalposts and make messaging changes on calls,” Ives wrote.
Opinion: Elon Musk wants voting control of Tesla’s stock, but he won’t admit it to investors
Tesla shares have lost more than 25% this month, contrasting with gains of around 3% for the S&P 500 index
SPX.
In the past 12 months, however, the stock has held onto outperformance, up 25% compared with an advance of 21% for the index.
