By Michael Elkins
Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) is down 1.96% in pre-market trading on Wednesday ahead of the company’s anticipated AI day on September 30th and 3Q delivery release.
A Morgan Stanley analyst believes that the company’s AI day is linked to CEO Elon Musk’s “Master Plan X” which will outline a mass industrialization of EVs and supporting supply chain that could see Tesla require as many as half a million workers by 2030.
Last year’s AI Day brought new updates on the many projects happening at the company, as well as a dancing robot. The electric vehicle company seems to be pitching the Tesla Bot, aka Optimus, as one of the highlights of this year’s event, especially after confidently stating in 2021 Q4 earnings that “Optimus ultimately will be worth more than the car business and worth more than FSD”.
Musk pushed the AI event back an entire month to prepare a working prototype of Optimus for AI Day. Musk mentioned that production at scale is a main priority, and “is why Tesla engineering has transitioned to focus heavily on designing the machine that makes the machine – turning the factory itself into a product.”
Ahead of Tesla’s 3Q delivery release, Citi took the opportunity to update their model to reflect recent data points and now estimates deliveries at 369.8k units (398.5k prior) largely reflecting the production ramp at Shanghai.
A Citi analyst wrote that he views the macro situation as “posing some risk to Q4 numbers. With our new H2 delivery cadence, our Q3 EPS estimate decreases while our Q4 estimate rises; our 2022 estimate EPS is unchanged. We will revisit our model after Tesla’s Q3 delivery release.”