Tesla Kicks Off Magnificent 7 Earnings This Week After Its Stock Kicked Into High Gear
Key Takeaways
- Tesla’s earnings, due Wednesday, kick off the Magnificent Seven earnings season.
- Many investors have moved on to the company’s next-generation opportunities as drivers for its stock. But the shares have underperformed the Big Tech group so far this year.
Halfway though 2025, Tesla stock looked like a big-time laggard.
The EV maker’s shares were down more than 20% through the first six months of the year—a stretch that was rough for just about everyone, though by the end of it the S&P 500 and Magnificent Seven group of tech shares had moved back into the green even as Tesla lagged. Then the third quarter happened: Tesla (TSLA) was the best-performing stock in the group of Big Tech elites, and here we are—with the shares now up some 10% since the start of 2025.
Where to next? Investors, at least for now, have signaled that they’re willing to look at the longer-term picture. Non-car-sales things—including optimism about robotaxis and robots, as well as a new pay proposal for Elon Musk and a big stock purchase by the CEO—were tailwinds. Several Wall Street analysts whose price targets hadn’t kept up finally got with it.
“The Tesla story going forward is around the AI transformation being led by the autonomous and robotics initiatives,” Wedbush’s bullish analysts wrote in a note published Sunday.
Why This Matters to Tesla Investors
Shares of Tesla have cooled a bit since the start of the month, but they remain well above Wall Street analysts’ consensus price target for the stock. That discrepancy highlights the challenge facing investors as they decide what to make of the company’s quarterly results, and whatever pronouncements about its longer-term opportunities might be made.
There will, however, undoubtedly still be plenty of attention on its third-quarter earnings, due Wednesday afternoon.
Deliveries are already in hand, with the company turning in better than expected quarterly numbers, though an update to Tesla’s car lineup will likely mean renewed attention on signs about car demand. (Analysts have dutifully issued estimates: Visible Alpha’s means for revenue and net income are $26.6 billion and $1.5 billion, respectively.)
Things have moderated a bit since Tesla stock logged a year-to-date closing high near $460 to start this month, though they’ve generally stayed around levels in line with their latest run-up. Wall Street, however, is still wary: The mean price target on Visible Alpha, around $365, is about 17% off Friday’s close. And the stock has underperformed the Magnificent 7 ETF (MAGS) this year.
More broadly, Tesla’s earnings are the first of the Magnificent 7 reports, essentially kicking off Big Tech earnings season. (Netflix’s (NFLX) numbers are also due this week.) Early in the third-quarter reporting season, Bank of America analysts said Monday, the S&P 500 companies that have already reported have beaten estimates by 7% as a group; the bank expects total Q3 earnings growth of 11%.