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A long-running bearish position on Tesla $TSLA -1.92% came to an end Friday when JP Morgan lifted its rating on the stock to "neutral" from "underweight," abandoning a price target that had pointed toward a loss of roughly 65% for shareholders, according to MarketWatch.
The bank raised its price target on Tesla stock to $475 from $145. Coverage of Tesla at JP Morgan had recently passed to Rajat Gupta; his predecessor, Ryan Brinkman, had been among the more vocal skeptics on the stock and told investors to approach it with a "high degree of caution" as recently as two months before the upgrade.
In the note, Gupta's team made the case that investors have come to anchor Tesla's worth to its future prospects in autonomy and robotics, a dynamic that has effectively decoupled the stock's valuation from what the company earns in any given quarter. The analysts cited Tesla's level of vertical integration across hardware and software as a key competitive advantage. "We believe this aspect is still somewhat under-appreciated and misunderstood, but for the sheer starting-point advantage it brings," they wrote.
The bank noted that market attention has shifted away from Tesla's flagging automotive sales and toward an expanding portfolio of emerging businesses — among them autonomous ride-hailing networks, humanoid robotics, AI chip development, and software-based revenue streams. To arrive at his valuation, Gupta mapped Tesla's opportunity across five distinct but connected segments — cars, energy storage, robotaxis, humanoid robots, and licensing of infrastructure — which he estimated could represent a total addressable market approaching $3.9 trillion within a decade, according to Reuters.
