Investing

Tesla going to over $6,000 per share, says money manager who originally predicted $4,000

Key Points
  • Ark Investment Management founder Catherine Wood said Tuesday that she believes Tesla could be worth more than $6,000 per share in the next five years.
  • Underlying this bullish view is the assumption that Tesla won't lose its considerable share of the electric-vehicle market, Wood told CNBC.
  • Shares of Tesla hit another all-time high Tuesday. The stock has more than doubled since late September.
Ark Invest's Cathie Wood on what's behind Tesla's record run
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Ark Invest's Cathie Wood on what's behind Tesla's record run

Ark Investment Management founder Catherine Wood told CNBC on Tuesday that she believes Tesla could be worth more than $6,000 per share in the next five years.

That's up from the last time her firm ran its model, she said, adding a more recent run may yield an even higher target.

"Stay tuned," Wood said on "Squawk Alley" of the upcoming five-year time horizon projection.

Underlying this bullish view is a belief that Tesla will not lose its considerable share of the electric-vehicle market, she said.

Initially, Wood said she thought Tesla would lose about one-third of its 17% market share last year.

"As we're looking at other auto companies, seeing how far behind Tesla they are, we're beginning to believe they might not lose market share, which is a huge change in our assumptions," she said.

Wood first predicted in February 2018 that Tesla would one day trade at $4,000 per share.

Based on 180 million shares outstanding, Tesla over $6,000 would put the electric-auto maker firmly in the $1 trillion stock market value club. Currently, Tesla's market cap is approaching $100 billion.

Apple, in August 2018, was the first U.S. public company to hit a market cap of $1 trillion. Amazon was the second a month later. In August 2019, Microsoft hit $1 trillion.

Tesla's stock hit another all-time high Tuesday, after the electric-vehicle maker sprinted more than 9% higher Monday to over $500. The shares have soared nearly 30% in 2020 and more than doubled since late September.

Oppenheimer analyst Colin Rusch on Monday became the biggest Tesla bull among traditional Wall Street firms, when he raised his price target on the stock by nearly 60% to $612 per share.

The other critical aspect of Wood's optimistic Tesla projection is autonomous vehicles, around which optimism has thus far outpaced anything close to widespread adoption. A truly autonomous vehicle does not yet exist.

In Wood's view, Tesla is positioned to be the dominant player in that emerging technology space because its fleet of existing vehicles — almost 700,000 of them, she said — are already collecting data.

She said Tesla developing and deploying a fleet of autonomous taxis could yield software as a service type margins around 80%, which she argues could support a stock price around $6,000.

"The winner in autonomous platforms, and in any artificial intelligence project, is that company with the most data and the highest-quality data," she said. "That company is Tesla."

Correction: Tesla's market cap is approaching $100 billion. An earlier version misstated the figure. 

ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood on why she believes Tesla can surge to $6,000
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ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood on why she believes Tesla can surge to $6,000