Why Cathie Wood Believes Tesla Will Hit $2,600

Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest released its updated Tesla (TSLA) valuation model last year, reaffirming its $2,600 base-case price target for 2029. It’s an aggressive number, especially when compared to the current market price of around $270, but the underlying thesis is clear: Tesla isn’t just a car company—it’s a data, AI and autonomy powerhouse.

A company report called ARK Invest Big Ideas 2024 put it this way: “We think that Tesla's prospective robo taxi business line is a key driver, contributing 60% of expected value and more than half of expected EBITDA in 2029. Across our simulation set, electric vehicles account for 33% of revenues in 2029, at substantially lower margins than robo taxi revenue."

ARK estimates that by 2029 Tesla could have millions of autonomous vehicles in service, generating high-margin revenue by offering ride-hailing services through a robotaxi network. These vehicles wouldn’t just replace Uber drivers—they’d do it cheaper, safer and at far greater scale.

A few key assumptions drive ARK’s model, like Tesla’s lead in autonomy. The company has logged over 300 million miles of real-world data with full self-driving (FSD) mode, giving it a valuable dataset to train its AI. With the recent rollout of FSD v12, the system now leverages end-to-end neural networks that learn driving behavior more like a human than a programmed machine.